For anyone who knows me my time at Hope came to an end a few weeks ago.  I made it all the way through that weekend (my last day was a Friday) before I got a gig, that started that Monday.  I was really looking forward to it, I was working with an associate I have known for a while but hadn’t really had the chance to work with, on a project that was interesting and was going to stretch my motion graphic skills.  All of this on what was suppose to be my first day unemployed. A week later the project is pretty much done, I feel like I did as good as I possibly could have, my client was happy. Life is good right? Kinda. I remembered through this project how stressed and obsessive I get about post production work. I forgot that one of the reasons I love live production so much is once it’s done, it’s done.  Some post production projects can just live forever. The worst realization was that I left a job that I felt I was being overworked at to go back to freelance where… I was going to allow myself to get overworked. Brilliant!

Now none of this was my clients fault, they were awesome! I was able to get so much done because of the stress free environment they fostered.  Liz Wiseman makes a great observation in her book Multipliers talking about the difference between pressure and stress.  The example she uses is William Tell.  William Tell felt pressure, his son felt stress.  The difference is control, or lack there of. One of the realizations I had; was I function like and analog to digital converter for pressure and stress.  If I get pressure I will be stressed no matter who is in control. This realization lead me down all sort of interesting and not fun discoveries about myself, and who I allow to be in control of what in my life.

What was really interesting was what I learned I about God. I found it interesting that even though I was stressed to my limit, I could see God was in this situation. There were just too many coincidences for it to be coincidence. Clearly he was in control, it was very clear to me. That said, I was still stressed, and you know what occurred to me? Despite the fact I was stressed, that I literally was doing the exact WRONG thing, God was there. So even though I felt like I had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, I had this huge grin, because this was the first time in a while I had taken the time to notice God’s involvement in my life. I always knew he was, but this was, in my mind, just a few steps short of audibly speaking to me. One of the Pastors at Hope nailed it when he said “that’s joy!” I am not happy that I am overworked, but I am happy that God is obviously moving in this situation, and despite how bad it is, if He’s in it how bad can it get? This ends with me making scripture references about not getting more then you can handle, and metaphors about wondering the desert for 40 years and NOT getting into the Holy Land. I’ll save it.

Regardless, through most of this I felt like an overprotective parent who has given their young child something precious to hold.  You want them to have the responsibility, but you don’t want it to break so you helicopter around trying to look like you have relinquished control, but you are ready to swoop in as soon as things don’t look good. I felt like that was what I was doing to God with my life, here God it’s yours but I am going to stand right here and as soon as it looks like things may get out of hand I’ll take charge again.  This is only moderately better then the Mexican standoff I felt like I have had with God for the last year, where I am saying “here I am waiting for you to move in my life” and God is sitting there saying “step out of the boat and see what happens” and I am going “no you show me, then I will step out.” At one point I really felt like he sat back and said “let me know how that works for ya, I PROMISE I WILL WIN, it’s just up to you when that happens” talk about the the dollar waiting on the dime.

I think I will end here before the theologians weigh in and tell me that doctrinally all of that doesn’t work. For the record, it works for me.