Open Hands · Week 1 · Tuesday · STRESS
He is forty-three, and he took the job because a man he came up with professionally took one like it.
That really is the whole reason, though he would not have said it that way at the time. At the time it sounded like growth. It sounded like the natural next thing. It sounded like the sort of opportunity you would be foolish to let pass.
What it actually was: work outside the thing he is genuinely good at. He knew that in the first week. By the second month he was working nights — not to do the work well, but to keep anyone from noticing how long the work was taking him.
We, however, will not boast beyond our limits, but only within the field of influence that God has assigned to us—a field that reaches even to you.2 Corinthians 10:13 (BSB)
A Field With Edges
Paul uses a word there that will not leave me alone. Assigned. Not earned. Not claimed. Not defended against all comers. Handed to him, with edges already on it.
We do not talk about our work that way. We talk about capacity and growth and stretch, and all of those are real words for real things. But underneath them is an assumption nobody says out loud: that the edges of what I am good at are a temporary condition, and a sufficiently determined man can push them wherever he likes.
Sometimes he can. And sometimes what is on the other side of that edge is not growth. It is just outside the field.
He was not failing at his work. He was succeeding at someone else’s.
What It Cost
He called the client on a Tuesday morning, which is not a good day to lose money, and told them the plain truth: this is not my work, and you deserve someone whose work it is.
They were gracious about it, which somehow made it worse. He gave them two names of people who would do it better. He hung up and sat at his desk for a long while without doing anything at all.
It cost him the contract and every dollar attached to it, and the next quarter was tighter than it should have been. He does not describe that as a small thing and neither will I. It was real money out of a real household.
Here is the part he did not expect. The relief did not come from the money being resolved, because the money was not resolved. It came from being back inside something he could actually do. There is a particular exhaustion that comes from working hard at the wrong thing, and no amount of rest touches it, because rest is not what is missing.
He slept that night. First time in months.
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