Out of Egypt

I have encountered an interesting struggle in the few short years that I have been writing. When God inspires me to write, words flow easily. When client demand is robust, my days are sometimes full enough to turn away paying work.

The struggle is, I cannot create either of these phenomenon. There are days when the words do not flow—or worse, when the wrong words flow. There are seasons of little-to-no client demand. On those days, my mind wanders back to the time before this struggle, the time before I was a writer, the time when I was a VP in the corporate machinery of a local bank.

That time ended in December 2019. Of course, 2020 was an anomaly not representative of my (or anyone’s) normal life. Yet, toward the end of that year, God showed me that He had closed the banking door for good. He was calling me to leave that season in the past and follow Him to a place where I would serve Him through my work.

I embraced the call with excitement! I prayed with my wife and my church family. I spoke at length with my pastor about where I thought God might (or might not) lead me. I was sure that this was not a call to pastoral ministry but to a different kind of ministry.

I was excited! Coming out of 2020, after a year without employment, God was opening new doors! He was taking me to the Promised Land!

A Familiar Story

If you are familiar with the Exodus story, you know that when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they were all too happy to leave bondage behind, move past the recent plagues, and be a people set apart by God.

You probably also know their journey was not a straight line with a quick reward at the other end. It was a forty-year season of transition. It didn’t take long before the Israelites were grumbling in the desert.

“We should go back to Egypt.”

“Why did you lead us out here to die?”

“In Egypt we were never without food!”

Moses grew frustrated with their grumbling. In response, he pointed to the promise that awaited them.

As a student of the Bible, I spent years taking the idyllic view, rooting for Moses. He put his life on the line to rescue them, and this is how the people thank him? How dare they show him such contempt!

About two years into my writing journey—my own trek across the wilderness to the future that God promises—I learned to empathize with the Israelites. With their struggles. I’ve experienced, in my own 21st-century way, a touch of their desert.

My Desert

To be clear, I wasn’t rescued from slavery in a foreign land, made to walk for years in the wilderness, or dependent on bread that mysteriously appeared each morning. I am a middle-class American, which makes me rich by global and Biblical standards. Nevertheless, through culture and upbringing, I—like every other person—measure my circumstance in relation to its environment.

In this season, the environment is pretty dry. After months of a full freelance writing schedule, my most reliable clients put project after project on hold as wordcraft shifted to the suddenly mainstream AI tools that are now widely available.

At first, the shift in my availability was encouraging. My first book was nearing publication, and I would have time to see it across the finish line. Plus, God had already placed my next book (my first novel) on my heart, and I had done enough research to begin drafting.

Great! I could work on my own projects and deal with client work as it comes. This is what God wants from me, right?

The trouble is, neither the just-published devotional nor the first-draft-in-progress novel was generating immediate revenue. I needed client work, but it wasn’t there. Just as quickly as my schedule had filled with work, it emptied. My budget began feeling the pinch and my savings took some hits.

So what did God say through all of this? Only the same thing that He said when I began the writing journey, “I will sustain you.“

Great! But how?

The Wrong Questions

Like the Israelites in the desert, I struggled to appreciate the manna from heaven because I turned my mind to the hot meals back in Egypt. I struggled to appreciate that every time I wrote, I was serving in obedience. I struggled to appreciate that every client offer was a gift from God.

Instead, I let my 28-year banking career and the steady paycheck it provided become my personal Egypt.

Like the ancient Israelites, looking back led me to grumbling. Bitterness about the change forced upon me. Discontentment over losing my stable, comfortable, and predictable income. Anger as I saw my wife stressing over her work. If I still had my old paycheck, I could relieve her of this burden.

Why did God bring me to such a place? Why did He open this door and allow me to feel such excitement as I began the writing journey, only to have me hit a wall? When and how will He throw open the doors to the Promised Land?

I couldn’t find answers to any of these questions. But the more I considered the ancient Israelites grumbling in their wilderness, the more I realized that I was asking the wrong questions.

Better Questions

In difficult situations, we naturally ask, “How can I get out of this?” This is often a helpful prompt to weigh options, establish plans, and strategize effectively. However, this is not always the case.

Scripture tells us that God allows us to experience trials so we may grow (James 1:2-4). Testing strengthens our spiritual disciplines, deepens our faith, and draws us nearer to God. When we view our trials this way, we understand the better question to ask is “What can I get out of this?“

To answer this question, I looked again to the Israelites in the desert and found four useful takeaways.

Lesson One: The Old Life is Gone

The Israelites wanted to return to Egypt because, to their minds, doing so would solve the present problem. Whatever hardships they had endured in slavery were preferable to their present hardships in the wilderness.

Except they weren’t weighing hardship against hardship. They focused only on the present problem and realized that, in Egypt, they did not have this particular problem. They didn’t consider their past hardships; Moses had to remind them they had been in slavery.

As a freelance writer, I experience good months and bad months. The inconsistency makes planning difficult, and a succession of bad months strains our household finances. It is this single point that makes me wish to return to a time when I had a steady paycheck and knew all my expenses were covered.

That’s when God, in His grace (and usually through my wife) reminds me that there were difficulties in that season, too. They were just different. I easily forget that before, I was always tired and often distracted from my family. The work tab on my mental browser constantly ran in the background and consumed valuable resources.

I had learned to cope with those issues, just as the Israelites learned to cope with daily life in slavery. By contrast, facing a new problem means dealing with something that doesn’t fit into any preexisting coping strategy.

Still, the biggest problem with my old life was the easiest one to ignore because it required no coping: I was not where God wanted me to be.

Lesson Two: Following Where God Leads

When God calls us in a new direction, His goal is not to simply upgrade what is familiar but to invite us to experience a radical change. We are seldom ready for such a change, so that is where God uses the trials of the journey to prepare and equip us for what lies ahead.

The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land. Why? Because the generation that left Egypt needed to be replaced by the next generation before they were ready.

The previous generation knew only bondage, subservience, and Egyptian culture. It is doubtful they could have built and sustained a functioning independent society because the old way was the only way they knew. If they had established their own society, it would have looked like a junior Egypt and not like people set apart as God’s special possession.

In the intervening forty years, God gave Israel laws and structure, directed the construction of the Tabernacle, and appointed worship practices and festivals. This was necessary if they were to be His people, set apart in the place that He promised for the purpose that He ordained.

For me, being pulled away from the corporate world with all of its titles, trappings, and politics was a shock. I couldn’t just start writing—even as a vocational ministry—and experience success without learning to do life differently.

Three years into this journey, I am still learning.

When meetings, office hours, and management directives demand certain hours of certain days, it is easy to get out the door early and get the work day underway. When executives, coworkers, and customers keep your inbox and calendar filled with issues, projects, and problems, it is easy to keep busy.

By contrast, when you start as a freelance writer, you have to find clients. You have to convince them to give you a first chance, and then impress them enough to get a second chance. And then—whether you get dressed or not—you have to actually start your day.

I could write a whole blog post expounding on that last paragraph (maybe someday I will). But for today, the point is that God was (and still is) leading me to a new life that looks nothing like the life He pulled me away from. To learn this new life, I must continuously and deliberately rely on Him.

Lesson Three: Relying on God

It’s not enough to learn once that I must rely on God. I need to continuously relearn this truth of the Christian life. The Lord promised my family and me that He would sustain us, and He has consistently done so.

True to His character, He sustains us in ways that remind us that the credit is His, not mine. This was my greatest blind spot in my old corporate life.

Looking back at my final year of employment, I had become increasingly focused on my tenure and accomplishments. I often touted the fact that I had been in my role for nearly 20 years and that I had built so much from the ground up.

My work became my identity. I wanted people to know me as Jac the Bank Security Guy. Then my identity became my idol. So God closed the banking door—cutting me off from my own self-made identity—before He opened the writing door.

My secret lifelong dream, since my teen years, was to be a writer. How exciting! I could be Jac the Writer instead of Jac the Bank Security Guy. But that would just replace one idol with another. What God really wants is Jac the Faithful Servant, no matter what vocation He calls me to. It just so happens that, in this season, He has called me to write.

For Him. Not for me.

He reminds me that my work is from Him and for Him by training me to rely on Him instead of myself. How does He do this? The same way He did for the Israelites in the wilderness.

Lesson Four: Manna

When the Israelites complained about their lack of food, God provided manna—sustaining grain from heaven. He didn’t lead them to where wild manna grows. They woke up and found their daily portion on the ground waiting for them.

Manna was not something the Israelites could cultivate, so they could not produce more on their own. They couldn’t even store it (except when gathering a double portion before the Sabbath day). If they tried, the manna would be spoiled and infested the next day.

Manna was a gift from God, and the Israelites could do nothing to make it their own thing apart from Him.

In the freelance world, projects come and go. I’ve had busy seasons that packed my schedule with client work. In those seasons, I’ve been tempted to tout my successes and accomplishments. But projects end—sometimes without warning.

Since I first drafted this post (a year ago) God opened the door to a part-time job (which I will discuss in a future post) that supplies much of my manna. But I still have to rely on the manna of occasional freelance work, delayed revenue from book sales, and whatever unexpected things God does to remind me that He is my portion.

Through the changes and lessons of this prolonged dry season, God has taught me to trust Him and press on with the work that He has placed on my heart in the time that He has allotted for that work.

Last year I published an advent devotional, which has generated a few sales. Presently, the novel that I began drafting at the start of the dry season (over a year ago) is weeks away from release. This blog is now live. Research for my next book is underway.

Each of these projects is something that God pressed on me to write—often to my surprise. I have no idea where He will take any of this work, how He intends to use it, or how it will affect my income. What I do know is this is what He calls me to do. My role is to trust, obey, and turn away from the idol of self-reliance.