Today was an odd day at work. After helping lead services at both Mercy and Good Shepherd this morning, I headed into the shop for my last day as a service shop technician. Once I finally go to sleep tonight and wake up in a few hours, I will be headed to work in a tie for my first day as the Bike Manager at Scheels. Needless to say, there were opportunities to think about the things that I'll miss in the shop as well as things I'll gladly be escaping.
One advantage to being on the sales floor instead of the shop, is that I can excuse myself from conversations that go a bit too far in the shop. I probably could have excused myself previously, but where would I go? All of my work was in the shop, so it's not like I could have left for long. Now I'll have a bit more freedom to leave when it gets to be a bit too much.
In the midst of so much of the garbage that polluted the conversation today, there were glimmers of hope. Josiah, one of the sales guys that I'll be working with most closely and also a strong Christ follower, expressed that he was experiencing some of the same conversation and behavior as I was and is looking forward to having me out on the floor with him simply because the level of respect and maturity should go up.
I had also had a conversation with one of the other sales guys who mentioned that he has a birthday coming up and is really almost depressed about it even though he's several years younger than me (a fact I don't think he was aware of). Through his words, I sensed a recognition that he needs something more in his life than he currently has. Josiah has been spending a lot of time talking to him and I think that God is bringing him to the point where he will finally hit the end of himself and will have to determine who he wants to be.
At the end of the day, I got to have a conversation with the two guys that I had worked with all day in the shop. Profanity and sexual topics were streaming pretty steadily throughout the day, but one of them mentioned near the end of the shift that he was going to church that night. He said it seemed a small thing for him to do and that he needed to start "practicing it" more the rest of the time. He said he figured he'd probably go to Hell anyway.
This opened a conversation about faith as duty vs. faith as relationship that I really did not see coming earlier in the day. I did my best to express that the goal of faith is not behavior modification. "Time clock" christianity that is based on simple church attendance and trying to be good enough is not life giving, but just makes us feel guilty and condemns us to live a life of slavery to the standard that we create for ourselves and the laws that we create to help us live up to it. Faith as relationship, on the other hand, brings about change because of the love that we find for God through living life with Him over time. It is a life that ultimately leads us to a freedom that no external control or set of rules can ever hope to give.
I don't know if anything I said made sense or connected with the guys, but I left work today praising God for another unexpected opportunity to share what little I know of Him to someone who needs Him.
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