All in The Journey
If you’re anything like me, you have your good days and your bad days. Days when you feel like things are going well, and others when no matter what you do, nothing seems to quite work out.
And if you’re like me, when all you’ve been doing is GO, GO, GO, emotions can run a bit fragile.
With today marking not only Valentine’s Day, but also the start of Lent, it seemed like a good time to talk all things chocolate, love, and surrender. (OK, maybe not the cleanest of introductory sentences, but every blog must start somewhere, right?)
Now that the awkward intro is out of the way, let’s talk about Lent for a moment.
It’s a relatively new thing for me, as most evangelical churches don’t do a whole lot about the 40 days prior to Easter, so here’s a quick crash course in case your early experience with people practicing Lent was a bit like mine: Looking with strange glances at the girls in my class who were giving up sweets, like chocolate, carbs or some other silly thing, quite likely for weight loss, all under the guise of piety, or as we call it, Lent.
I’ve been reading a book about different personality types, and my particular type, it turns out, tries to avoid pain at all costs.
Now, I get that it’s human nature to avoid pain, but apparently people with my personality type will go to nearly superhuman lengths to avoid it. It seems that pain is something that is particularly difficult for someone with my makeup to deal with.
And since God isn’t really interested in stagnant character development… the past 11 months have been some of the most difficult of my life.
If I could pick one image to describe how this past season has been for me, this would be it.
Cloudy, cold, unclear, and filled with an unbelievable number stop signs
You know the feeling. That one where you’re up to something good, something that benefits others, and no matter which direction you turn, it seems like all of the forces of nature have been set out specifically against you, with the sole aim of thwarting your efforts?
That’s where the past few days have left me.
Battered, beat down, discouraged, and several times on the verge of sheer hopelessness
I left a very stable 15 year teaching career to roast coffee.
Some might think I was crazy to do it...
In fact, when I first announced the concept behind Wild Goose Coffee Roasters, one of my colleagues bellowed, "My gosh, Nate, THAT has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!"
And that was all the motivation I needed.
We’ve all been there... Rejected.
I’m not talking about when someone rejects your outfit, or rejects your sales pitch, or even your resume.
I’m talking about when they reject you.
I made reference to physical and financial pain in my last post, and a number of you have reached out to check in on my well-being, and I’m oh so grateful.
To fill in some of the details, let’s back up about 6 weeks…
I wrote a post called Finding Your Harp, where I chronicled the value I was finding in cycling—how it was my source of physical, emotional, and even spiritual recharging.
Shortly thereafter, my harp broke.
I was listening to sports talk radio the other day when one of my favorite sports leaders quickly became the topic of discussion: The ever-quirky, highly intelligent Phil Jackson was quoted as saying something about “transformational leadership vs. transactional leadership”. The sportscasters were discussing the merits of his approach to leading an NBA franchise, and were somewhat lost in articulating the differences between the two styles of leadership.
You don’t coach your teams to 11 NBA titles without knowing a thing or two about leadership, so I was naturally intrigued by what Phil Jackson meant by that comment.
Yesterday I put my signature on a paper that officially steers my career in a new direction.
I left teaching high school math a little over two years ago in order to work full-time in my coffee business. I traded stability for adventure. A high-structured job where simple needs like going to the bathroom were dictated by electronic bells buzzing through busy hallways, and exchanged that for the freedom to set my own schedule. I tossed my collared button-down shirts aside in favor of shorts and flip flops.
