What is Wisdom Worth?

As a child, I struggled - as we all do - to be assured of approval. I was desperate for it. Whose approval did I want?

Well, of course, as is the case with any child, I wanted my parents' approval. But I also wanted the approval of teachers at school, Sunday School teachers at church, and perhaps more than all of this - my peers.

Yes, I was a little people pleaser growing up. Not because I wanted everyone to be pleased with me for its own sake necessarily. It wasn't really praise I was after. Mostly I wanted to avoid getting in trouble with anyone in authority, and wanted to avoid being looked down upon or teased by my peers. I was ruled by fear - the fear of the consequences of a lack of approval.

My desire for approval, however, was a red herring. Have you ever heard of where the term "red herring" comes from? Well, ok, first and foremost, it's one of those secret terms that only well educated people are familiar with, so they use them as much as possible in order to impress their audience with their erudition. The word erudition is another such word. It just means you want to impress the audience with how smart you are or how well read and well educated you are. To be all those things is to be erudite. See? Now you too can be in the club, and can dumbfound your audience with how stupid they are in comparison to yourself...

Yes, I'm talking to you, preachers.

But I got off topic. I was talking about red herrings. Actually, I just succumbed to a bit of a red herring myself. A red herring is simply a distraction. The term comes from when people would train hunting dogs or blood hounds or whatever to track by scent. They'd give the dog a scent to track, and then they would use red herrings (a particularly pungent kind of fish) in an attempt to distract the dog from the scent they were tracking. This taught the dog to be disciplined and focused on the task at hand.

So my desire for approval from literally everyone (anyone) was just a red herring - it was a distraction. Whose approval did I actually want? God's of course.

When I had no choice but to walk away from the ministry, THIS was the most painful aspect of it. I was just absolutely sure that I did not have God's approval anymore, if I had ever had it at all.

This is the most difficult part of abandoning the ministry, and it is especially difficult if it comes in the context of also being rejected by the church.

At any rate, back to childhood. I can remember being so desperate for approval (or rather, some assurance of approval that might penetrate my thick skull) that I grew quite frustrated with my entire life situation. I remember quite vividly crying myself to sleep growing up, often accompanied by pillow-muffled screams.

Now, you may think that's a little unusual. But then again, maybe you don't. Or maybe you do, despite the fact that you can probably relate to it. But the truth is, I was THAT kid growing up. You know, the one no one wanted on their team (I sure hope teachers have figured out by now that letting kids pick teams is just an awful thing to do), the one the other kids always made fun of. Kids can be cruel.

So you'll understand why the story of Solomon appealed to me so strongly.

You see, one Sunday, I went to church, and heard the story of how Solomon became king of Israel. When Samuel anointed Solomon as king, he told him on behalf of the Lord that he could ask for anything - ANYTHING - he wanted, and it would be granted.

Well, Solomon apparently gave the best answer one could give when presented with such an opportunity. He asked for wisdom. I didn't remember the details. I only remembered what he asked for and how the Lord responded. The Lord, I was told, was PLEASED. So pleased, in fact, that he bestowed great wealth on him and wisdom and he became Israel's greatest king.

Of course, as a kid, the riches was totally lost on me, and I certainly couldn't understand why anyone would want 1,000 wives (what's a concubine?). However, I did figure out that Solomon asked for wisdom and it pleased the Lord.

To me, this was a magic formula. To me, it was as simple as putting two quarters in a soda machine (remember that?) and getting a can of Coke. The request for wisdom was two quarters and the Lord's pleasure with me was my can of Coke which I desperately wanted.

So every day from that day on - well into high school I think - I prayed for wisdom when saying my bedtime prayers and thought of Solomon.

Now, you might say that my theology was all screwed up. It was. You might also say that I was trying to manipulate God into approving of me. I was. But I was also just a kid. As tainted with sin as that prayer was, it wasn't ONLY sinful. After all, I just wanted God to be PLEASED with me. He himself told me in his Word that it's good to ask for wisdom, and I believed it and asked him for it myself. So it wasn't all bad, nor was it all good. But that's pretty much all I can say about the prayers I said this morning.

For example, I recently helped a friend get a job. He thanked me profusely. He assumed that I had gone out of my way to help him simply because I was being kind to him. After all, he needed a job and I was able to help and I gave it to him. And when he thanked me, I looked at him with a smile and said, "Are you kidding? I didn't do it for you. I did it to feed my ego." Of course, I was joking. But the best jokes have an element of truth to them, and this was no exception (and yes, we both laughed - it's all about the timing). The truth is, the help I provided him was not purely altruistic. In some sense it was about feeding my ego. When I was a child, I idolized the idea of the mafia don who bestowed favors on people all the time, who then owed him a favor in return, along with their loyalty and their love. This is one of those ways that I've just always been tempted.

However, it would be wrong of me to withhold that help from my friend, simply because my help would be tainted with sin. Sure, I took some pride in having helped someone. And knowing that in advance, maybe I could (should?) have refrained from helping him to avoid the temptation. But then he wouldn't have been helped and wouldn't have a job. So I did it, and yes, I did indulge in a little secret self congratulations. But the Lord used it anyway to provide my friend and brother in Christ a job that he really, REALLY needed.

In the same way, the Lord used my sin-tainted prayers as a child to bring about his purposes. He did answer those prayers. He did give me wisdom.

You know, when I was a child, I was pretty sure that Solomon was given wisdom in much the same way that Neo learned Kung Fu in the Matrix. If, for some reason you haven't seen the Matrix, please correct yourself as soon as possible. In it, Neo basically downloads knowledge like a computer. In 10 seconds, he learns Kung Fu. Anyway, it seemed very much to me that in the story of Solomon, he asked for wisdom and then was instantly wise. In Solomon's case, that may be how it happened.

For the rest of us, however, it's not. I had little idea what I was actually asking for. It turns out that the road to wisdom is paved with suffering. For example, see Heb 5:8, which says that Jesus learned obedience through suffering.

Now, I've often had quite a bit of trouble understanding that. How is it that the sinless Son of God had to LEARN obedience? Well, I don't think it really means that he had to learn HOW to obey, so much as he learned what it TAKES to obey. In suffering, Jesus learned specifically what it COSTS to obey.

In the same way, I think, wisdom has a price. You aren't born with it. You suffer and then become wise. Perhaps Solomon had a rough childhood. After all, his mom and dad had an adulterous affair, after which his mother got pregnant, which caused his father to have his mother's first husband killed so that their adultery wouldn't be called to account.

It may be the case that Solomon's brothers, and possibly even the people of Israel gave him a hard time about that. In fact, it's probably quite likely. The Jews thought that bloodlines were a very big deal. And everyone probably knew at the time what happened. We still know all about it 3,000 years later! I think Solomon probably had a rough time of it. Maybe he even screamed himself to sleep a time or two. Perhaps that's where his humility came from, as exhibited by his response to the prophet who anointed him king.

But whatever the case, I'm pretty sure wisdom is learned through painful experience. For instance, if you get an adjustable rate mortgage that you can just barely afford to make the payments on today, and the payments skyrocket tomorrow because the interest rates finally rose, so that you eventually have to foreclose on your house, chances are you will wisely avoid anything but a fixed rate mortgage going forward. Thus a tiny seed of wisdom is planted in someone's heart and nourished with suffering.

If you ever have a chance to go to visit someone in the hospital who has been battling some disease for a long time, please do so. You'll find that they're very wise. They care very little for the things of this world, and they look to the age to come. What a pleasure and joy it is to visit some sweet little old lady, barely alive in her hospital bed, who is nonetheless sweet to the nurses, kind to the other patients, worried about taking her pastor's time, grateful that he would come see her, etc. Wisdom. She knows from her suffering that what really matters is not this age, but the age to come. She's ok with suffering in the body for a time because she is looking forward to being raised from the dead.

And so it is with those who have been badly burned, spurned and abused by the people of God, the church. You see, they have been exposed to the ugliness that persists in every church of every denomination, no matter who the pastor is, no matter how godly the elders, how high the offerings are, how many people sit in the pews, etc. Every church everywhere is tainted. Every church everywhere is impure.

And every pastor, at any time, can find himself suddenly shepherding a flock of wolves, bursting and belching because they have eaten all the sheep and have turned their greedy eyes to their shepherd (or the shepherd's intern).

God promised to meet your needs. God promised you salvation in Christ. He did NOT promise that you could always be a pastor.

Oh, how I hoped in my own desires as if they were promises of God! I graduated seminary, I landed an internship, I endured the worst that that minister and elders could dish out during said internship, and I even endured the seemingly required year or so of unemployment while I waited for my first call. But that call never came. Was God being unfaithful to me? Was God being mean or cruel?

No.

At what time did God promise me in his Word that if I did all the things just mentioned that I would earn the right to be a minister?

Without realizing it, I had devised my own covenant of works and assumed that God had entered into that covenant with me. According to my covenant, I'd check all the boxes required to be a minister and if I checked all those boxes, I'd become a minister. That was God's responsibility to me. We each had our responsibilities in the equation. I did my part, he did his.

But that's not how it works, is it?

God promised us that if we would just worry about seeking his kingdom and his righteousness (whose righteousness - mine or God's?), then he would take care of the clothes on our back, the roof over our heads and the food in our bellies. It may be that he'll give you a job, or it may be that the deacons will help you.

God promised us that if we have faith in Jesus Christ, he will impute the righteousness of Christ to us and permanently unite us to his Son by his indwelling Spirit, who will be at work in us, conforming us to the image of his Son, growing us in righteousness and reforming the desires of our hearts. And he promised to do this completely by his grace, by his mercy, not for anything done in us, or by us, but simply because he chose us.

Oh, they say, but God is love! How can he choose only SOME? When I choose to marry my wife, am I being unloving to all the other women in the world? And at the same time, if I choose every woman in the world, what makes any of them special? As they say, when everyone is special, no one is.

But I digress. The point is, God promised us salvation from the condemnation earned by our sin, the condemnation of eternal death, and instead has promised us eternal life by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. And he has promised to provide for our needs.

But he never promised I could be a minister. He never promised any former minister that that man could retire a minister. In fact, the Bible says in Jude that "certain men have crept in among" us, and that those men are up to no good. They're here to cause trouble, and trouble they will cause.

For you ministers out there who want to believe that your church will never turn on you, or that your ability to make the people in your church like and appreciate you is the source of your security, think again. Who killed Jesus? Who was screaming, crucify, crucify? It was not those outside the church. It was the church.

Who was it that threw Jeremiah into a sewer? Who persecuted Paul? Who murdered the prophets? On whose heads did Jesus place the guilt for all the prophets?

It has ALWAYS been the people of God who had the most hostility toward the prophets, toward those who speak to them on God's behalf.

We are always so concerned about the evil outside the church. Who cares? It's all small time compared to the evil WITHIN the church. The church contains the greatest evil that has ever been on earth. They are Satan's hidden sleeper agents, walking among us, pretending to be one of us. They're so good at it they have begun to believe their own lies.

And they are everywhere.

What price would you be willing to pay to gain wisdom?

God asks us all to pay different costs, but make no mistake, we will all suffer to gain wisdom. We have to. There's no other way to learn. You cannot learn that debt is dumb until you get deep into debt and have to work your butt off to get out of it. You cannot learn to be wary of office politics until you've been stabbed in the back.

God wants us to be wise. Christ is our wisdom, says the Scriptures. But he learned through suffering. We do too.

And God sure did answer those many prayers as a child.

He has answered those prayers many, many times over.

But there is one time when he answered that prayer the loudest, the clearest.

When I was left with no choice but to walk away from the ministry, that's when God answered the prayers of a child who once desperately asked God for wisdom, just because he only wanted to please his God.

And as I reflect back on all that anger, all those feelings of betrayal, how I felt so hurt and rejected by God - I have actually been taught something by that little boy I used to be once upon a time. That little boy was willing to do ANYTHING to please God.

Well, one day, God asked me to walk away from a career I had been carefully cultivating for about a decade. All that effort I put forth, all the sweat, tears, money, stress - not to mention the price my wife paid - all of it had to matter less to me than pleasing God. I had no choice.

My God asked me to lay it all aside and, like Abraham, to go to the land which he would show me later.

That's when God answered the desperate pleas of a little boy. Because when I said, over and over, "Please give me wisdom," I was really saying, "Please just let me glorify you."

It's a privilege to have walked this road. It really is. I have learned more than I could ever possibly articulate in something like a relatively incoherent blog post. I have gained some small measure of wisdom through what I have suffered.

And it was all worth it.

What is Wisdom Worth?

The price I paid was small. I would pay much more.

I am tempted to wish that God would ask less of you, but then, that would be to wish that God would give you a smaller measure of wisdom. And I wish you a large measure of his wisdom, and I hope he gives me much more.

And I know what it costs.

Transforming a Minister into a Trainer

You're a former minister/licentiate/seminary student, and for whatever reason, the ministry is a closed door and you're wondering what to do with your life. You've got a ton of education and some experience, but it doesn't seem like any of it is very easily applicable in any job field.

Good news! It is applicable! It's applicable in the area of training. Something that is truly exploding these days is any kind of software training. There are tons of these jobs near any major city.

In today's climate, there are lots of software companies whose growth is so explosive that they're desperate to hire as many trainers as possible. Since their product is new, they aren't looking for people who already know their software - after all, no one does yet.

This means, if you have a pulse and can demonstrate some capability to learn new technology, possibly even string a coherent sentence together, you can probably get hired to do this. They'll train you on their software and then pay you to train others.

This is a great way to cut your teeth in the training world and establish yourself and your resume. Trust me - take any job in software training. I've seen guys with only a little bit of experience and no college get hired for 60-70k per year plus benefits. If you graduated seminary, you have a masters degree in training and communications (verbal and written), not to mention critical thinking. You're a training team's dream - though they may not know it if you don't translate your resume into a language they can understand. More on that in another post.

First, there are two broad areas of training you can get into.

1. Internal training: getting hired by a company to train their employees internally
2. External training: getting hired by a training organization to provide training on demand for external clients

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking number 2 would be more exciting and would probably pay better, right? You're probably right, though I doubt the pay difference is that great, if it exists at all.

I've done both internal and external training. External training is exciting at times, especially when you get into creating custom tailored training for a specific client for a specific purpose. That can be pretty cool and can involve travel, etc. However, chances are you're going to be stuck teaching the same basic class 3-4 times a week to a different group of students each day. That's if business is good. If business isn't good, then you have to worry about getting laid off. And once you truly understand your situation, you'll worry. A lot. Especially when there's no advertising budget.

When you're doing internal training, business is always good. Plus, you'll get more opportunities to get beyond the basics with your users because you're right there in the organization, available to them at all times. Yes, you'll teach some classes, but you'll also find yourself in a resident expert role. You'll answer help desk tickets and troubleshoot problems.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, yuck, I'm not an IT guy. Right. Neither am I. But I answer help desk tickets. Granted, some of them are rather tedious and the need to document everything gets old fast. However, some of them are really interesting problems to solve and people need help doing some really advanced stuff. This is where you'll really learn a lot and prove your value to the organization.

People who do good work in these kinds of jobs have tremendous job security. They can lay off a couple salesmen, but they can't lay off the guy who enables ALL the salesmen to do their job.

For example, let's talk about SharePoint. Lots of people have all kinds of notions about SharePoint. Usually it's that they hate it. But they only hate it because they refuse to take the time to learn it. With a little time, it's actually really quite easy. If you can use Microsoft Office proficiently, a Windows PC and the internet, you already have the skills you need to learn SharePoint. Nothing about SharePoint is hard, there's just a lot to learn. Your ability to memorize is very sharp, though, you who have studied Greek and Hebrew, so you'll find it quite easy.

I had about a year of training experience (teaching writing, public speaking, critical thinking, etc) before I got a job doing software training. I was able to get that job based on my training for the ministry, my small amount of experience as an intern and my year of classroom training experience. After doing that about a year and a half, I took a job doing internal SharePoint training. I had no SharePoint experience at all. My new employer simply gave me an account to access online videos. After 2 weeks of thorough study, I was all ready to go and began building curriculum, answering help tickets and troubleshooting problems.

And five years ago, I would have said that anyone who makes as much money as I do is rich (though I now realize how naive I was, especially about money). Now, I'm not greedy, and I'm sure you aren't either. Nonetheless, there's probably a little part of your heart somewhere that's secretly glad you're not in the ministry making 35k at some tiny church in a small town with 3 stubborn families who refuse to acknowledge that theirs is not the only true church in the universe, and all because it was the only call you got and you needed a job.

You have a masters degree and some very sharp, very marketable skills. Once you learn to market them properly, you can join the my-wife-doesn't-have-to-work-nights-anymore club. Don't you want to call the Dave Ramsey show and do your debt free scream? I sure do. And that day is coming soon. I will be 100% debt free in just a couple more months. No car payment, no school loans, no credit cards, nothing.

When I'm debt free, I'm going to save up for a sizable down payment on a house. But I'm also, for the first time, going to be able to respond when the announcement is made in church that "the deacons have a special need for $500 for a worthy individual in need." I'm looking forward to that day. Much more than buying a house.

Sorry, I got distracted. Where was I? Oh yes, SharePoint. Like I said, 1-3 years, you could very possibly be making low six figures. The secret is this: competence and motivation. If you do a good job (which you are more than capable of) and you have an ongoing reason to want to continue to do a good job (such as a desire to provide for your family and please your God), you're pretty much going to get promoted and excel, so long as you don't offend people and make enemies. By the way, don't aim at making everyone you work with your friend - that's impossible. Just aim at making some friendly acquaintances and not making enemies out of everyone else. And of course, make opportunities to pay your boss respect and show initiative in any way you can think of.

SharePoint is easy. But it's a great example of an opportunity for you. SharePoint is easy enough that it won't make you crazy trying to figure things out. You can get answers to any question within 30 seconds if you have access to Google. But SharePoint is complicated enough that most people won't spend the time to figure the thing out and they'd rather pay you to figure it out for them and just point them at the easy button. Sure, if they'd only spend a week getting great training (which you'd be happy to provide), they could do this for themselves. But they know they're far too important to spend a week doing that.

SharePoint is made by Microsoft and is used by just about every large-ish enterprise in the US. It's not as ubiquitous as Office, but it's up there. Companies use it to provide structure for their company intranet, which is just like the internet only it's inaccessible outside the company's network. People use it to store documents and collaborate on them (like Google Docs). They can store other files as well (like Google Drive).

Let me give you an example of a use case that will be more familiar to you. Suppose you're back in seminary and your professor, in the week leading up to the exam, hands out this huge list of 100 essay questions he may ask you on the exam as a study guide. As soon as he exits the room, 20 of you collaborate and divvy up the questions, taking 5 questions each.

When you were actually in seminary, you probably used Google to do this. We did at my school. But that was definitely a pain.

Now imagine you have SharePoint...

You could build a site, accessible by only the students who actually collaborated. That one guy who said he needed to do his own work or some such thing and refused to participate wouldn't be given access. If he's logged into Windows, you won't even be able to navigate to that web page.

You could have lots of tools for your use on this collaborative site. You could have a calendar where you could post times when you were planning on getting together for discussions and study groups. You could have an announcements list that anyone could contribute to, to let people known that a new event has been posted to the calendar or something. You could have a discussion board where students could debate answers to questions without having to put 50 comments in the Word document. You could have a document library, which is in some ways kind of like an online folder to store documents. But it's also more than that. You can view a document or edit it right in the web browser, or you can download it and edit in on your computer. You can also set the documents so that people have to check them out to edit them, which prevents anyone else from editing it until it's checked back in - though they can still view it.

You can do more too. You can set up a workflow, which is simply an automatic process. You can also set up an ability to have draft and published versions of your essay answers, and each person can start out with their own document for their five questions. The workflow would come in when you say to yourself, ok, I think I've got good answers now, I'm going to publish this. Then you can turn on the workflow (or it can kick on automatically whenever you upload a document to a document library you decided to call the "done" library) and it'll automatically email all the collaborators, signaling them that your document is done and ready for them to read.

Do you think something like that might come in handy in today's workplaces? Oh, you betcha. Man, companies are eating this up. But like I said, it's kind of a lot to learn for most people, and since it doesn't directly contribute to earning glory for yourself by impressing a client, most people can't be bothered to learn much more than the very basics. So they'll always need you and your expertise.

But why don't they just use Google Drive for free? Because Google Drive is...well, where is it, exactly? Your data I mean? When you upload a document to Google Drive, where does it go? No one knows for sure (probably to a server on some barge off the coast of San Francisco), but wherever it is, Google owns it. That literally terrifies company executives. They want it stored in their server in their building where their IT people can babysit it and assure them that no one else can see it. SharePoint provides the structure that allows them to do this.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to learn SharePoint with just a week or two of concentrated effort. You're willing to do that because you can make a living from then on. You may not be able to land a job like that right away. You may have to establish yourself a bit first. But it won't take as long as you think.

Maybe SharePoint won't be your thing. That's ok. It's just an example. There are lots of opportunities out there in software training. There are lots of opportunities in other areas too. Reach out to everyone you know. If you can get someone on the inside, that helps tremendously. And everyone you know that works at a good sized business has people that do their training that they can put you in touch with. Who knows - they might be hiring. And if the person you know has a good reputation with them, they'll be much more inclined to hire you.

You'll also want to target certain software companies or whatever organizations you're interested in. And when you do, be sure to Google "pain letter".

Resume tips coming soon.

Remember, this website is purely anonymous: both those who post and those who comment. Comments that name people (including the name of the commenter), churches or organizations will be deleted.

Training: the Perfect Career for Former Ministers

So you've walked away from the ministry, and now you're thinking, how on earth am I going to make a living? If you're anything like me, you have a mountain of college and seminary debt and the very last thing on your mind is adding any more education to that mountain. You're ready to earn a paycheck. Besides, your wife is probably sick of working nights in the hospital, right?

But what do you do? Who appreciates the skills of a minister/intern/seminary student? What good does it do you? There's pretty much no application for these skills outside the church...right?

When I walked away from the ministry, I couldn't even get a call back from McDonalds. I ended up taking a job in a factory as a general laborer for minimum wage, despite having a Masters degree that required about three times as many credit hours as a typical Masters. I was just desperate to take whatever work I could find.

To be honest, I was scared. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to provide for my family. I was extremely discouraged and sure we were doomed to poverty forever.

I reached out to literally everyone I've ever talked to and asked them for ideas or leads. Would you believe that about a hundred people between them couldn't come up with even one job opening that might work for me? But at least half of them said I should be a teacher.

A teacher?! My mind raced back to my days in public school growing up. Those poor teachers! Overworked, underpaid, unappreciated, forced to teach from lousy curriculum. No way! Not me. Besides, I had actually thought about that before, and like everybody else, I knew several guys in seminary whose wives were teachers. So I knew enough to know that if you want to be a teacher, you need to be certified, and to get that, you need an undergrad degree in education - which I didn't have and had no intention of getting. And even then, you'd have to start as a substitute teacher or a teacher in some tiny, non-accredited Christian school for about 25k a year. No chance of supporting a family on that income, especially with my school debts. Teacher indeed!

So all those people, those many people who knew me who said I should be a teacher - they received a snarky response about how they were uninformed or hadn't really thought their idea through and why can't you give me a useful idea? Like me, they didn't think my skills were of any use either outside a classroom.

And then it happened. Someone forwarded my email to someone I used to work for in my distant past who remembered that I did good quality work, and they said, hey, I'll give you a job doing training! And it wasn't a job offer for 25k either - in fact, it was more than three times that! I felt like I won the lottery!

It turns out there is a kind of teaching you can do that's actually fairly lucrative. It's just not called teaching - it's called training.

You see, businesses employ people, and those people need training. They need training in simple things like: writing, critical thinking and public speaking. As a former minister, you wouldn't know anything about those things would you?

Now, you may not be all that confident in your thinking and communication skills. After all, there were people in your church that criticized you, and you weren't as good as the other guys in seminary, and you're just not sure that you are capable of very much whatsoever.

Well, I'll tell you a secret. If you could examine the thoughts of most people, you'd find that they're mostly completely confused and incoherent. This is why they'd just rather watch sports or Fox news or something. Trust me, after graduating seminary, you're pretty much a samurai master of critical thinking.

And no matter how bad you think you write, you're probably light years ahead of most people. I'm convinced that most people stop learning anything about writing somewhere around junior high. They begin with incoherent, inconsistent thoughts, so it's probably no wonder that their writing is a mess. Ask any college graduate to show you one of their papers from college. I'll bet you won't even be able to discern the point of the paper.

And let's talk about public speaking. Jerry Seinfeld has a great comedy bit about it. He points out that surveys consistently show that public speaking is peoples' number one fear, ranking even higher than death itself. That means that, for most people, at a funeral, they'd prefer to be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy.

You've no doubt mastered public speaking. Even if you think you have room to improve (of course you do), just being willing to do it at all puts you ahead of most people. You can stand out in a crowd, literally and figuratively, just by being willing to stand up in front of people and speak.

Now when it comes to training, it turns out that in order to do it well, you need these skills in spades. You need to have sharp critical thinking skills because you need to be able to understand the material and explain it to others. You also have to be able to handle odd questions from students and recognize that they're asking it because they didn't really understand a concept properly that you had taught earlier. As a samurai master of critical thinking, you can see how the concepts all hang together in a coherent system and how pulling out a piece here or there will affect the whole.

Obviously, training involves a lot of public speaking in classrooms, so skills in this area are super valuable and essential. Your skills are so sharp, in fact, that you can probably train the trainers.

It turns out that you need writing skills as well. In the training world, we write lesson plans. You used to write sermon outlines or manuscripts. Now you can write lesson plans. And lesson plans have to be well written.

But, you say, I don't write well at all! My writing is quite atrocious! My seminary professor said so. Yes, but your seminary professor held you to a very high standard. Most people today write like 13 year olds. No, I'm not just being funny or even exaggerating.

I'll tell ya what. Do this little test. Ask someone at random who has never been to seminary if they can explain when to use I or me in a sentence. Oh sure, any child can probably tell you which one is correct in just about any given sentence, but I sincerely doubt any adult can explain it to you conceptually in the abstract, with the possible exception of a few over-acheiving alumni from some storied private school run by very old and very strict Dutch people or something who still hit kids on the hands with rulers.

But perhaps some of you may not know either eh? Shame on you! You can translate Greek and write exegetical papers, but you can't explain when to use I or me in a sentence? Ok, I'll tell you, but you're going to feel quite silly. It's simple really. You use I when it is the subject, and me when it is the object. See? I told you it was simple and that you'd feel silly.

Now here's where you'll really be surprised. Again, choose any adult at random. Ask them to explain when to use I or me. When they can't tell you, explain it just exactly as I did above. No cheating. Do you think it will help? I have taught writing classes to recent college graduates. Granted, most of them were math, science and engineering majors, but some of them had humanities degrees. I have yet to come across anyone who can tell me the difference between the subject and an object in a sentence.

And of course that means they can't tell you what the passive voice is, but they're pretty sure it should not be used by them (ahem). You recognized that that sentence was a lame attempt at humor. Most people wouldn't get it if you held a gun to their head (nor if a gun was held to their head by you).

Not only can you write, but you can concentrate, you can focus, and you're not lazy. This means it's possible for you to write curriculum from scratch. Lots of people out there claim to be curriculum developers, but they accomplish very little. Almost no one volunteers for this either. It's tedious, labor intensive, requires a lot of intense focus for days or weeks at a time, and it's not sexy. There's very little glory in writing curriculum. Most people simply won't do it, and those that do take about 3 times as long as it should take because it's just that hard to concentrate. Worse, the finished product is often boring, not detailed enough, incoherent and largely the same as the old curriculum.

If you go in and make a concerted effort to the glory of God, you'll be a superhero and they'll still be using your curriculum 10 years after you've left. Most curriculum developers don't write new curriculum from scratch, they just make small changes to pre-existing curriculum and repackage it. It's the blind leading the blind in most cases. They spend a lot of time surfing the internet.

Alright, I know what you're thinking. I'm not saying all this to be arrogant and make fun of the poor, unenlightened souls who haven't gone to seminary (not exclusively anyway). I'm trying to encourage you. You're far more educated than most people, much more so than you realize. You have amazing, marketable skills. Your critical thinking and communication skills in particular are sky high. These are highly prized in the marketplace.

Once you've established a little training experience outside the ministry, and you do an excellent job and can prove it, you'll be able to get an even better job, possibly even managing other people conducting training. Training can be very rewarding and satisfying.

One area that you should really consider is software training. Did you know that people can make a really good living training people how to use Microsoft Office products like Word, Excel and PowerPoint? In a big enough organization, this is a full time job. Yep, they'll hire you to update their curriculum and teach whoever needs it. You'll probably teach 2-3 days a week for about 4 hours and "update curriculum" the rest of the time.

There are all kinds of software companies coming out all the time. Many of them are trying to sell their product to enterprises, organizations of various kinds. Were you a teller once upon a time before you went to seminary? That experience, believe it or not, plus your training experience as a minister makes you a very strong candidate to teach tellers and other bank employees how to use the new software the bank just purchased. Why? Because you understand their job and you understand training. The software company will most likely be able to train you how to use the actual software - that's easy. But you'll probably get trained by a software engineer who has no idea how the actual end users will use the software. But you do, because you used to be a teller. Sure, it was a long time ago, but you could pick it up quick. The job hasn't changed that much and you've experienced it for yourself.

Or maybe you were a paralegal. You can train software to lawyers and paralegals.

Heck, maybe you worked in a McDonalds in high school. You know what? You can train people at McDonalds' corporate headquarters when they send their store managers to learn the newest version of their software so that they can return and train their employees.

The point is, you can take your education/training for the ministry and any ministry experience and call it training experience. And that's certainly not dishonest by any stretch. You have those same skills. And you can pair that with just about any other experience you have on your resume, and you've just become the golden unicorn that someone's been seeking for their training team. It's your job to figure out who these people are.

Don't go searching on Indeed or Glassdoor. Go to Google and find the companies selling the software you want to train on. Find the hottest new Silicon Valley darling in the industry, go to their website and look for the tiny link at the bottom of the page that says Careers. Click it and apply.

In another post, I'll talk about how to rewrite your resume and talk about your skills in a cover letter and interviews in the language of modern training. First, build a list of companies who might be interested in adding you to their training team.

And by the way, it's ok to dream again. And it's not a bad thing to want to make money either. You have debts to pay, no doubt, and a family to provide for, not to mention your poor wife's night job. The sooner you pay off those debts, the sooner you can make a bigger monetary contribution at your church. Maybe you can even buy a house someday and be free from the sound of neighbors' feet over your head and the deep bass line that's felt as much as heard.

There is life after the ministry. You can survive. You can even thrive.

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