Journey Into The Unknown part 5

In my second post of this series (on December 6, 2011) I mentioned the journey I began after the funding for my job was gone. That journey involved a change in careers, not just a change to a new job of the same kind. It was a difficult transition, as you might imagine, because much of one’s identity is bound up in answer to the question, “What do you do?”

We seek to get to know someone by asking about their family, but more often by asking about their work. For 19 years my answer to that question was “I am a minister”. Sometimes I was more specific, “Pastor, Campus Minister, etc. Suddenly I was thrust into a position where I was no longer in “full-time ministry”. That is, I wasn’t being paid to work for a church or denomination. Over time I would answer, “I am a Realtor”, but I still retained the expectation that at some future date the Lord would call me back into “the ministry”.

After several years, when I admitted that the Lord had put me in the work I was currently doing, and that He was probably not going to lead me back to work for a church, I borrowed a phrase from Caesar’s Gallic Wars which I remembered from high school Latin: “alea jacta est” (the die—singular for dice--is cast). When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River from Gaul (France) into Italy to return to Rome in defiance of orders to stay away, he knew there was no going back.

That’s how it was for me when I finally used that phrase to settle the fact that my future was in real estate (with voluntary or bi-vocational ministry to fulfill my calling) and not in full-time Christian ministerial positions. The dice had been cast. The decision had been made. Look to the future, not to the past.

I heard it years ago on TV, and I guess it’s a fairly common truism, “There’s no future in looking back”. That’s what I ultimately meant my adopting the phrase from Julius Caesar as my own motto. It helped me settle in and do the work I needed to do to be successful in real estate for the next 20 plus years.

It is applicable now, too. As we begin the search for a new church home, Lindsey and I are looking toward the future, not looking back. We still want to keep friendships strong, and in some ways the past always puts its stamp on future decisions; but our focus is on what we want our next church to be like.

That will come in the next post.