What is your greatest rational fear?
Many people will sum this up as their phobia, being afraid of spiders, snakes, or heights. I've often heard it said that the most common phobia among humans is the fear of public speaking. I'm not sure if that ranking would hold up to Snopes, but having done a lot of oration I'll confirm that this unlicensed factoid will make you feel more heroic as you're stepping up before 350 people with eyes on you.
For one reason or another, I've given a lot of thought to my greatest irrational fear. Something horrifying that has no chance of ever happening to me, but has certainly happened to someone somewhere at some point. The options are limitless, but one horror stands above the rest:
Being jettisoned into outer-space on life support.
Can you imagine? You're thrust into the blackest void, watching your spaceship dwindle until it's indiscernibly lost among the stars. There is nothing to grab hold of to gain purchase, no propulsion to redirect your momentum. Inertia has ended your life already, and your oximeter reading is like a clock ticking down the knowable seconds of your life sentence which is now served in a spacesuit prison.
I've seen a lot of Star Wars, and there are many ways to die in space. This is the worst one.
Besides Sarlacc Pit.
Floating in the Most Peculiar Way
In August 2020 I got my first introduction to being jettisoned from a job. It's an event that many have endured, and depending on how you stick the landing, it's likely to be a traumatizing endeavor.
I had three children, the youngest being age one, and there was this global event happening at the time that you may have heard of called COVID. I had a good severance package from this workplace of nine years that I hoped would buy some time to search for my next job, hopefully in ministry. Above all, I had great faith that God would provide.
Against all odds, I had hoped that I'd be allowed to stay in the same town where I'd made a life in Oregon, but only one church was hiring a lead pastor role, and they were moving with the kind of urgency that would have received approval from 9 out of 10 snails in my garden. I had several talks with their search team, Elders, and current pastor, but every step of their hiring process would be about three weeks from the previous one, and my cushion of savings was not pacing to outlast their prayerful consideration.
Candidly, this is a term that churches use to indicate that their decision-makers, who are volunteers, do not meet more than once every 2-4 weeks. While a lot of sincere prayer happens along the way, I've begun to consider how many searching pastors have had months of joblessness added to their lives due to this method. I'm not sure the committees intend this outcome, and I'm not sure they comprehend its effects.
Three of the pastoral roles I applied for in that first year took me as far as the final three candidates. From the time when I applied to the time I was told "no", these three job searches totaled 14 months.
That's 1.2 years of pending job application.
One preaching job, rather than tell me no, simply introduced their new preacher to the congregation and posted a video of it on Facebook. My wife happened to find it, and that's how we got our answer on that job.
Such practices are common with churches because the Church is a pseudo-professional environment. It has formal employees and staffing structures, but its origin, identity, and goals are entirely existential. The church is not a common workplace, and so many positive and negative distinctions result from this. In the end, it is what it needs to be, and I shed light on these things as an explanation, not a critique.
That said, I found myself in a very costly waiting game, and there are expectations on every clergy going through such things.
Just have faith.
Don't question the process.
Don't question God's plan, his timing, his providence.
Anxiety is a sin of doubt.
Doubtfulness disqualifies you from shepherding the church.
Pursuing another career is forsaking God's calling.
If these voices don't accuse you from the outside, then they certainly dwell within your mind, and every pastor reading this right now is nodding their head.
The Stars Look Very Different Today
As I sorted through my limited ministry options, another career path came across my desk.
A friend from my days in Texas reached out about a job opening in his company for a sales director at a senior living community. He was doing the same job at a sister community and thought I might find a good fit here as he had done when transitioning out of his own ministry job. The provision was worthy of my attention, and it also happened to be in Amarillo, the city where my parents lived in Texas.
Interesting.
Eventually, I told him no, and decided I wasn't done pursuing my ministry options. His company hired someone for that position, and I felt at peace with all of it.
I went through more of the same searching as I had before, without great results, then he called me again, six weeks later. The position had re-opened. Their new hire had vacated as a result of a personal incident in her family.
Thinking hard on the implications of a total career shift and a big move, I sought much counsel on this, prayed hard, and I did a couple of interviews with a company who was very efficient, showed a lot of interest in me, and put me through the Wonderlic test (Aaron Rodgers and I are 39-twins now! And he doesn't respond to any of my handwritten letters about this.)
They made an offer and gave me two days to decide.
God, what are you trying to do here? Every other door closed, and you open this one twice.
I accepted the job.
Planet Earth is Blue
My new company was anxious to get me into the work, and I had about three weeks to sort out my affairs in Oregon, get my house ready for sale, get packed, and make the drive down to Texas. That all sounds impossible as I write it out loud.
Those weeks of cleaving were painful but left me with vivid mental snapshots that I still flip through often.
Our going-away party at the park with so many friends that I cherish with all my heart.
Opening my trunk to pull out a duffel bag containing a yellow inflatable kayak and handing it over to my friend saying "take good care of her".
Watching Eurovision, and suppressing tears over a Will Ferrell comedy with a heartfelt finale about loving your home and knowing where you belong.
My brother from another mother driving me to the Eugene airport and playing Coming Home (Oregon) on Spotify. A real jerk move for the nicest guy I've ever met, ya know?
Packing up a moving truck with an empty house behind me on the day my son should have been in the kitchen with his friends blowing out six candles on a cake.
I've moved a lot in my life, but there's never been one like this. Never been one I led a family through. Roseburg was the longest-standing home of my life at nine years, and I remember those last days, riding my road bike alongside the river and the vineyards, consciously straining to soak it all in, unable to do it fast or deep enough.
I'd lived in Amarillo before--this wasn't my first rodeo--and I didn't relish the thought of going back to that landscape. I'd be giving up almost all of my hobbies and pastimes. Biking, hiking, camping, coasts, forests, rivers. No more of that. Off to the windiest city in America. Straight, flat roads. Air quality brought to you by Hereford Cattle.
There's a somewhat mundane scene in Gladiator that I always found very profound, where Maximus is talking with his swordbearer:
Maximus: Do you ever find it hard to do your duty?
Cicero: Sometimes I do what I want to do; the rest of the time I do what I have to.
This is the lesson you learn when you graduate from childhood into adulthood. Your life becomes the avenue through which you enact your duty, then everything else happens in the margins.
You do your duty whether or not it feels good.
You do your duty to protect and provide for others first.
You do your duty to fulfill your promises.
You do your duty whether your children understand it or not.
You do your duty because you are not a child anymore.
Still, I was glad to know that we would reunite our children with their grandparents, and at least Amarillo has Tex-Mex, right?
Off to a new adventure.
There's Nothing Left to Do
In my interim period after accepting the job, I had flown down to Texas and scouted houses, and actually found a home that my wife and I agreed to buy before she'd ever seen it.
I do not recommend this. But again...duty.
We had all sorts of expectations of how this would play out within a certain range of outcomes, and we discovered that we formatted that range too narrowly. By the time we'd arrived in Amarillo, our Oregon house had a pending offer, but the buyer reneged when we refused to pay for a $9,000 roof, causing our Amarillo house purchase to remain in limbo. Even in the midst of this, the readers of our entire saga (starting here) will understand that there were some very relieving moments for us to verify that our Oregon house was sellable.
Still, the frustration of relying on unreliable parties eventually became a source of panic as our house selling/buying dance dragged on to a point that "is like nothing I've ever seen" according to our Amarillo realtor of 30 years.
Again, don't tell people this stuff out loud, it's demoralizing.
All that said, I found myself living indefinitely in my parents' guest bedroom, getting dressed in formal work attire early in the dark November morning, trying not to wake the toddler sleeping in a Pack'n'Play inside my closet, in a new city, on COVID red alert, learning a new career, while all my family's possessions ship across the US from a home I can't get sold to a house I can't buy.
Nice to meet you, I'm Kory. I'm excited to show you our two-bedroom apartments that are specially outfitted for senior needs. Tell me a little bit about your parents.
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