When did you get a real job?

If you’d have asked me at fifteen “what do you want to do when you grow up?”, I’d have been very clear: I wanted to be a bike mechanic on the Tour De France. Actually, the truth is I wanted to be riding on the Tour itself, but even though I was in the top handful of schoolboy and youth cycle racers in the country, I knew already that many are called but few are chosen. People like Laurence Boulter were born with a different kind of magic dust on their pedals. So, in the eyes of my school careers teacher, I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

 Something else happened in late teenage that created a different current in the flow of my life. I grew up in an unreligious household. My mother took us to Sunday school when young but there was no expectation that we would continue into teenage. My father was an angry atheist and so that meant that religious conversation didn’t happen in our house. Whatever you might believe was an entirely private affair and if you ever dared venture a question about Christianity in particular you would be met with a barrage of examples from his own life experiences as to why Christians were all hypocrites. Against all scripts and expectations I had two different religious experiences in my later teenage years, spread between about three years. I didn't have a home background that encouraged such things and I had no framework or friends around me who particularly helped me make sense of these events. A religious experience is a bit like falling in love. The categories of pure reason and logic don't apply. Skeptics love to dismiss the experiences through psychological or emotional or intellectual argument. But no one can explain or deny that something happened. Love is love. Religious experience is religious experience.

The second of these experiences felt so profound at the time that it had beckoned, like a calling from the Divine, to wholehearted service of something bigger than myself. In the late 1970’s there were only two options available, as a response to such an experience – go into the church, or go out on to the mission field. I’d had experience of international youth work in Europe and for whatever reason I chose the church route. So my first ‘career’ was leading churches in the East and then the south of England, the last of which was following through my own unchurched roots to pioneer a style of church that would suit people like myself; honest seekers who didn't align themselves with any church, but who wanted to explore the deeper questions of life. That ‘career’ ran its course and was undergirded by my academic studies in the areas of education, psychology and theology and a little philosophy and through it all, a fascination with the subject and practice of leadership. And as I said farewell to my mid thirties I also decided it was time to say farewell to the ‘first career’. 

It was a very strange and difficult transition out of the world of religion, faith, belief, the existential questions of a person life, how transformation happens in a person’s life, into the world of ‘normal’ work. I went from a place where the only conversations in town were the important questions of life, into an arena where no one was asking (out loud at least) any of these important questions that make us human beings. Alistair Campbell would have been pleased – no one seemed to be doing God. This raised all kinds of questions for me. I was delighted to be out of what seemed an often unreal, out of touch, world of churches but I was still a human being full of huge questions about why I was here, why the universe existed at all, was there more than I could see with my eyes, was atheism growing or declining in modern history?  You can take the boy out of the church, but you cant take the spirit- hungry soul out of the boy. How could I now bring all of me to work when a whole chunk of what makes us human wasn't even being acknowledged in the workplace? 

This dilemma that I was working through came to a head one wet, November London afternoon. In my new world, my ‘second career’, I was working as a leadership consultant for a good European consultancy. I felt very proud to have made the transition into such a prestigious job. One of my assignments was to go and meet the CEO of one of London’s top recruitment consultancies. I was told that they had some serious staff morale issues and needed some diagnosis as to what kind of training intervention might help. Now, those who know about recruitment consultancies will, at this point, be nodding with a knowing smile. These people are a ruthless breed of their own. I arrived at the office on the 23rdfloor of this 1960’s grey, concrete tower block of offices just after 2pm ready for my 2.15 meeting with the boss. The ladies at the reception desk were polite but cold. “Maybe a symptom of the problem?”, I was quietly thinking to myself.  I was shown into the Boardroom with its mile long table and high backed leather chairs. I was told to wait and Mr A would be with me soon.

I didn't sit. I stood by the window and surveyed the City from this vantage point, trying to identify the landmarks of London from this unique perspective. 2.15 came and went. 2.30 came and went. I checked with the desk and was assured he was coming. Around 2.45, while I was still looking out of the floor to ceiling windows, trying not to entertain vertigo, the door burst open and in strode Mr A. Sharp suited and very focused he went for a chair and dumped himself in it. No greeting at all. No welcome. No shaking of hands. No ‘how are you?’ or ‘can I get you a drink’. He went straight for the jugular.

“So what’s your career background?”,

Clearly he only had a one-size fits all approach. I was being interviewed for the consultancy work just as if he was interviewing me to go on his recruitment list. I suppose in a way he was testing me out to recruit me. I fumbled an answer. 

He came back at me in an instant like a hard rugby tackle.

“You haven’t told me anything. What have you actually done?”

Not wanting to be dismissed for my previous career I found myself using words like,“voluntary sector”; “charitable organization”.  He pushed harder. 

“What did you actually do?”

So, like making a full confession, I told him what I’d been doing and what it had involved and what I had achieved. (I could feel that I was entirely on my back foot and could sense the ground ready to catch me as I fell). Without pausing for breath he then delivered the killer punch.

“Yes, but when did you get a real job?”

With that one question he simply dismissed fifteen years of my life’s work, my deeper motivations, me. My previous work was deemed as unreal, unimportant, irrelevant, almost disqualifying. 

It was in that defining moment that I realized what it was like to be in the presence of a working professional who “didn't do God”.

So where do you go from there?

©Trevor Waldock 2019