Welcome back to the Promises of God Podcast, Episode number 37 my name is Tracie Rollins, and I want to thank you so much for spending some time with me as we learn and take action on God’s promises in life. This months series is about living life, and we’re working out of the momentum devotional offered by Bible Journaling Ministries titled Live Life. You can learn more about Bible journaling with our free 10-day Bible journaling course at BibleJournalingMinistries.com. Today we’re focused on our relationship with work, is your career killing you? Our verse for today Is 1 Corinthians 2:11 and it says, for who among men knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him even so, no one knows the things of God except God’s spirit. There were many times in my career where I would leave for work in the darkness very, very early, early in the morning, so dark, and then I would return late at night, and it was also dark.
I would spend 80 hours at work a week. It just really wore on me. I would wake up in the morning and head into work, and it would be dark, and I’d come home, and it’d be dark. I would miss the sun entirely. What’s sad about that is that I live in Arizona, so the sun is shining more often. Really. Then it’s not shining, and it’s really kind of sad. I would forget to take vacations. I was allotted a certain amount of hours for vacation every year, and I wouldn’t take him. I wouldn’t take breaks. I would work through the day, and I just was so heavily focused on my career and moving to the next level. It really got me into really a bad health situation currently that I still struggle with today, and that is obesity and exhaustion and even isolation.
Like I didn’t go out with my friends whenever they were going out to lunch. I would just be like; I got to get this project done. Like that’s how I was and when I was lead projects. I would lead as a leader that was so focused on getting the results, and you could tell that if you were on one of my teams, you would know that you had a deliverable and that deliverable was to do exactly when it was due, and if you miss that, we would have a discussion. It wasn’t like it wasn’t fun. It was just really a very focused, focused person that I was and that’s great. I’m not saying it’s not okay to be focused. I know that my focus was not healthy, and I was so into my job and not into anything much else than that. I was focused on moving up in my career, and one time I heard the Holy Spirit like I was in my cubicle at the time.
I worked in a manufacturing facility, and I had a cubicle with that was surrounded by hundreds of other cubicles. The Holy Spirit spoke to me. He said, look up, and it wasn’t audible, but it was something within my, my soul that I heard. And I looked up, and I stood up, and I glanced across the hundreds of cubicles that were around me, and I was alone. There was nobody there. It was completely silent. So I got up, I walked out of my cubicle and walk to the window to look at it, the parking lot, and there were just a few cars left in the parking lot, and it was completely dark. I had worked the entire day at my desk and never noticed that the whole company pretty much had gone home for the day. I was alone in an office that was completely silent. So I walked back to my computer, and I shut it off, turn off the light, and I headed home.
And at that moment I was utterly deflated like it was, I didn’t know what had happened. What, where did everyone go nobody stopped to say goodbye. Nobody stopped to check in to see if I was ready to go home and walk out the door with them. Well, that’s kind of what happens when you isolate yourself, and you focus. At least for me, it was just focused on my career. When people ask you to go out to lunch or when they asked me to go out to lunch, eventually they stopped asking because I never went when they asked if I was ready to leave for the day so they could walk out with me. I always said no, I still had work than I wanted to get done. And so they stopped asking and when they walk to the gym too, and we had a gym on site, so let me literally, you didn’t have to leave. We had food on site, hit the gym onsite, hit everything on site, so he didn’t have to leave. And this was before I had children too. So when they were going to work out at the gym, they had maybe once asked me or twice asked me, and I always said no. So they stopped asking. It was a very lonely, lonely time for me. Even my manager at the time, he was really into the gym so that he would stop by often. Like he would stop by, he had like his cube was two doors down from mine and he would stop by and say, Hey Rollins, I’m going to the gym. They want to go. And I’d be like, no, I have to prepare for this meeting, or I have to prepare for the speech I’m giving. And it wasn’t like I was, I wasn’t high up on the career ladder.
I was an engineer, and I was in responsible for toolsets. And I took that very seriously in these toolsets were multimillion dollars. They weren’t just like, you know, a wrench or a hammer. They were multimillion-dollar machines. So I took my career very, very seriously to the extent that it ruined my health, my friendships, my relationships, and was killing me. So after I heard the Holy Spirit tell me to wake up, I turn everything off, started walking to my car and realized, and at the time there were no, we had desk phones, there were no cell phones. I didn’t have a cellular phone. I had a pager, and my husband hadn’t paged me. Cause know he knew where I was. I was at work. That’s where I was always at work. So I walked down. You had got past the security guards because, of course, this place was guarded and, went to get in my car.
And as I drove home, just this feeling washed over me about just how much my job was killing me. And I was allowing that I was lying my job to kill me. And I was the instigator of it killing me because I was so focused on it. And I started thinking about what would life be different Like how would life be different if I wasn’t always so focused on my job And so I went home, and I talked to my husband, and I apologize, obviously again for being late to come home. And I would, um, sit down with him and ask him, what can we do Can, can we, can we go on vacation And before that, my vacations were on the weekend so that I would end work after like an 80-hour long week. I know it’s intense. It was so fierce. And then I would get my car with my husband, and we go travel for two hours to see my parents and his parents.
And we do like this thing where we would visit everyone’s house. We’ve used it at my parents’ house, and we visit his parent’s house, and we’d stay a day at each, and then we get in the car and come home. And then we would do that multiple weekends. And then we would go to my sisters who lived four hours away the next weekend. And we go there, and we’d stay there for the weekend, and we’d come home. And my life was so exhausting. It was completely exhausting. So when I asked my husband if we could take a week off where we just went on vacation, just he and I in at the time we had uh, an Rv, a recreational vehicle that was in storage that I had purchased from my parents and we never used it. It was, we paid, I think it was $50 a month to store it and we never used it.
And so I asked him if we could plan a vacation. And so we did, we planned a vacation to Colorado in this RV. We had dogs, so we took the dogs too. It was so fun. And during that time I never got one page from anybody and it a pager for those of you who are familiar with it. Was this a little black device that I would wear on my pant pocket. And if they needed me in the factory, they were supposed to text, not text where they were supposed to call that number. And then they would leave. They would leave their number so that I could call that number back. So that was the pager back then. And nobody paged me. Nobody contacted me at all for any reason. And it was the first time that I realized that I could take a break and that the factory wasn’t going to shut down because I wasn’t there and that my projects weren’t going to go, you know, go to the the garbage because I wasn’t like driving them so hard, and it was amazing.
I came back after that vacation more refreshed and rejuvenated and ready to go. I had better ideas, and I was more productive. I realized how much taking that break meant in terms of even my goal at that time, which was hugely focused on my career. So taking that break helps me with my career. And I started then incorporating that break more and more. And then I incorporated more breaks. So I would then go to my boss and asked him if he wanted to go work out together. And it was always funny that when sometimes I’d ask him to go work out, he’d be like, no, I’m prepping for a meeting. And so it was almost the opposite way. But eventually, we got to work out together sometimes, but not often. I would decide that I would take that break and I would start to go to the gym, and every day, five days a week, I would do my best to get to the gym.
I still have always had problems with taking a lunch break in terms of like getting away from the computer and meeting with people, but I do try to do that. I do meet with people in my life here a couple of times a month where we take a break and can have fellowship together with coffee or lunch or something like that. But taking a break from my career, that first time was so transformative to me and ever since then by implementing breaks, vacations, taking time off it, it has strengthened my marriage. It’s strengthened my family, my family has. We have such good communication. We’ve experienced so many different things together that have been amazing and sometimes scary in terms of some of the things that we’ve done. And I’m just so glad that I finally heard the Holy Spirit when he prompted me to look up and take a break.
Don’t always have your head down because your career is killing you and you need to take a break and get up and see the world and see all the wonderful things that God has created. So that is my story in terms of remembering to look up and, and, and take a break. And sometimes we can think about vacations, and we say, oh, I can’t take time off. I’m too important at my job. Or I’m the CEO of my company, and I can’t take a break off it because if I do, then no one’s going to run my business. Um, or if I own an Etsy shop, I can’t take a break because if I leave, I can’t have anyone to ship out my materials. Or some people won’t order from me if I’m gone for two weeks. Or if your work is being a mother to young children, I can’t take a break because there’s no one to watch my kids or I can’t afford a babysitter.
We have so many things that we kind of build up in terms of the walls that we don’t want to break. Right. We brought, we built up these walls and the excuses that that’s really what they are. I know, I understand that. You know, sometimes you could say that, oh, I don’t have any money so I can’t go. Right. And that’s a real thing. That’s not, and I’m not saying that’s an excuse. That’s not valid. I mean, have been through a lot of times in my life where I had zero money and even after I took, this was even after I realized that I needed to take breaks. There have been times in my life where we’ve had $0 million, and for our vacation, we put the small kids in our car or little kids at the time. They were a super tiny little three-year-old and five-year-olds, little guys and loaded them up in the car.
We went to the park, the local park and we, there’s a little fishing pond there, and we fished, and that was our vacation. It was free for them cause they didn’t have to pay for it. We didn’t have to pay for their license in Arizona, your children that are under a certain age; they don’t have to have a license. So they would fish, and dad would have a license. So he would fish and I wouldn’t fish cause I didn’t have a license and I didn’t have the $12 to pay for it. But I still had a vacation with my kids, and I still had fun with them. And even as a mother, a young mother comes in, and there were times where I just needed a break, and my husband would come home, and I would hand him the baby, and I would walk around the block and for the 30 minutes I had a break.
I had a vacation, and I didn’t want to just run away from it all. I got a chance to have that little vacation. So vacation is I have to belong. It doesn’t have to be, you know, could be anywhere, 10-15 minutes, just a break, a little mini vacations. You could have those, it doesn’t have to be anything big, but I would encourage you to play in them, especially if you are like me, very focused, on your work, trying to do your best for the Lord, trying to do your best for your family. Just trying to make life work. So this week, take some time to write or journal about your relationship with your work. Is it healthy or is what you’re doing killing you if it’s not healthy, what is one thing that you can do to change that Don’t think about what it is that your boss can do or your kids can do, or your friends can do.
Think about one thing that you can do. You’re in control of you. So maybe it is to take that little mini-vacation, that little 10-15 minute break or maybe a 30-minute workout at your job. Or perhaps you can swap some time with somebody and you each take half an hour break for yourself. There are so many different creative ways you can come up with to think about how you can take that break and how you can have that vacation, especially if the Holy Spirit is calling you to look up and experience life and see the wonderful things that God has for you. And if you’re here today and you’re frustrated with your career, and you’re wondering what living life truly means, I encourage you to check up the Bible and learn about this amazing man named Jesus who in John 10:10 says, the thief only comes to steal, kill and destroy.
And I came that they may have life and they may have it abundantly. If you’re happy in your career, that is awesome that maybe you feel like your relationship with work is a bit off. I encourage you to seek God and ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate an area or an area in your life that you need to pay close attention to them. Maybe you’re overweight, and you could use a break in the middle of the day to take care of your body. Maybe your marriage is struggling, and you diff and you focus on work as a kind of a way to escape it all and get away, but perhaps this day, take 10 minutes to text your spouse and let him know how much you love him and how important he is to you. You’re not promised tomorrow, so don’t put this off. Romans 6:23 says, the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus, our Lord. So turn to him, confess your sins, and follow his will in your life, and you will feel the love of Christ that surpasses all understanding. I want to thank you for tuning in today. I’m so excited to talk to you about, about living life this month, really experiencing the things that God has for you and I can’t wait to talk to you in the next episode of the Promises of God. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to the promises of God podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Bible Journaling Ministries where thousands of women grow in the word creatively. It’s your free 10-day course for other ministries and other episodes resources at ThePromisesofGodPodcast.Com.