Maybe You're Not Ready Yet

Editors, publishers and agents panel at the Mid-South Writer's Conference

Six months after I launched my advertising agency a local business owner offered me a job in sales and bookkeeping in his flooring business. Prior to plunging into the world of small business owners, I interviewed for a half-dozen marketing jobs but received zero offers. The recession was bearing down hard in Mississippi when I realized the stay-at-home-mom life wasn’t my thing.

Sales and bookkeeping weren’t exactly my thing either. If you’ve followed my travails with Quickbooks on Facebook you know this. I massage words into stories not numbers into. . . well, numbers don’t like being massaged into anything really. They are what they are. If you break the rules in writing they call you a best-seller. If you break the rules in taxes they take you to jail.

For two years I sold tile, hardwood, carpet, and other random flooring necessities. I calculated how much a customer needed, coordinated flooring with wall colors, put together quotes, billed customers and reconciled accounts.

But those official duties weren’t why God placed me there. Although I did not know the owner prior to working for him mutual friends of ours gave glowing recommendations of him a strong Christian man and leader. I found them to be right.

I learned how to manage the books of a growing business, how to manage employees, how to deal with conflict in a respectful manner and even how to let someone go without creating a toxic environment for everyone else.

When my marketing agency business grew to the point I no longer needed my gig at the flooring store, I was ready to manage all aspects of the work. When I started there I thought it was a random job that just happened to come along. What I know now is that God knew I wasn’t ready for the work He had waiting for me, so He put me somewhere I could learn the skills I needed.

This past weekend at a writer’s conference the keynote speaker said something along the lines of maybe if success as a writer hasn’t come yet, it’s because we aren’t ready.

Perspective is my favorite word right now. In the midst of working at a flooring store, I could not see how it would affect or influence the ad agency that was my passion, but every step of those two years is so clear in the path to where I am now.

I remind myself of God’s internship program sometimes when I’m stuck or confused by the road I’m on. I hope this encourages you. Maybe, just maybe, whatever you’re doing now or wherever you are now is your training ground. Learn it well and with your whole heart. You never know what He’s preparing you for next.