This morning, I was talking to a friend with a son who is a senior in high school. Like every senior, he’s weighing out his options: two-year versus four-year college, military, and future career. Like many seniors, he isn’t sure what to do.
“He’s got time,” I said. “I’m just now doing what I want to do, and I’m 38.”
While true, I wish I had known a lot sooner. Twenty years ago, I was a high school senior with no clue where I was headed. Two decades later, my working life has been a squiggle rather than a line, but I’ve learned that wandering can teach you more than arriving ever could.
It’s tough to get anywhere when you don’t have direction or drive. I was a rudderless senior; I had no idea what I wanted to do (I just knew it couldn’t involve math).
It’s tough to get anywhere when you don’t have direction or drive.
In February of my senior year, I went to a show at the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo. I saw photographers down in the arena with dirt on their knees and cowboy hats pushed back on their heads. They were shooting broncs and bulls, ropers and rough stock. “That’s a job!” I realized.
And so I learned that Agricultural Journalism was a thing. I was an avid photographer and fancied myself a writer. I could shoot rodeos, write for National Geographic, or live in the back country somewhere, sending articles to editors whenever the satellites and planets aligned. Better still, the Ag Journalism degree at Texas A&M required minimal math.
But it wasn’t long before I hit my first curve in my career path. Freshman year at A&M, I had renewed my faith and felt a call to ministry. I assumed that meant seminary was in my future, and that my undergrad was just a stepping stone to a higher purpose. I didn’t need to waste my time with internships, experience, or my degree other than getting it, I thought.
So I didn’t.
Then the next curve came when I graduated in 2008 with a degree in Agricultural Communications and Journalism at the height of the recession and housing crisis, with no experience, mediocre grades, and the inability to pay for seminary.
I drifted from job to job. I simultaneously worked as a substitute teacher, a freelance sports photographer, and a farm hand for a dairy, and still couldn’t pay rent until I was evicted.
I got my first real job as a call center rep in the HR department at Wells Fargo. Then I worked in customer service and shipping for New Growth Press. I eventually started seminary at Southern and was a freelance researcher for pastors with Docent. Then I left the cubicles and moved into the trades as a landscape foreman, failed small business owner, groundskeeper, and grain miller.
God was good to give me gainful employment all those years. He was faithful even when I wasn’t. But looking back, I wonder why I didn’t try to go back to communications. Sometimes I want to beat myself up for it now. But that’s with the 20/20 vision of hindsight and two decades of maturing.
Now I’m in a job that I love. I work for an organization that values me, using hard-fought skills I love to use, for a mission I care about. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to get there, because the more I look at social media trends and AI, the more I feel like that Steve Buscemi meme (”How do you do, fellow kids?”).
If I could go back to the version of me in 2005, I would tell that young man to think beyond his little world, to think bigger. A coworker recently said something that stuck with me: “How overwhelming it is to be at the end of your world.” It was. It’s hard for a young man or woman to think beyond what’s right in front of them—and oh, how I wish I had
I’d tell that sensitive teenager entering manhood to work out, because one day his testosterone will tank and his shoulders will tear, and he needs to enjoy his youth now while he can. I’d tell him not to lose heart whenever he was turned down for a date, because one day, a certain girl will say yes, and he’d build an amazing life and have amazing children with her.
I’d tell him to be faithful now so that he can be faithful later. I’d tell him that learning Adobe Photoshop is, in fact, not a waste of time, that he should take that internship, and actually show up to class. I’d tell him not to give up because one day he would be a published fiction author and non-fiction writer.
I’d tell him to be a man, to go forth, be fruitful, and multiply. That he won’t live forever, so he should live now.
Maybe that’s what I’d tell my friend’s son too, that the path may twist, but God wastes none of it.
And by God’s grace, if and when he messes it up, God is good to redeem his foolish mistakes and get him to where he needs to be. As he did, and still does.
You can also check out my fiction work here at George Cottonwood Books!
Awake! Put on strength! 