I Have This Friend, You Know?
I'm posting every day for the rest of lent as a way of breaking down walls I've built over the years - I think... to be honest, I'm not exactly sure why except that I feel I should... it's all badly explained here...)
Ok, so yesterday's post got a leeeetle long-winded. Sorry about that. :-) I'll try to be less verbose and bombastic, not to mention redundant. But I'm serious, I will use every one of those Word Wealth vocabulary words I had to memorize in school before I drop off this planet.
I'll be brief.
I have a friend who knows he needs to do something about his job when he actually gets to the point in his prayer life where he asks to get laid off. Pretty bad. His employment, after a great run and challenging projects and some amazing coworkers, had begun - on and off over the past few years to feel like standing in a warehouse during the Apocalypse, after the hordes of survivors had already come through and picked it clean. A fluttering of paper, a can of beans maybe, to the point where why bother even eating the beans, you know? (Think opening scene of Walking Dead, season 3, and the dog food can.) Plus, to keep with the simile (Word Wealth, grade 9), no one even knows he's there sometimes. Part of that's his doing - withdrawing into the shadows, but never for lack of asking. It's funny - the older we all get in this business, the more they either think we're busier than we are, or the less they want to give you, even though productivity-wise he can write code three times as fast as the foreign outsourcing folks they bring in to replace those who let go in past years (no offense to the contractors he works with, he just has a very high opinion of his coding skills).
Still - he's my age, and I know how he feels. I've been doing this thing for 28 years. Me, I'd be happy if they just had me code a bunch of programs not have to do any analytical work. Or research. Or other icky stuff I never liked doing even in college. I'm too much a techie. But I need to be busy, so like my friend who is a completely other person working at some completely different company, if I'm not extremely busy at work, my productivity goes down. It's like when this happens to me I horde what little work I can get - though at least recently, over the past year I've been busy enough and in those times I found my job satisfying. I find it that way when I get paid, regardless - but though I can't speak for my friend, but for me - it feels like I've overstayed my welcome. And it's felt that way for a while now.
This is another of my little "change" vignettes I guess. Like the blind man in this Mumford & Sons video, there's a time to let go of my own self- and expectation-imposed limitations and trust in God's plan, begin running with more trust into the light. He's got my back.
So if thats the case, why don't we do it more often?
Ok, so yesterday's post got a leeeetle long-winded. Sorry about that. :-) I'll try to be less verbose and bombastic, not to mention redundant. But I'm serious, I will use every one of those Word Wealth vocabulary words I had to memorize in school before I drop off this planet.
I'll be brief.
I have a friend who knows he needs to do something about his job when he actually gets to the point in his prayer life where he asks to get laid off. Pretty bad. His employment, after a great run and challenging projects and some amazing coworkers, had begun - on and off over the past few years to feel like standing in a warehouse during the Apocalypse, after the hordes of survivors had already come through and picked it clean. A fluttering of paper, a can of beans maybe, to the point where why bother even eating the beans, you know? (Think opening scene of Walking Dead, season 3, and the dog food can.) Plus, to keep with the simile (Word Wealth, grade 9), no one even knows he's there sometimes. Part of that's his doing - withdrawing into the shadows, but never for lack of asking. It's funny - the older we all get in this business, the more they either think we're busier than we are, or the less they want to give you, even though productivity-wise he can write code three times as fast as the foreign outsourcing folks they bring in to replace those who let go in past years (no offense to the contractors he works with, he just has a very high opinion of his coding skills).
Still - he's my age, and I know how he feels. I've been doing this thing for 28 years. Me, I'd be happy if they just had me code a bunch of programs not have to do any analytical work. Or research. Or other icky stuff I never liked doing even in college. I'm too much a techie. But I need to be busy, so like my friend who is a completely other person working at some completely different company, if I'm not extremely busy at work, my productivity goes down. It's like when this happens to me I horde what little work I can get - though at least recently, over the past year I've been busy enough and in those times I found my job satisfying. I find it that way when I get paid, regardless - but though I can't speak for my friend, but for me - it feels like I've overstayed my welcome. And it's felt that way for a while now.
This is another of my little "change" vignettes I guess. Like the blind man in this Mumford & Sons video, there's a time to let go of my own self- and expectation-imposed limitations and trust in God's plan, begin running with more trust into the light. He's got my back.
So if thats the case, why don't we do it more often?
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