My assignment, this morning, is not a pleasant one.

Short of running a load of laundry, I can’t think of any more chores to distract myself from the work I do not want to do.

The work? Preparing for a job interview. It’s come to this: I need steady employment with a predictable paycheck. I hate to admit it. But the itinerant preacher in me is chewing gravel.

“Get a job, any job,” I recall my savvy and caring siblings saying to me after a work assignment had ended. But I cannot shake this desire to live precariously in service to God.

My brothers think I’m nuts.

So to honor their advice I float my resumé, and pretty quickly I’m offered an interview. For a job. In a collections agency. As executive assistant to a Very Busy Young Man who is general manager. 

I’d be at his beck and call, it turns out, 24/7. Not just during the expected ten- to twelve-hour-a-day office shift, but by pager at all times. 

“You know,” the young man says, “just in case, when I’m golfing with a client in Japan, I might need something.”

I feel my eyeballs roll to the back of my head as I sit with this busy young man, and his human resource director, at the agency’s enormous and highly-polished conference table.

“And we are pleased to offer you $26,000 a year,” he tells me, full of confidence that I will snap up the offer. And pretty confident, too, I’m sure, that at my age I probably don’t have any other job offers pending. 

Which, it turns out, I don’t.

Well, given my impressive executive support experience from earlier days, his offer is a ridiculously paltry sum for the demands of the job.

So I allow his offer to hang in the air as I go inward to compose myself and gather just the right words.

“I am not able to accept your offer,” I say calmly, my eyes fixed on his. 

Pause. A significant pause, really.

“I am a woman of Christian faith,” I say, “and no job can be the center of my life.”

I pause again. “Jesus is the center of my life.”

The young executive shifts in his chair, sits a little more upright. He clears his throat. The human resource manager is dead quiet, not moving. She’s not even breathing.

“Well,” he says, “no one has ever spoken to me this way.” 

Pause. 

And I am thinking: Well, I just did!

“And I respect,” he says, “what you have just said.”

We rise, shake hands, I thank him for his time and wish him the best. He wishes me the best.

I am already assured of the best, I think, as I walk, with my heart free, right out the door.

Right now he may be thinking I am nuts. Or just plain dreamy-eyed. Too connected to my convictions to appreciate that he had Just Offered Me A Job.

Jesus was sneered at for his core convictions, even as he hung on the cross.

What will I do in the cause of love? What will you do?