The Steps of a Writeous Man

I have always wanted to be a writer. When we went around the room confessing our dreams for the future in my high school Sunday School class, I said, “I want to write a hilarious novel.” I was working on a hilarious novel at the time. I never finished it, although I did get over a hundred pages into it. And it was hilarious. It didn’t make any sense, but it was hilarious.

I once had an interview to be a copy writer for a company that sells vacation packages. Before the interview, I got pretty excited about this opportunity. I already had a wife and three kids, a degree in English, most of a Master's degree in writing and a job. But no one was paying me to write, and I wanted to be a writer.

I think the man interviewing candidates was the manager of the branch. He was definitely in charge of all the people in the building. It was a small company. He could have been the founder of it. He was in his late 30s and wore a suit like a small dog wears a sweater--unnaturally. He had a double chin hanging over his collar. His tie was crooked and it was tied crookedly. His pants were too baggy in the legs and too tight in the buttocks. He called out “Eric Broswell” in the antechamber (lobby) and brought me into his office without even looking at me. His office had magazines lying on the desk, on a chair, on a coffee table, and on a sofa in the back of the office. At least nine dead and stuffed animals were placed haphazardly around the room--on top of tables, magazines, chairs and the sofa. His office wore work like he wore a suit. He gave me a rubber fish handshake and told me to sit down on the only un-cluttered chair. He plopped down in the chair behind his desk, stuck a pen in his mouth, leaned back and crossed his legs. He still hadn’t looked at me; he didn’t look me in the eye once during the entire interview. Instead, he continuously flipped through my resume and asked me questions that could have been answered by looking at my resume. Questions like, “Where did you go to college? Oh. (Sour face) Evangel.” And, “Did you even graduate from college?” He asked me--with his pen in his mouth--why I would leave the good company I was working for (and still work for) to work for his company. I told him that I would do so because I wanted to be a writer. He acted as if this were the wrong answer. He wrapped up the interview and told me they would get back to me after the writers he already had on staff had a chance to look at my writing sample.

I knew immediately that he was not going to call me. And, if he ever had called me, I knew that I had to turn that job down. I was disappointed. I had thought that this was going to be my chance to become a real writer. Instead, I had wasted an afternoon. An afternoon-and-a-half if you count the hair cut the day before. Throughout that interview, I could hear God telling me that this was not the place for me.

Now it is several years later, and I still don’t have a full-time writing job, but I know that I am working where I am working because God’s plan is better than mine. God’s path is not a shortcut, but it isn’t a long-cut, either.