Interactions with God #77
After two years of driving back and forth, buying a house and moving to NH, the church plant died. Basically, we had a coup attempt. One of my team believed that he should be the church plant’s leader, instead of me. So also, did another family who had been friends with him for years. They began to set up meetings in which Martha and I were not invited.
Look, I didn’t request this thing. Two years earlier, my leadership had asked me to do it. I accepted and then set my life in a completely different direction because of it. For the two years following, my family and I sacrificed time and money to accomplish the task I was given. I knew it would take a while, but I never expected some of my team to turn on me. When Pastor Ed found out, he immediately shut the thing down.
When your dream dies, it feels like you lost a child. It hurts a lot. I put my heart into this church plant effort. I put my future plans into it. Now it was gone. I was just lost.
After the crushing event, I spent a lot of time fasting and praying for what to do next. I felt rejected by people and God…again. I didn’t understand why He did things this way over and over. After several months of just plodding along waiting for direction and hope, a Sybase job posting was emailed to me by a co-worker, named Rich.
Rich had started at Sybase a year after I had. While I was working in Telemarketing, he got a job selling training services as an inside sales representative. A week after he started, I got a job promotion and moved into the same group. Rich and I became good friends.
Sometime in 1996, Rich got a promotion to become an Education Account Manager. Basically, a field sales representative selling onsite training classes and larger contracts. The position he emailed me in early 1997 was for a similar role, but it was to be located in either Los Angeles or Phoenix.
That night, I talked with Martha about the position. Surprisingly, she was interested in the idea of moving to Phoenix. I think she was as disappointed as I was over how things in Manchester went. Plus, my commute to the Sybase office in Concord, MA from New Boston, NH was over an hour to 3 hours each way (depending on the weather). With two little girls at home, my time away was killing her. She needed a positive change and so did I.
I still wanted to plant a church. Though, my immediate hopes for doing so in NH had collapsed, I really didn’t want to give up on it just yet. Because of that, I was not quite ready to move out of the area. Oddly enough, while still discussing it, we had visitors. Some old friends, Al and Joanne Davis, happened to be visiting another family down the street and unexpectedly stopped by just to say hello. Their son, Chris, was my right hand go to guy when I managed the youth group at the church in Nashua, NH. He had since gotten married and moved to the Phoenix area.
In the general catching up conversation, we told them about the Church plant failure along with the present job possibility. I also mentioned my resistance to the idea because of the lingering hope of still planting a church. Joanne said that the church Chris and his wife Anita had been going to just had a major leadership problem and fell apart. Now, there was a group of people who were looking to start a new church. Joanne laughed and said it looked like God wanted us to move to Phoenix in order to plant a church there. Hope, yes, that is what it was, and hope is very motivational. We believed this might just be the direction we had been asking for. That night Martha and I decided that I should apply for the job in Phoenix.
The next day, I asked my current manager if he was OK with me responding to the job posting. He said “Go for it!” sounding very supportive. So, I responded to the job posting letting the hiring manager know that I was interested. The hiring manager, Jesse, responded with an interested email and a notice that she would reach out to my manager, Dave, to get his input. I figured everything looked good based on how it was proceeding. I was rather surprised, then, to get a call from Dave, my manager, just before 6pm that afternoon. “I need to see you for a minute.”
As I walked into his office, he shut the door and then told me “Jessie, is going to call me in a few minutes. I just need to tell you that when she asks, I am going to give her a bad report about you.” Yea, my jaw hit the floor. “Uh, Why?” Dave, who just a few hours earlier said “Go for it!” with enthusiasm no less, now said “Well, because you leave early and get in late.” I did come in later as my territory was in the Central US time zone. I got in at 9 and left at 6. I also rarely took a lunch of more than 10 minutes. And he knew it. This was bogus.
I never understood why he did what he did, especially after his supportive comments earlier in the day. It was really confusing, especially on top of how things went with the church plant. It seemed that people hated me for no reason. After his bad report, Jesse passed on me for the job. That was around April of 1997.
By August of that same year, I sent Jesse an email asking if she had found a person to fill the role yet. She had not. I had been emailing her for months just to keep in touch. I knew why she wouldn’t consider me, but I couldn’t address it directly. It was rather awkward. I persisted still, shooting her an email every couple of weeks or so.
After she replied to that email in August, I sent her another email letting her know that I would not give up. I said that my next effort would be to buy a plane ticket and show up at the front door of her house. Yea, I was pushing it a bit. Sure, I made it humorous, but threatening to be a stalker is generally not a good way to get a job.
What I didn’t know, till much later, was that Jesse could not find anyone that she thought would be persistent enough to do the job well. She printed my email and went to her VP. “What do you want to be the biggest quality of the person we hire for the Field Sales job?” He replied to her, “Someone who just won’t quit.” She handed him the printed email. After reading it, he said “Bring this guy in.”
After several phone interviews and one face to face with Jesse in Phoenix, I got the job. As it has been written about over and over in scripture, no matter what evil things devils or people do, God will always have His way. In the last week of February of 1998, we packed up our lives and moved to Cave Creek, AZ.
Ten months had passed since that night in April. There was no longer a team of people waiting to start a church. Why were there? We did not know yet. What we did know was that God pointed the way and we went where He pointed.