Life Changing events

How do you know that you are doing what God wants you to do? Is it really possible? Does God just expect you to do the right thing without giving you guidance or some sort of sign?

I believe he does all of those things and more. But how does one KNOW?

These are all the questions I have been asking myself for the past two and a half years. More intensely in the last year - for reasons that will become apparent.

I was a social studies teacher for 7.5 years. I left teaching in January of 2000 to become a web developer for Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART).

Leaving teaching was one of the hardest decisions I had made up to that time. I felt (and still do feel) that God made me to be a teacher. I'm very good at it. I can control a class, I can make history interesting, I give good/hard assignments that aren't Mickey Mouse (in general). The kids seemed to respect me and respond to my style of teaching.

During the 99-00 school year, I was having a great time. I was teaching at one of the best schools in my town. I had been there long enough (two years) to have a reputation. I started to get siblings of kids I had had before and heard good things from them. For some reason, a friend of my from DART, Ray G, kept sending me job openings that he thought I would be interested in. I kept deleting them because I was exactly where I wanted to be. But one day, I got a job description that had my name all over it. It was to be a sort of web master for the DART intranet. I knew that if I didn't learn how to do database connectivity and dynamic web pages soon I was going to get left behind, technology-wise. I was worried about doing html for the next ten years and knew that I wanted to learn more.

Carla and I prayed about it and decided that I would interview for the job, testing to see if this was what God wanted me to do. I interviewed in November and heard that they wanted to hire me at $50K. I would go from $35K to 50 in one month. How's that for a raise?

We decided to go for it and I left my mother profession at the end of the Fall semester in 1999.

The next three years and eight months were very...interesting and are a story for another day. I learned how to work for and be accountable to one person (something teachers rarely have to do). I learned how to use my time more wisely. I learned how to do database connections, vbscript, javascript, and sql. But, I wasn't really happy or content. It wasn't that I felt I was in the wrong place, I just felt that there was somewhere else I could be. Does that make sense?

To be continued...