Untitled Document

Finding a Career
Steve's Destiny Malaise

Steve came to me because he and His Wife were both extremely frustrated over his inability to set a course for his life career-wise. She was beautiful, intelligent, very decisive, very diligent, and very successful in her business career at a major corporation.

He was handsome, intelligent and talented enough to do almost any kind of work, but he could not seem to wholeheartedly choose anything.

By the time I met Steve, his favorite job had been delivering UPS packages to hundreds of different businesses that gave him a chance to see what the rest of the world was doing while he was waiting for his destiny to appear.

They both wanted to know was he just lazy, or too proud? Was he too ambitious, and perfectionistic, or was he afraid of failure, or even afraid of success?

As Steve and I met a couple times, I went looking for unconfessed sins, or unresolved hurts and fears. There wasn't that much to find.

I could only see that he seemed to have too many good ideas, but no focus and no real passion or lasting commitment to any one of them. He seemed aware of so many possibilities but was a diligent pursuer of none.

This drove his wife crazy because she found it very easy to make choices and to see them through to fruition in both the corporate world and her private life. But she could not seem to help Steve breakthrough his paralysis of analysis, his inertia, and his "pie in the sky" "my ship is going to come in someday" thinking.

Both of them came from very loving homes, so it was a little confusing to me at first. Forgiving parents for past errors did not seem to be the issue with either of them.

Quite the contrary. Because the apostle Paul says "whatever was to my profit I now count loss for the sake of gaining Christ," it seemed God wanted me to help his wife Diane to crucify the perfect little girl that had been lovingly taught that she could anything that she put her mind to, the wonderful student, and the woman who succeeded at all she ever tried. She repented of self-confidence, and contempt for her husband's indecisiveness and lack of productivity, that had hurt him. He could not seem to help how he was.

After she prayed with me, I got my breakthrough with Steve. Steve had also been a very intelligent boy. but he was so intelligent that he was easily bored and distracted and therefore didn't do as well in school.

His parents discovered that he liked to read magazines at an early age, and so they got him several magazines a week. He read every one of them- thousands of them by the time he went to college.

He had read about all kinds of people, and places, every imaginable career and calling, and thousands of inventions and hobbies. (Like a boy looking at too many beautiful but immoral women in pornographic magazines, he had overloaded his brain with hundreds of possibilities.)

Hundreds of times he had read the whole story of someone else's life in just a few minutes or a few hours without ever having to actually walk out a single difficult moment of what they had gone through in order to overcome and succeed in their situations.

As a result of all he read he grew up believing that he'd do something very exciting, significant and wonderful with his life, just like all the people he'd read about.

But he could never start at the small beginning of his own path without impatience for the success and boredom with the details. Reality was never quite as exciting as possibility, except perhaps briefly at the planning stages.

He tried his hand at being a recruiter and career promoter for others but that did not seem to get off the ground. How frustrating. (ROM 8:19-20)

"Do not compare yourself to others," "Do not covet," "Do not despise small beginnings" "What is highly esteemed among men is despicable in the eyes of God," "Whoever loves the world and the things in the world the love of the Father is not in him." "God hates the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life."

All these scriptures spoke against what Steve had been allowed to do to his mind and his heart.

We crucified that too smart, too curious, too fascinated little boy/teen and adult who was always ready to hear what someone else was doing and never quite ready to look after what he needed to be about.

The change that occurred was interesting. He began to focus on working on some simple projects with his hands. His very professional wife left her corporate career and worked with him.

We spoke at some length recently and I was thrilled to find Steve has now worked for three years in a manufacturing company and says that he has finally begun to find contentment on the job, and even excitement about waking up to his own new stable life.

He told me he now actually has ideas in the morning that are related to his own job, and to some other grandiose idea, and that he goes to work with some enthusiasm for what he is doing instead of dreaming about what he is not doing.

Another blessing was to hear that his formerly corporate wife is now a very spiritual woman and the personal assistant to the Senior pastor of one of the largest and fastest growing churches in Atlanta.

I exhorted him that he is the head of his wife and that she was given to him as a gift to be his helpmate. No matter how good her current position looks, God is still working on him to bring him into fulfillment of his destiny.

I believe he is called to ministry and will soon get there. Perhaps his wife has been sent ahead to pave the way for him to one day be a part of the ministry she is working in, or maybe she is being trained to support the ministry he will have later.

Personally, I have felt the call on his life may be to be a Christian counselor who can lead people to their destinies by first taking them to the place where all of their old life needs to go no matter how good, bad, successful or wretched it has been --the Cross.