"YOU KNOW," I SAID, "if we're going to have this kind of confrontational relationship ..."
But that's as far as I got. "And you'll do what?" he pounced. Clearly, being confrontational was exactly what my boss intended. And I'd just tried to put a condition on my future employment. Big mistake. I was back home, unemployed, by 8:30 a.m.
I promised myself I wouldn't leave that room until I defined and redefined myself in purely spiritual terms.
The work had been full of threatening moments, and then the job that followed—two states away—was more of the same. The questions kept coming: Is it me? Is it them? I'd always had good work relationships, but I felt I was in the middle of a rocky new chapter. After several weeks on the second job, the owner relieved me of my daytime management responsibilities and placed me in a training position. Working at night.
Thus began my life of living in a motel by day and working evenings until midnight.
How had it come to this? I'd been studying Christian Science all my life, so I knew the challenge before me wasn't to try to "fix" a pattern of difficult bosses and coworkers. Rather, I needed to lift out of the human scenario and pray from the standpoint of my true identity, the expression of divine Mind.
Living alone in that motel room day after day, I had minimal distractions. I began to think about when Mary Baker Eddy was first healed spiritually. She didn't fully understand how it had happened, but she knew she needed to retreat from society—to give herself the peace and freedom to understand more clearly her intimate relationship with God.
I wanted to experience my individual relationship with God, too. I promised myself I wouldn't leave that room until I defined and redefined myself in purely spiritual terms. Often that meant "undefining" myself according to how the previous day had gone: dropping the identity of a miserable, unpopular technician-turned-training-wonk, while I gained a sense of myself as God's creation—spiritual, spotless.
I began to see progress. Even in the midst of the pressure and criticism that continued at work, I held to the truth that an idea (me) of divine Mind (my only source) could not remain misunderstood or marginalized. I knew the human baseline on which the world tries to find common ground, but I was finding a spiritual baseline, where I and everyone else could be seen from the standpoint of divine Mind. And it was from this altitude that I met my adversaries.
One day several months later, I arrived at work. I walked into the building through a long, dark, tubular corridor. The floors were carpeted, along with the walls and the ceiling. Pressure switches under the carpet triggered examples of the company's advertising work. Halfway down the hall, my foot landed on a switch, and as the light came on, a question came to me: What is your job—what is it you are here to do? The simple answer changed my life. My job, my only job, is to be that idea of Mind, of good, that I'd been praying to better understand. To be the example of that idea for all to see and work with. And for me to see that divine idea in everybody else. I continued down the corridor and began my new career—as the expression of divine Mind.
A few days later I received a job offer from my previous employer, the one with whom I'd had the initial falling out. He apologized and offered me a position far more compatible with my skills. The offer came with a raise and a promotion.
On my first morning there, I walked through another long corridor—this one noisier, brighter, and built of concrete, bricks, and plywood. I joyously held to what I'd learned in that motel. My work, wherever I am, is to be an idea of God, who so loves us that we can't help but know what our full employment is—always. Whether we have a "job" job or not.
