The Job I Meant to Leave

Sami took that job at twenty-six because he needed something for about a year.

He is forty-eight.

It is a decent job. That is the first thing to say, because the version of this where the job is miserable is a different article. It is not miserable. It pays adequately, the people are mostly good, and there are three or four things about it he would genuinely miss.

It was simply never the plan.

The plan was a thing he had been working toward since he was nineteen, and it came apart in a way that was not really anybody's fault, and he took this to cover the gap.

Twenty-two years.

And somewhere in there, without deciding it, he developed a way of talking about his own life.

He says still.

At weddings, when somebody he has not seen in years asks what he is doing, he says: I am still at the same place. When his sister's friends ask, he says: still there, yes. When a form asks for length of service he feels something about the number.

One word, in front of everything, for two decades. And it does the same thing every time, which is to signal that this is a temporary arrangement he is aware of and has not endorsed.

He would tell you it is just an accurate word. It is not. It is an apology.

There was a leaving do in the spring for a young man who had been there four years and was off to something better.

Good lad. Sami trained him. That is not a formality: he sat with him and taught him the actual work, the way you teach somebody a trade, over about eight months.

And at the door, on the way out, the young man said, "You are the reason this place works."

And Sami did the thing he does, which is to make it light. Something about how somebody has to keep the lights on.

And the young man did not take it. He said, "No. I mean it. You are the only one who has been here the whole time. Everything anybody in that building knows, they learned off you or off somebody you taught."

Sami drove home and did not put anything on.

And what he thought about, the whole way, was not the compliment.

It was that he has been describing his own life with an apologetic word since before that boy was born.

Now let me ask you how long you have been saying it.

Because if this is yours you have a word, and it might be still, or just, or only, or for now, and you put it in front of your own life without noticing, every single time somebody asks.

The ambition he actually names

Paul writes to a young church about how to live and he gives them a goal, and the goal is not what anybody expects.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you, so that you will behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need.1 Thessalonians 4:11 to 12

Read the first four words again.

Make it your ambition.

The word behind it is the one Greek used for driving personal ambition, the thing a man organizes his life around. Paul takes that word, deliberately, and points it at a quiet life, ordinary work and hands.

That is not a consolation for people whose plans failed. It is the target.

And notice the reason he gives, because it is not inward. So that you will behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need. The point of the quiet life is that other people can see it and that you are not a burden on anybody. It is aimed outward, at a watching street.

So hear this said over you, driving home with nothing on. The twenty-two years are not the gap before your life, they are your life, and Paul aimed the strongest word he had for ambition at exactly what you have been apologizing for. That is written in his own instruction to a church he loved, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the one at work in a believer to will and to do, and He has been at work in a building for twenty-two years through a man who kept turning up.

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to tell you the plan did not matter.

It did. You worked toward that thing from nineteen and it came apart and there is a real grief in that, and a man who tells you to be content and moves on has skipped something that took years out of you.

And I am not going to tell you that staying is holier than going.

The young man was right to go. Some of the best people you know left places and were right to, and this article is not a rebuke of anybody who moved. If a door opens for you next year, walk through it with a clear conscience.

Here is the only thing I am saying.

You have been living a life and describing a delay.

Those are two different documents and only one of them is true. In the actual twenty-two years you have taught most of a building its trade, and you are the continuity in a place that would be worse without you, and a young man drove away this spring knowing how to do something because you sat with him for eight months.

And in the description, there is a word in front of all of it that says: this does not count yet.

The word says whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, and Paul wrote that to household servants doing unremarkable work in somebody else's house. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure, which puts the last twenty-two years on His side of the page and not on yours.

There is a whole tradition behind this. It said, four hundred years ago and with some heat, that a man at a bench and a man in a pulpit are doing the same kind of thing, and that God is as pleased with an honest day's work as with a sermon. It said it because people in ordinary jobs had been taught that their lives were the second-best option.

That was a lie then and it is the lie in your one-word habit now.