Practicing My Preaching

So here I was with a new career located in a shopping center store location. My fellow elder had since left his wife and so I hired her to help me build the business from scratch. Her name was Frieda. We would work from nine in the morning until nine in the evening and it was hard work. We were doing telephone prospecting because we had no accounts. We had plenty of room to grow. That's the business side of what was going on at that location but there was something deep going on inside of me. I felt like the insurance business was just a temporary interruption to what God really had in store for me. I didn't know what journaling was Per Se but I started a daily journal back in 1986. I still have the first three years of that journal and when I read it today I can still feel the loneliness that I felt at the time.

My day would start about 7:00 AM. I would arrive at the office two hours before Frieda and I would begin to journal. I made a lot of assumptions back then and some of them were wrong I suppose but I had this idea in my head that God wanted me to prepare myself for something that He would reveal to me in the days ahead. My wife and family were not privy to this. I was very private about what I was doing in that office every morning. I started writing sermons and memorizing scripture. I would stand up and rehearse behind an imaginary pulpit. After all, that is what I now perceived the ministry to be. I was very articulate and dynamic while practicing. One day the cobbler next door came to his shop early and heard me preaching. I was so embarrassed at first but he stopped over and started asking all kinds of questions. He was a lonely young man. He didn't know anything about God and was confused by his childhood. We struck up a good friendship.

My early morning prayers were almost always the same. I was always pleading with the Lord about what to do about the ministry and the church. My wife was actually kind of happy to see me away from the church scene and working at Allstate. At least I had some direction and that gave her some security I suppose but my heart was never in the business. I became very efficient at the business and I loved the competitive nature of it all but I had a love-hate relationship at best while selling insurance. My favorite time of the day was that 7:00 AM time with the Lord. When that time was over, I would turn on another switch and become the consummate business entrepreneur.

At least the cobbler heard one of those sermons and I was content searching and praying all by myself. I didn't want to involve other people because I thought that this was my time to be with the Lord and sort things out. I resisted fellowship for quite awhile. Going to church somewhere never entered my mind. The churches just seemed to be more of the same. I wanted my relationship with the Lord renewed and I was yearning for Him to empower me like the days in Follansbee but it never happened and so this was definitely a wilderness walk for me. My family loved me and supported me in most things but nobody really cared about my calling other than myself and so I was in a very dry and lonely place.

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Success, I guess?