If you owned a good business, with a healthy income to match, that you had built up over 15 years and would see you right until retirement, why on earth would you throw it all up to start a completely different career in an under-paid and under-valued profession?"
The question has never been put to me in quite those terms, but it is clear from many conversations I have had over the past year that this is in many people's minds when they hear about my change in career from owning a successful retail business, where I was my own boss, to going into a career of teaching religious studies. Did I receive guidance from God, or have some sort of spiritual experience that led me to undertake such a radical change?
And there is the rub. Guidance. How do we really know whether God is leading us to undertake one direction or another? It is easy to know in broad terms the way we should live our lives - after all, we have a role model in the form of Jesus Christ - but what about the specifics?
We all deal with such matters in different ways. I have to confess that I used to be really hung up about this matter of guidance, and be almost paralysed by inaction while I waited for God to speak His word right in my ear. Eventually I thought I had discerned His will through prayer and reading the Bible, and would act accordingly, but sometimes things didn't turn out the way I'd planned at all. Perhaps God had different plans for me, or perhaps I just hadn't heard Him right! It was quite similar when I was trying to discern His will for my long-term plans a couple of years ago.
I had become a licensed Lay Reader in the Anglican Church, but the three years' course had opened up many more theological questions than answers, and so after a year's break from study, I embarked on my Batchelor of Theology course, part-time at Chester. The course was hard work, especially doing it alongside running a business and being a father and husband, but it was fascinating. Having previously lacked the qualifications to go into teaching, something I had wanted to do since teaching basic literacy to adult Africans, I quickly realised that if I were to do it I would have to commit to it totally, and sell the business. There could be no halfway house, but I couldn't do that until I had been accepted onto a PGCE (teacher training) course.
After four months from my initial enquiry and full day interviews and tests, I heard four days before Christmas 2000 that I had been accepted. The shop in Knutsford was sold by Easter, the degree finished in June, the results - phew - in July, and now as I write I will be finally starting the PGCE course next week. I can't wait. And yet with the Lay Reader training and the degree, I will have spent 7 out of the last 8 years studying. Who says The Lord always leads you down the easy path? Sometimes He takes you your way and in your time because He knew all along you could do it and that was his plan.
It's just that we don't always see it first time. But we need to know that he always remains faithful to us and has a plan for each of us even if it takes longer than we expect to be revealed.
Richard
