I Feared Losing My Job. The Man Job Feared Losing It All. We Both Got What We Believed in Our Hearts

In 1997, IBM hired me to build websites.

This would have been a fine and reasonable business decision on their part if I had, in fact, known how to build websites. I knew a few lines of HTML, self-taught, the way you’re “self-taught” at anything when you’ve right-clicked, looked at the source code, and wondered, “Hmm, I wonder what <b> does.”

I still don’t fully understand why IBM hired me, but they did, and for seven years I worked at one of the best companies in the world. I made more money than I’d ever made in my life and spent the entire time absolutely terrified I was one bad meeting away from being exposed as a fraud. Not “worried I might get fired.” Convinced I could be exposed as a fraud and fired. I didn’t know the date. I just knew it was coming — the way Job apparently knew disaster was coming for his kids, certain enough of the outcome that he was making preemptive sacrifices for a catastrophe that hadn’t happened yet.

And then, right on schedule — seven years in, almost to the month — my job at IBM ended.

Which, if you’ve spent any time in the Old Testament, sounds a little too on the nose. Seven years of plenty, then it’s over. Jacob works seven years for Rachel and gets handed Leah instead. Seven is the number the Bible uses when it wants you to notice a pattern, and here I was, having quietly authored my own pattern in advance and then watched it arrive precisely as ordered.

Here’s what I didn’t understand at the time, and what took me years and a fair amount of hindsight to see: I hadn’t just predicted the ending. I’d been rehearsing it daily for seven years in a hundred small ways nobody else could see. Bracing in meetings, discounting the praise — and there was praise, and promotions — all while waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was functioning like Job – sacrificing on behalf of kids who hadn’t sinned yet. I was guarding a blessing I’d already decided wasn’t really mine to keep.

And if I’m being transparent (oh, come on, Eddie, why stop now?), I did not understand God’s grace. Not really. I thought I had a part to play in who He put in positions of employment. Nope. Not even close. To this day, everything I learned at IBM, I still use for this ministry. God loves me, yes, and He provided for me, yes, but He wanted me to learn skills for His kingdom, not mine.

When the loss finally landed, Job says: “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.” You know the line. It’s almost as famous as John 3:16, for different reasons. It gives us an excuse to believe loss is coming, not the goodness of God.

And the text is careful about something we tend to skip past when we quote it — God didn’t reach down and personally dismantle Job’s life. God removed a hedge, perhaps to accommodate Job’s prophecy of his own future. God withdrew a boundary and let something else act — something evil. That’s a truth we might want to consider as we fear the worst.

Job goes straight to “the Lord took,” and most of us reading his story do the same. It’s so much easier to blame the hand that supposedly took than to examine what you were quietly, faithfully expecting to lose all along.

There’s this father in Mark 9 who has the faith of Job. He expects Jesus to heal — but not really. Not fully. The father tries his faith on the disciples. Big mistake. They blow it. The father is proven right: this won’t work. But then Jesus walks onto the scene, and the father says to Him, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” Jesus tosses the word “if” right back at him. “If I can?” You can almost hear the laughter in Jesus’ words.

And the father — in what might be the most honest sentence in the whole New Testament — comes clean. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

He doesn’t pretend the fear isn’t there. He names it and hands it over to Jesus in the same breath.

That’s the prayer I wish I’d prayed somewhere around year three at IBM, instead of quietly losing sleep for four more years over a review that hadn’t yet happened.

When I left IBM, I was relieved. My wife, not so much — but for me, it was freedom.

I remember thinking that if God went to the trouble of inventing the internet just so I’d have a job at IBM, surely He could manage a better one. And He did. I ended up doing the thing I actually love, which is writing.

I don’t know if my seven years of dread had anything to do with my ending coming in seven years. That’s a bigger claim than I can prove. But I know this: I’m convinced God is good all the time. He was good when He got me a job for which I wasn’t qualified. He was good when I lost that job. He is still good and providing while I daily write and pray that the works of my hands sell into the hundreds of thousands — not for my benefit, but because somewhere in my books is my best attempt at glorifying Him, without preaching.

And I’ve come to believe that’s already a reality in heaven. My job now isn’t to make it happen. It’s declaring that the Kingdom of God in heaven has come. It’s coming. I’m sure of it.