Every day, my corporate job was slowly killing me.
Literally.
It’s been almost 18 years since I worked at a day job that caused long-lasting physical pain and auto-immune disease.
I suffer from this auto-immune disease to this day, even though medicine helps suppress its symptoms.
What happened was I was in a job that I could not stand. So I would apply for a new position within the company.
And for the first year or so, in that new position, I really enjoyed what I was doing. It was playing to my strengths. And that department then got merged with three others. So the everybody in the four departments, some 40 plus people, over the next two and a half years, we’re all being transitioned to learn how to do everybody else’s job.
There were some jobs from one company or from one division that I didn’t mind doing; I actually learned to enjoy it since it got me back on a Mac computer.
There is another one that I could tolerate. And then there’s one that I actually was getting physically sick, thinking about trying to learn it.
Fast forward a few months, and I am placed on a disciplinary performance evaluation because I dared ask why I had to learn how to do everyone else’s job and be marginal at it.
Being placed on a disciplinary performance evaluation, I knew that it was my time to leave.
I looked for a job. I found one. But in that almost two years of high stress, I developed psoriasis, which then became psoriatic arthritis. And I’ve been dealing with that every day since.
The pressures that we put ourselves under for a job doesn’t make sense.
If we were to die at most of our jobs, they would have that position posted online before our obituary was posted.
So why are we spending so much time and energy working at companies in jobs that do not provide us an outlet or an expression for our passion?
We need to look for passion and God’s calling in our lives. What do we do when time ceases to exist?
We can actually live like we are from the movie. And we are the director, writer, and producer of our life’s movie.
Mel Gibson plays William Wallace in Braveheart. And one of the great lines from that movie is, “every man dies, but not every man lives.”
And I’m pretty convinced that applies to us as well.
Thoreau said, “Every man lives in quiet desperation.”
I think that’s true. We’re desperate to live lives with meaning desperate.
