Unbalanced & Slightly Out of Focus

This week we were discussing the office Super Bowl pool and I said I was not going to participate because it was too complicated for me to figure out if I won. One of the guys said in an exasperated tone “It’s just numbers, you work with them all day.” My “little boss” (the 25 year old son who is the shop manager) looks at him and says. “Yeah, tell me about it. That’s scary.” I am not a numbers person. What I do all day long is tedious work, which requires attention to detail. I am not a detail person.

I work with “Type A” people who multi-task like crazy and are move like little whirling dervishes all day long. I am a “Type B” personality who does not like to be interrupted from the task at hand and could most likely spend the day doing nothing more than watching the grass grow if I thought I could get away with it. Details are not that important to me.

I rarely see or talk to any customers. I mostly stay in the office with my coworker. I like being around people and miss the opportunity my old job provided in seeing a variety of people.

But this is where I landed two years ago when I started my search for a job after my old one ended when my former bosses shut the doors on their business and retired. It has it advantages—one important advantage is that I am off on weekends and will be able to visit my son each weekend when he is granted the privilege of having visitors in March. But it is also very stressful simply because the job is not a good fit for me.

I’ve been visiting a large church in our area for over a year now. It’s a place where nobody knows my name, and for a long while, I liked it that way. I don’t have a place there yet—a small group where I fit in and can interact on a more personal level with other believers. That is more my fault than the church’s fault.

It seems things are settling down a bit in my life and I am seeing areas where my life is out of balance and I have some work to do. The Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines tag line is “Get out there”. I think that might be this year’s theme for me, to “get out there” and quit hiding and settling. For me, that means a little less thinking and a little more doing.

I regret that I dropped school before I finished and I have hopes of one day going back to complete what I started there, “if God is willing and the creek don’t rise”, as the country people say. But even if I do not go back to pursue formal education, there are still plenty of opportunities to learn and do around me. I plan to take a Leisure Learning class on Photography in March. That is one way of getting out there.

I plan on looking around for a church home. If not this big giant church, then possibly a smaller church, maybe even a different denomination. It’s hard when you feel like you do not fit in your church anymore. I have said I often feel like a square peg being squeezed into a round hole. Maybe God is calling me to be a minister of square pegs being squeezed into round holes! I am searching for direction. And I am searching for a place to serve.

I am looking at jobs again. I am also considering the possibility of a home-based business, which I am not yet ready to write about.

So these are the things that have been on my mind lately. Maybe I'd have myself a little more together in this stage of the game had I only paid a little more attention to the details. Thank God His mercies are new every morning. I'm pretty sure I use my day's allotment every day.