John Bevere - CALLED (My Plan vs. God's Plan)

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My idea of serving God was that I would go to Harvard and get an MBA. I would marry a pretty girl, work for a large corporation, move up into management, make a lot of money, pay tithes to my local church, and take three vacations a year with my beautiful wife. That would be my idea of serving God. Well, one of the things I was doing was co-oping. Now, do you know what co-opting is? It's a program that some universities have where you go to school for a semester and then work in your profession at a company as a junior for another semester. One day, I was in my junior year, having already been doing it for a while, and I noticed I was miserable. I wasn't having any fun, but I thought, "Hey, it's a career; it's going to get me to being a manager one day in a big corporation."

I remember one day we were celebrating one of the engineers in our department's 38th anniversary. We were all sitting in the room—about 14 engineers—and they were drinking their coffee. I don't drink coffee; my wife has tried for years, but it's not working. So they were all drinking their coffee, and we were doing small talk while celebrating this guy's 38th year. Suddenly, the guy said, "Yep, I've hated every single day I've walked into this company for 38 years." Everyone in the room laughed, except me, and I was waiting for someone older and wiser to say something, but nobody said anything; they just laughed with him.

Finally, I asked, "Wait a minute, why have you done this? You've hated every single day you walked in here for 38 years." He replied, "Yeah, so why haven't you done this?" He said, "John, it's a job," condescendingly, like I was a dumb, stupid young engineering student. Right then, I was completely quiet, and I thought, "Okay, I'm getting out of this, and I'm going to figure out what God has put me on this earth to do."