Part 3
While I was in Seattle, Karl, our computer guy at Keynote, shipped my Mac to Apple so they’d replace my hard-drive. When I got it back, he helped me get everything reinstalled. We were about to reinstall VMware, the program I used to run Windows, when he told me that I’d need the program’s key to install it again. He suggested that I search through all my old emails to see if I had it saved somewhere.
I didn’t.
In the middle of searching, I got a new email from VMware. I rarely get emails from them and when I do, I delete them. I mean, they’re boring. But since I happened to be searching for an email for this very program, I opened it, scrolled down a little, and stopped cold.
My eyes rested on an invite to come to an unveiling of some new version of the program—at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Venetian Hotel is where XXX is having their vision night.
For some reason, it was beginning to seem like God would be persistent on placing the date and place of this vision night before me.
So I casually mentioned Vegas to a few close friends. Everybody thought it was cool, but the issue with running in a missionary crowd is that we don’t exactly have deep pockets. So I prayed. And when I began to think that I and whoever God would provide would probably have to pay about a grand a piece for this weekend, I started praying a little harder.
“Ok God, you know I want to go this thing. And you seem to keep putting it before me, so I’m just gonna start asking you for specifics. Would you make a way for K-Trout to come?”
Kristin told me from day one that she’d think and pray about it. I thought this thinking and praying would take a couple days. Three weeks later, she finally gave me her answer.
“WE’RE GOIN’ TO VEGAS, BABY!”
I almost peed. But at least this time I didn’t cry.
When I first asked K-Trout if she’d go with me, I started looking up prices for flights and hotel reservations. Like I said, the vision night is happening at The Venetian—a five star, super swanky, been-in-movies kind of joint. So I figured it’d be easiest to just get a room there.
Three weeks later, when she had finally given me her answer, the price that I had found was exactly the same. I mean, I think it went up like five bucks. But that’s exactly the same in my book.
So here’s what God did: he provided my best friend—who praise God, thinks a whole lot differently than I do, and provided her with enough vacations days and enough money to just drop. Unreal.
When we bought our tickets, we added on a rental car and still paid well under what I thought we’d pay. I mean by like hundreds of dollars. It was ridiculous.
During this time, everyone around me was encouraging me to respond to Brandon’s email and ask for some clarification. But I was scared. I’ll admit it.
I knew I needed to respond somehow, but I couldn’t decide who to write to.
“Do I respond to Brandon? Well, I’m kinda scared of him for no good reason right now. What about Jeanette? She was the one I wrote to initially. Should I get Craig in the loop? If I do, is it gonna look like I’m going behind Brandon’s back? I don’t want to look like a five year old.”
All of this was motivated by fear—fear of further rejection, fear of stepping on toes, and fear of single-handedly slamming the door in my own face.
So I decided to write an email asking to meet with someone from the team face-to-face while in Vegas, unsure of who I’d ultimately send it to. Once it was written, I decided not to look at it for two weeks and instead, pray that if anything needed to be added or deleted, that God would show me.
Carole told me she’d read over the email and look at it from an HR perspective since she deals with hiring people all the time—just to make sure I had all my bases covered. During that two week time period, I never heard back from her about what she thought of it. I decided not to ask. God would make it clear. That, I was sure of.
True to form, he did. After two weeks, I read the email again. It just didn’t sit well with my spirit. So I didn’t send it.
I was in the middle of battling through a lie Satan threw at me from the first moment I read Brandon’s email. “In my zeal, I’ve become annoying to them, and they don’t like me.”
Over the weekend, I started flipping through Romans after weeks of being out of the Word. Immediately, God spoke.
Romans 12:9-12 says, “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”
I couldn’t believe it. I don’t exactly use the word “zeal” a whole lot in every day language, but for some reason, that was the main word in the lie that I was choking on. And there it was. Never be lacking in zeal.
I cried. Of course.
I started praying that God would have XXX send their vision night invitation so I at least knew I was still invited to this thing. I totally expected it to come via snail mail, so when I opened my inbox a few days later and saw an email invite with all the specs on where to go and what would happen, I knew that God and I were back in business.
He was talking. I was listening. I was talking. He was answering.
In that invite it specifically said that if you wanted to get together with anyone from the board or staff during your time in Vegas, to respond to the invite—a generic XXX email, not a specific person—and they’d set it up.
Two prayers answered in one shot. God let me know that yes, I was still invited to the vision night and no, I didn’t have to worry about who to send my email to. All I had to do was respond to a generic address and ask to meet with someone. Beautiful.
A couple days later, I got a message on my voicemail from a friend who knew nothing about what was going on in my life. She said “I’ve been praying for you and I just really feel like God’s telling me that he’s got something new for you. So, there you go. Call me back.”
Seriously?
The next morning, Kristin was getting ready for work and had her radio on. “I’ll keep you my dirty little secret.” I stopped what I was doing around the word “keep” and slowly walked over to her bathroom. “What are you listening to?” She lifted her groggy soap-covered face out of the sink and looked at me in the mirror. “What?” “Is that the radio?” “What? Yeah…”
Dirty Little Secret is a song by The All-American Rejects that XXX would use to intro all their podcasts—which until then, I’d heard on the radio maybe once.
Over the next few days, I must have heard that song 3 or 4 more times. Two days later, I was poking around on an emo hair website and clicked on a picture of a girl with fantastically bright electric blue hair. When I scrolled down to see the entire shot, I stopped and stared at the picture’s description.
X3.
X3’s an abbreviation XXX uses for themselves all the time.
A few minutes later, K-Trout and I hopped into her car to go to Wal-Mart. At a red light, right before we pulled into the parking lot, the radio announcer came on. “Hi, this is Brandon and you’re listening to…”
Brandon? I literally grabbed the car door and yelled “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”
We walked into Wal-Mart. When we rounded the corner from the store’s entrance, I was met by a wall of new DVD releases—all the same film—What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas.
What. The. Heck.
It was then and there that I told God to stop. That it was too much. That I couldn’t handle anymore of these “signs.”
So he stopped. Soon after, I realized that it would in fact actually be better to have a God who speaks a lot over a God who’s silent.
I decided that I wasn’t going to read into all of these “signs” as if they meant that I was destined to become a part of the XXXChurch team, regardless of the Dear Jane email. Instead, I decided that I’d simply take them as God telling me to definitely go to the vision night—for whatever reason.
Very shortly after I matter-of-factly told God to quit speaking to me with all the signs, I began begging him to have another go at it.
A few days later, K-Trout and I were over at the “free stuff” table at the office waiting for our Marketing meeting to start. There was a brown grocery bag there that was new, so she stuck her hand in and pulled out a wine glass wrapped in tissue paper. As she unwrapped it, we saw that there was writing on it.
“National 1987 ACOG” Blah, blah, blah…
“Las Vegas.”
We looked at each other and laughed. She stuck her hand back in the bag and proceeded to pull out all the other wine glasses—each with a different city’s name etched on it.
But Vegas was the first out of the bag.
