What do you do when you can’t work in your chosen field? We looked at one positive response to that situation yesterday. What if you’re a pastor?

I shared a story in my first book Join the Adventure! in which I suggested a simple action plan that I’ve blogged about before.

• Be there
• Pay attention
• Do what you can
• Tell the truth

My grandson told me once that he liked the action steps except the first one: “GrandBob, the first point is stupid! Everyone is where they are.” To which I responded, “No, sadly, they’re not.” Here’s what I wrote in Join the Adventure!

Some people often want to be somewhere else. I was talking with a young man who was on part-time staff at a church, and who held down a full-time job in the computer industry. He really wanted to be in “full-time ministry” completely oblivious to the fact that his “there” for at least 40 hours a week was at his job, around people who would never come to his church since most of them lived in another town 45 minutes away!

By contrast, I knew a pastor who was in his second or third year of no church job. In the meantime, to put bread on the table, he was working in a call center for a national insurance company. Guess who the de facto chaplain for the people in that call center was? To whom did they go for counsel or prayer? That pastor! A man who was “there,” where God had him at the time, not thinking of a church where he’d rather be. – Page 18, emphasis added

Jesus paid attention:

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. (John 9.1, NIV)

As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. (Matthew 9.9, NIV)

I close with the well-known Halverson Benediction:

You go nowhere by accident. Wherever you go, God is sending you. Wherever you are, God has put you there. God has a purpose in your being there. Christ lives in you and has something he wants to do through you where you are. Believe this and go in the grace and love and power of Jesus Christ. – Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the US Senate