Making A Career Out Of Making A Career

Job interviews are great, aren’t they?

You go in, you try to act all knowledgable, they try to act all knowledgable, and you usually leave hoping that they believed you, because you completely believed them.

Afterwards, they try to pick the person who they think will be best at the job. Even Christian employers do this, calculating the best candidate from their human wisdom, in spite of 66 books testifying how God always picks someone totally and utterly unqualified. Often they don’t even want God’s job.

I’d like to quote some examples, but you already know them. It’s the same old names cropping up again and again… Moses, Paul, Jonah… yada yada yada.

With CBA work drying up, I’m of course on the look out for alternative employment again.

On the whole, everything I have tried to do in New Zealand has failed, but everything that has happened to me has been blessed.

So looking for a job ought to be simple – just let God.

And yet, there is I think a balance to be struck.

Recently, a prospective employer offered me a permanent full-time job, promising to apply for the relevant Work Permits, Visas etc. I turned them down. That was a hard decision, mainly because I had no specific reason for doing so. It would have been working 5 mornings and 5 evenings a week. It would have been at 2 different locations each day. It would have meant moving again. It wasn’t a job in radio, or Christian ministry.

I would have compromised on some of these, but not all of them. Thanks to my lack of faith though, the stakes appeared high. If this was the only job I got offered, then ultimately I was dooming myself to return home whenever my money/Visa runs out. But I’d prayed about it, and in God’s trademark silence had made what seemed to be the most right decision. No.

I’ve found that whenever God faces me with tough decisions, 100 times in 100, he’ll push the stakes higher and higher, forcing me to make the same tough decision maybe four or five times. What’s that line from The Matrix Revolutions?

Oracle: "Now, since the real test for any choice is having to make the same choice again, knowing full well what it might cost - I guess I feel pretty good about that choice, 'cause here I am, at it again."

So today they offered it to me a second time. And I prayed about it. And for the second time I turned them down.