My Job I Love, Doing What I Hate

I love my job. I mean I LOVE IT. I used to watch the show “The Office” and feel sad because I wished I had a job where everyone was friends and joked around.

My office is BETTER than “The Office.” My office feels the way a “Friends” episode feels. It feels comfy and cozy. I have never before seen such an amazing example of what Christian community should feel like. I think I’ve found in my office what most people spend a lifetime searching for in churches. We share life together. We know when someone is sick, we know when someone is sad, we know everyone’s kids and even their kids’ likes and dislikes and personalities. I feel like I intimately know everyone’s pets. We eat together, we talk together, we pray for each other. They are my family right now.

Not only that, I love what I do. I love that it’s a little bit complicated and complex so I can think about it. I love that I still feel challenged. I love that there are things I don’t know and everyday I can manage to pry a little more information out of my coworkers to learn an extra tidbit. I love to learn and love that my job is one where learning is a constant.

I love the tasks that I do – contacting people, organizing, putting things together like a gigantic puzzle and then when it all comes into place and everything fits just right...ahh it’s beautiful! I love the feeling of accomplishment. I love that sometimes it is just a little bit bigger than what I think I can handle and at least once a week I feel a little bit pushed to do something I don’t quite think I can do, but I begin and then BOOM I do it! And that feeling of accomplishment is a confidence boost like nothing I can explain.

I love that I now have enough information that I can figure some things out for myself. Sometimes I don’t know the the answer to a problem but I have enough tools now to know where and how to track down the solution. I love that. I feel like an investigator on the prowl. I love the incredibly goofy grin on my face when I have a problem, tell no one, solve it all by myself and then present the finished product (complete and problem free!) to my coworkers. TA- DUH!

I love that this job pushes me to have a positive attitude. I’m a person who loathes failure and demands perfection from myself. And this job has A LOT of little details so failure is inevitable. I love that. I love that it forces me to tell myself “You win some, you poop some.” Because if I allowed myself to scream at myself for every failure, I would be screaming at myself all day every day. This job forces me to see failure as a learning opportunity. It forces me to be a little bit easier on myself.

Have I convinced you yet? I HAVE THE BEST JOB EVER. I LOVE MY JOB!

You know what I don’t love? Things that take a long time. I do NOT love anything that is a process. Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE end results. I love pearls and grown up troubled kids and complete 25,000 piece puzzles. But I do NOT LOVE waiting for the oyster to hurry up and make the damn pearl and dealing with bratty, ungrateful teenagers and sorting through the thousands of puzzle pieces. I DO NOT love “journeys.” I love coming to the end of a journey. I love arriving. (I would make a horrible gardener.)

I do not like glue that takes a long 
time to dry or sitting through a commercial before I get to watch a YouTuve video. I love to get where I’m going. I am efficient. I take highways. I enjoy getting results in the fastest and quickest way possible.

It’s not that I’m simply impatient. That is too simple. It’s that from the very center of my being I operate from the core belief that my time is short. And because of that, I’m always in a hurry. I have never really taken my time with anything. I have always believed, my whole life since as young as I can remember knowing what death was, that death is near to me. I have always believed I would die young. I was born with a sense of impending doom. I was born knowing life is short and therefore time is precious, time is limited, time is valuable. No one ever had to tell me to Carpe Diem or to suck the marrow out of life.

I don’t want the glue to dry fast because I’m impatient. No, I want to glue to dry fast because I believe I’m dying soon and I have a lot of other things I want to accomplish so I don’t want to waste ten minutes waiting for that! This sounds extraordinarily dramatic but it is 100% true. It’s not that I am impatient, I am just always panicking. I’m always aware that the clock is ticking. I don’t like processes not because I don’t see the value in them, but rather because I have so many things I want to do in my life and I fear I won’t get them all done if I spend too much time on this one thing.

I’m always multi-tasking. I’m always trying to do something while waiting for something else to finish so that I don’t waste time just waiting. I almost go into cardiac arrest when I read those dumb statistics about how many years of your life you spend on the toilet or at red lights.

I remember when I was eight years old and my mom was talking to me about puberty and all the changes my body would go through. She told me I would develop breasts and I was SO EXCITED! I kept thinking I would wake up one day with nice big boobs. I kept checking every morning and I was be so disappointed when they weren’t there. Finally I asked my mom when my boobs would appear and she explained I wouldn’t be “fully developed” until age 16 or 17. I remember crying so hard! I was so upset! Life seemed SO UNFAIR! Age 16 and 17 was FOREVER away and would basically NEVER arrive. There was no possible way I could wait that long to have boobs.

I remember a similar situation when I found out I would lose my baby teeth and grow adult teeth. I wanted to pull every last baby tooth out of my mouth that very night so that while I slept all my adult teeth would grow in and I could have them all by morning.

So, have I painted an accurate picture of how absolutely insane I am? Well, here's the best part! God being God and all, decided He would bless me beyond belief and be more good to me than I could ever possibly imagine. He gave me a job I love, with people I love, in an environment I love, with management I love, with a desk I love, in a location I love

...doing what I hate most.

I have to wait. I have to take time. I have to gather details, small details, one at a time and sort them and piece them together. I have to send out emails and wait. I have to order things and wait for them to arrive.

And I love it - I love what I do. I even love the irony in it all.

Okay so are we all clear here?

Processing (a/k/a my job, putting things together, getting things ready) = Love

Processes (a/k/a things that take a freaking LONG time, journeys) = Don’t Love

God is hysterical