He Holds It All Together
I got inspired to write on this about a week ago. I had gone to Ibadan to drop my ID card and laptop from the job I just left and as my “visit” was rounding up, I observed something that was like a full circle event.
My first trip to Ibadan to start work happened on a Sunday. It was quite the eventful Sunday as it was with the trip. I particularly remember the drive as it rained heavily throughout and at some point, visibility was almost zero but I persisted. Just as we were getting into Ibadan and trying to find our way to our hotel, I realized I had forgotten my suits at home. I had packed my suits in a suit bag and somehow forgot to put them in the car. How the suits got to Ibadan that evening is a different story.
While we were waiting for the suits to come in though, my partner & I drove to my office building and did a walk around. We took pictures and prayed, committing the entire work experience into God’s hands. You see, this job wasn’t something I particularly wanted as conventional wisdom said it was a downgrade from the previous job. And I wasn’t proud of it. But I also knew I needed a new work experience. I prayed for it, and I genuinely believed it was God’s answer to my prayers, no matter how much it didn’t exactly look that way.
So on June 15, 2021, I started my new role as an Investment Associate focusing mostly on equity investments. I had a “mood board” type thing where I copied the kinda skills I hoped to leave the company with. I copied the skills from the Job Descriptions posted by one of the companies I’d like to work for in the future. The skill set didn’t exactly intersect with my role but I kept it there.
In 2021, I sent in my resignation letter on April 18 and exactly a year later, I was handing in another resignation letter. On May 19, the day I went to drop my work stuff, my line manager offered to take me out to lunch. And just like I’d done with my partner the day before my official start date, I did another walk around of the office, on the day after my effective end date. I don’t recall now if I even said a prayer, but it was in one of those moments on the way back from the lunch that it struck me — God knew this end moment, even from the beginning.
You see, like I’d written, this job wasn’t one I was particularly proud of. It seemed to offer more pay and allow me have more time to myself. I was working remotely and by the time I was resigning, I had networked with a couple of important people in different sectors of the economy and the government. But it was also a pseudo-government organization and they were located in Ibadan. So imagine my culture shock when I genuinely didn’t have any new tasks for a whole week! Or when my colleagues would come late to a virtual meeting! I couldn’t understand many things concerning the pace of the work and saw them as dysfunctional.
But I also admit that the experience was important for me personally in many respects. It was essential for me to work with, and learn from a different set of people than I had experienced throughout my career. I wanted to find out if I was an impostor and had just been made comfortable by working in the same place for 8+ years. With this job, I was able to get that. I also thought that on a personal level, I was in a season of my life when I had to learn to “say what I needed to say.” I can confidently say that more times than most, this was something I did at this company. I didn’t care about impressing anyone, I didn’t care about how my mistakes would be punished, I didn’t care about appraisals or promotions, etc. I said what I needed to say, did my job and moved on.
And in relation to the previous paragraph, even before going in, I always had the feeling of that this job would be transitory. I had that knowledge deep down but the end wasn’t always clearly in sight. I didn’t know how the transition would end — in December when I realized these guys were not going to pay a bonus, or in January when my take home salary was suddenly adjusted downward by about 25%, or in early February when our Lagos office was shut down. I definitely didn’t know when I was robbed in the middle of March but that consciousness came back after that robbery.
But God knew. Right from the start.
That second walk round experience jolted me because of the times when I made myself find stuff to be anxious about. There were times when I wasn’t sure about the volume/quality of my work and I would worry that I wasn’t doing enough. But there was no need for all that worry. If I had seen the end of my journey from the beginning, I would have embraced the 11 months a lot better. I would have done my work without all the worry and I would have maximized all my free time even more.
And that’s the meat of this note. In many areas of our lives, we worry so much while we’re in the middle of stuff. How much of your high school experience would you change if you saw the end from the beginning? The things that got you all worked up, did they really matter that much? Idk. Idk. Idk.
I’m taking this question along with me wherever I go now. Whether in traffic or on a long haul flight, I know that God is already at the end of that experience. As he’s with me in the middle of it. And I don’t have to worry. I can just live.
Since I first heard this song last year, there’s a couple of lines that have always resonated with me,
“You are the Alpha, and you’re Omega, you’re in the middle, you hold it all together”. And Chandler Moore went on to ad-lib, “you’re not just at the beginning, and you’re not just at the end, but you’re right there with me in the middle.” Those lines have always struck me and reminded me not to worry.
