Well….the title might not be entirely accurate to this post, but I think it is pretty close. I don’t really consider my life a waste, but I do feel my pursuits throughout my life as kind of a waste. More specifically in ministry and in the workforce. I'll bet you can figure out how the pictures reflect the title.
You know, though, now that I look back on my life it seems kind of obvious what my true calling is…not that God hasn’t blessed me in my pursuits to follow Him and “work” for Him.
So, here is what I mean: I have had a plethora of jobs throughout my 40 years of life, but nothing has ever really satisfied me. First, I remember a “sort of job” where Firestone hired a bunch of us high school kids to try and sell their coupons. That didn’t work out so well. I worked at a Chinese fast food restaurant, gymnastics instructor to young children, Cafeteria worker at my first college, English tutor for a well-established tutoring company, telephone telemarketer, Security Forces in the Air Force, Salesman, Children’s pastor, and a secondary school teacher.
For a while, I just figured I would be a "career nomad." Not ever settling down at any particular job, but moving from one to another for the rest of my life….until…I found my true calling. I feel like my two degrees from my two colleges have been a small waste of my time and money. Now, I learned a lot from my education, but now that I know what my calling is, I’m just not sure it was ever really worth it.
Nothing before my writing career has really ever satisfied me. Yes, there have been some fun jobs, but nothing that ever really connected with me until I decided to take my writing to the next level and try and make it a business.Some of it might be that my passion for writing skyrocketed to the point in 2018 that I felt like I would explode if I didn’t write, and that was what led me to this journey of writing full time.
Now that I look back at my life all of the signs that I should have pursued writing much earlier was there.
To start, when I was a young child, I had this crazy imagination. I had an army of imaginary friends, from flying dolphins that could breathe out of the water to eagles, and all of the animals in between. I would look up at the sky and see thousands of my animal friends flying in the sky. If I looked at the horizon surrounding the car I was riding in, you wouldn’t believe how fast all of these animals were running!
Then, there is jr. high and high school. I used to walk home about a mile or two from school…and sometimes walk to school. During these little treks, I would imagine scenarios in my head. I would create Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stories and new villains that they would fight. I would create G. I. Joe stories. I would pass the time walking by creating fiction stories in my head as I walked.
To add to this, I remember one specific day around the time TMNT 2, (90s version) came out. I had this subscription to animal planet or something like that which every month I would get a handful of animal cards that listed all of the animal’s information. I had looked up all of the turtles that I could find and wrote all of them down on a sheet of paper, giving them names and everything. I titled it something like “my imaginary friends” or the such….which was stupid. Well, I was at lunch one day in jr. high and a kid….dare I say…a bully…tried to snatch it out of my hands. Boy, I held on to that thing for dear life, knowing that if he read it, I would be forever ridiculed…even more than I already was then. Well, after a moment or two, he gave up, and I shoved the paper back deep into my pocket, dodging a major social bullet.
There was also the fact that wrote many of my dreams into short fiction stories as well as writing a few fiction short stories not from my dreams through high school and even college…but I never took my writing seriously. I fell in love with writing my freshman year when I had to write a fiction story using my vocabulary words…. I LOVED it…and I think that is what inspired me to start writing my dreams into stories.
So, there you have it, all the signs were there, but I didn’t pay attention to them…and now I am thousands of dollars in debt and have wasted my life on jobs that I never really wanted to grow in. Now, though….I love what I do, and I will never stop until my hands can’t write anymore or my mind goes to mush. Who knows, maybe one of the reasons I never pursued writing earlier was because it hasn’t ever been considered a “real” job and it is not a job that always brings a steady income like getting a paycheck from Walmart, McDonald’s, or the such. Hope you enjoyed it.
I truly believe God has promised that great things will come from my writing fiction for and with him....the question is...what are these great things?
Until next month.