It’s been one week since my last day at Movement Mortgage and for months I’ve been trying to put into words what that job has meant to me. It’s been hard, because the journey that lead me here started long before I ever considered being a missionary, and even before I considered working at a mortgage company. It started in a dirty warehouse off of Freedom Drive in West Charlotte. A building, owned by the mortgage company that is now such a big part of my story.
In the spring of 2014 I decided that I wasn’t going to work during the summer. I had been a teacher for 6 years and I’d grown accustomed to the income (and entertainment) that working at a summer camp had afforded me the past several years. But I was starting to feel restless in my current job and really wanted to start pursuing some other interests of mine. One of the ways I could do that was through service. I wasn’t sure at the time what that would look like, but I felt certain that God was asking me to trust Him and see what would happen. I’m so glad I did. About a week before school was out, I started getting anxious. Thoughts like “I’m not going to have any extra income during the summer, maybe I should work. Is it too late?” filled my head, but I remained confident that God was telling me not to, so I didn’t look for a job. I enjoyed my first two weeks of no alarm clock, endless hours of Netflix on my couch and a brief trip to the beach with my family. And then, I started getting antsy. I was looking at another eight long weeks of nothing. So I got off the couch and told some of the outreach leaders that I connected with earlier in the year that I was available to help. Actually, I think I had to ask a couple of times, because they were busy and I was bored. I showed up to the Elevation LOVE Week warehouse and I never left (or at least that’s how it felt). It started small, helping to organize Home Depot orders going through endless excel spreadsheets of events and supplies until late in the evening, and then helping to check in supplies, organize supplies, gather supplies at the warehouse until I was hooked, and helpful. I spent so much time in that filthy, hot, chaotic warehouse and I LOVED it. I loved the place I found there, the people I worked with and the work that I saw God doing in our city through our church. It was beautiful and I was addicted. Not only that, but while I had just started in leadership at our church in another role I became a leader there, too. I was stretched in so many ways.
LOVE Week War Room – 2014
Looking at how the LOVE Week warehouse operates now it’s hard to believe that just three years ago late nights loading trucks, early mornings pulling supplies and repackaging on-campus events with a skeleton crew in that tiny warehouse was the norm. It was hard and so beautiful. I’ll never forget 2 a.m. in the back of the warehouse counting hundreds of erasers with three of our team members, all of us a little punchy from the lack of sleep and exhaustion of the day and one of the guys dumped a whole box on his head. Because, why not, we all fell out in giggles and then proceeded to count erasers, pencils and notebooks until we had it all organized for the next day’s event. In those couple of weeks I learned so much about myself, how God can work through me and what I wanted from my life. Three years later the team of leaders has grown exponentially, supplies are delivered early (sort of), late nights are limited to the week before instead of the week of (mostly), and our massive collection of excel spreadsheets (fondly remembered as EPTs) is now an online database program called Optimus. Looking back I had no idea what God had in store for me that summer, but I’m so glad I listened and was able to be a part of it. It also lead me to the role of Outreach Coordinator at my church campus. I loved it, it helped me understand so much more about what I was capable of and what I wanted in a job and from my life.
This experience was a blessing and a curse, in 2014 I went back to teaching frustrated and confused, because I wanted something different, I just didn’t know what it was. As 2015 approached I continued to ask God where he wanted me and I chose a single word to focus on for the year – Calling. I didn’t know what God wanted me to do, but I was frustrated abut where I was. I loved my students, I was happy with my job, but increasingly I was recognizing that the gifts I was leaning towards, my strengths, weren’t really being used as a teacher. And after the summer I had I desperately wanted to lean into my strengths everyday.
So that brought me into a challenging year, I was busy, I let relationships that I had built up fall away as I over committed and felt overwhelmed and torn between what I had to do and what I wanted to do. I put my head down and worked, a lot. Between teaching art, learning and teaching yearbook, coordinating outreach, leading a team and all of the commitments at church I was busy. I used the year to figure out what I was good at and what I wanted and tried my best to listen to what God told me. It was a year of immense growth, happiness, contentment, frustration and disappointment. I lost three influential leaders in my life and I’m still not sure the void left by there successive resignations has been filled. Reflecting on it now, maybe that’s because I was looking for a person to fill it instead of God. I learned a lot about myself and I’m still processing through many of those lessons even now.
Matthews LOVE Week Team 2015
I entered the school year of 2015 still confused, frustrated and feeling slightly alone. I made a conscious decision to step away from my campus role in outreach, this was hard for me. Even though I knew it was what was best for my sanity and my students, I struggled with letting it go. As much as I loved what I was a part of, I felt that the time and energy I was pouring into outreach was time and energy I was taking away from my students. And while I didn’t feel like teaching was where I was called, it was still my job and those 180 young adults that I was responsible for each day deserved a teacher who was fully present. That fall is when I first thought about transitioning to Movement. At the time it felt a little crazy. Wasn’t it irrational that I should leave a creative teaching job to go work at a mortgage company of all places? I’d be leaving days full of creativity, energy and messy desks for an 8-5 lifestyle in front of a computer. It helped that I the invitation was coming from someone I respected and my former pastor. But things didn’t line up initially and in between the miscommunications with Movement I literally had my dream job pitched to me by a non-profit organization in the Charlotte area. That job never worked out, but it was a clear indication for me of where I wanted to be, and very clearly, that wasn’t teaching.
At the time what I wanted more than anything was a job where I felt like my strengths were being utilized everyday, and while I was good at teaching art, what I found was when I leaned into my strengths, they weren’t all of the things that make a teacher great. I was using those strengths at school, but not in my role as a teacher – over the last several years I found myself using them in facilitating the business practices for the yearbook, organizing large scale events for school or my church. My students were wonderful, typical, creative middle schoolers whom I still adore. My co-workers were amazing and I loved seeing them and sharing my life with them every day. My school and the community I was in was great, but I knew that there were better teachers out there and that I would never be the kind of teacher that I wanted to be.
So when I was approached by Movement a third time I followed it through to the end. I prayed that if it was what God wanted, he would make the path clear. It took another two months from the original job offer in December of 2015 (that I had to turn down) for it to work out. It was risky and weird and scary, but I knew it was the right move, even though I didn’t understand it at the time. But looking back now, I’m so glad I did. God has continued to be faithful as I have been obedient, and even when I haven’t.
As I said in my opening, I’ve been thinking about how to put all of this into words over the last couple of weeks. When I sat down to write last week, I came up with too much to share in one post, so this is part one of 3, check back next week for more of my story from teaching to the World Race.
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