Are our failures part of God’s plan, or does God redeem our failures?

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October, 2016. I agreed to step down from my pastoral role after God spoke to me through a roundabout:

“See the direction everyone else is going.”

“Yield.”

“Navigate your way through without crashing.”

“Know when to exit.”

After two months of resisting, I yielded to leadership and resolved to make my exit without causing a wreck. I remembered what Abram said to his nephew, Lot, when they were arguing with one another while moving their families and livestock from Egypt:

“So Abram said to Lot, ‘Let’s not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herders and mine, for we are close relatives. Is not the whole land before you? Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.’” (Genesis 13:8-9 NIV)

The church and I worked out an exit plan: I would have until mid-January 2017 to find another job but could leave earlier once I did. I wouldn’t make an announcement to the congregation until early November, though, so any job searching would have to be on the down low, at least for the first few weeks.

The first step was to update my résumé—something I hadn’t done in a decade. I opened my LinkedIn™ profile and took a look at my career.

The trajectory—or rather, the lack of a clear one—made me look aimless: I began my career in copy writing, went into film and video production overseas, returned to LA for a years-long gap in employment while I studied graphic design, did a bit of freelance work, and resumed film & television production work for a brief stint before detouring into a decade of full-time ministry, including two years as a missionary and a year-plus as a children’s pastor.

I didn’t know what I was going to do next.

I didn’t want to work at a church anymore––for one thing, doing so would obligate my family to attend whatever church I’d be employed at, and I wouldn’t want to call some place my “spiritual home” simply because I was paid to be there––but I was worried that I might no longer be marketable outside of a ministry context. Could I return to graphic design and film-making, or had I been out of those worlds for too long to have kept my skills current? Never mind the fact that I was twice the age of a whole new batch of recent design-school graduates entering the job market.

I thought I was done. Washed up. A has-been. I felt I had failed my family, and the voice of the enemy kept pounding it into my head: “You fool. This is what happens when you follow God. Where did it get you? What do you have to show for it? Where is God now?”

God was with me the whole time, though I couldn’t see what He was doing. As it turned out, He was about to make the kind of move only He can do.

As I despaired over what I saw as limited job prospects, a friend asked me what I wanted to do next. “I don’t know,” I muttered. “Write? But I don’t think there are very many paid jobs for writers out there.”

My friend, who had known me since my very first day in ministry ten years earlier, ruminated for a moment. “You should be in content generation,” he chimed in. “That’s what you’re wired for.”

A few days later, I was having dinner with another friend, who was not a member of the congregation I was leaving and was therefore a “safe” person to talk to regarding my upcoming transition. Since he works in the field of graphic design, I asked him if there were any job openings at his company.

He replied that there weren’t, but he did hear of something at an organization that his wife’s client worked for. He couldn’t remember the name of it, so he Googled something and came up with a possible website. He texted me the link and told me to look up job openings.

I went to the website, found the “careers” page, and read the available positions. None of the three looked applicable to me, at least based on a quick scan of job titles, so I put my phone away, enjoyed the rest of our dinner, and forgot all about this organization for several days.

When I remembered to follow up on it later that week, I sat down at my computer, pulled up the website, went back to the careers page, and downloaded the job description for “marketing services administrator.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Under “primary roles and responsibilities,” the first thing listed was “content generation”––the exact term my friend had suggested I was wired for.

I went on to read the details of the job and it looked like a checklist from my résumé.

☑ Copy writing.

☑ Graphic design for social media.

☑ Video production.

☑ Missions and ministry.

☑ Children’s ministry, too? There was even a VBS curriculum to produce!

My crazy résumé, with all its twists and turns, looked to be in perfect alignment with this particular role—the same résumé that I thought would never get me anywhere. This was like my dream job: working in missions without going overseas; working in ministry without working at a church; using my skills in writing and multimedia production to tell stories of what God is doing around the world.

I knocked out a cover letter, confidently declaring that I was the right person for this role, and sent it in. Within weeks, I went through three rounds of interviews and received a job offer. 🙌

This experience gave me new insights into Proverbs 3: 5-6:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
   and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
   and he will make your paths straight.

1. Trust in God, not in your circumstances. If I had given in to the discouragement assaulting me from all angles, I most likely would have fallen into paths of destruction, whether in my career, my marriage, or my own health. However, because I had seen God’s faithfulness time and time again, I learned to trust in Him, even though I had no idea what to do. Faith requires trust in things you can’t see.

2. Surrender your mess to God and let Him fix it. When verse 6 says “he will make your paths straight,” it doesn’t mean that God will make everything go your way if you sacrifice to Him. Rather, the verse is saying that your crooked paths can be straightened by God if you surrender to Him. My résumé looked like a tangled path to nowhere, at least to me, but God made it a straight line into my current job.

3. This is not a transaction with God. I knew that nothing I did in my past, whether related to ministry and missions or not, earned me any Brownie points with the Creator of the Universe, who gives by grace, not in response to works. It’s not like I could say, “OK, God, I did all this work in Your name for years, so the least you can do is get me out of this mess.” Rather, my prayers were, “God, I don’t know what’s going on here, and I don’t know how any of this is going to play out, but I trust in You and I have no regrets about following You.” Verse 6 doesn’t say “In all your ways submit to him SO he will make your paths straight”––it says “submit to him AND he will.”

The imperative verbs in this passage are “trust,” “lean (not),” and “submit.” That’s our part. That’s about all we can do.

In November 2016, I left my role as children’s pastor and prepared for my new job in content generation at a faith-based, missional nonprofit. God was releasing me back into the marketplace.

Was the roundabout simply about exiting my role at the church, or was it about exiting full-time ministry completely? Was the sense of calling to Santa Ana an off-ramp to get me out of Japan, which could have easily become a roundabout to my family and me—a loop you could stay in indefinitely?

And was the calling to Japan an exit out of the roundabout of pastoral ministry—another loop that one could circle endlessly, caught up in endless needs that come through each day?

What was God trying to teach me through all of this?

(To be continued)