With Interest

Philippians 2: 4 & 5, “⁴Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

I cannot begin to enumerate the blessings that I receive from people in all the facets of my life, let alone give justice to them in recalling them in any sort of story form. The three that I talk about here stand out to me just now because of how timely they were regarding important junctures and events. I find it interesting to look at them and see that they are from three different aspects of my life; work friendship, home-church friendship, and a friendship that transcends our old-church beginnings to carry us throughout life. All of the men mentioned here exemplify verse four; they looked to the interests of me and my family and not to their own. While they are from different facets of life they are all tangential to the one point in verse five; they all have the same mind that is in Christ Jesus.

I recently retired from AT&T after a 35 year career, 29 years of which were spent in the Network Engineering Department. It was not my intention to retire at the time but when the company came out with a short-term, enhanced retirement plan I took a close look at it and determined that I needed to take the offer. A lot of prayer, soul searching, spreadsheet reviewing, and discussion went into the decision and so far, it seems right. A friend of mine in the department, Herb Parker (whose career orbit and mine brought us into frequent contact) and I talked about the offer. I have always valued Herb’s company wisdom and insights; I value even more our ability to freely discuss our faith. Herb asked what my plan was for retirement and when I told him it would be time for me to put up or shut up for a story I’m writing he told me of a few books that would be valuable for me as a writer. When I returned from lunch I found a Vromans’ Bookstore bag on my desk with “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser in it. Receiving the book and the book itself have been inspiring. I appreciate Herb’s genuine interest in what I have to say as a writer as well as his interest in my desire to improve my new craft.

Workday results

On April 13, 2014 we hosted the backyard wedding of my son and our wonderful new daughter-in-law and I officiated. We had a huge amount of work to do since we’d never really done anything with our yard and it was a wilderness. From the time of the decision up to just hours before the blessed event something was being done in the yard to make this happen. I received offers of help from two of my LCPC friends who I hike with when I can. The offer was for four or five of the guys to come over and do whatever we needed done instead of taking the Saturday hike. I accepted the offer and two weekends before the wedding Scott Gossett, Greg Wolflick, John Holmquist, Darrell Fernandez, and Steve Pedrini showed up and did in four or five hours what would have taken me over a week of full days to complete. They restacked a dry-stack wall, set native rock flagstones in a path and steps, set in a used brick deck, and put up lattice under our deck. Their interest in our family event gave us the boost we needed to have a signature event in our backyard and the prayers and love that were poured into the workday were evident throughout our celebration weekend. I love those guys!

As I have been in transition from the highly structured career where I knew where I’d be on any work day to a writer’s life where I have to provide my own structure some things have fallen aside, most notably for me, Calvary’s Thread. Jim McClelland, one of my longest and best of friends (I have three men from my youth that I use this term for: Doug, who we lost before he was twenty, Mike Schermerhorn, and Jim), gave me “Hero” a devotional style book by Derwin L. Gray. Reading just the Introduction and first chapter reignited my desire for daily spiritual reading. I imagine that reading Hero will inform my Calvary’s Thread writing for next several weeks as well as provide material for the story that is in progress.

What better friends than these could a person have, that would see to my own needs before they see to theirs? My challenge to us now is to sit back and take stock of the blessings from our friends. My prayer for us is that we end up sitting back in wonder at the love God pours out for us.

Luke 6: 38, “³⁸Give, and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full – pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap.” (NLT)

In His grip, jerry