Chapter 5: Seventeen Positions in Twenty-Three Years

When I accepted my first position with the State Office of Mental Health, I didn’t see it as a calling fulfilled. I saw it as employment—necessary, stable, responsible. I had returned home uncertain, carrying the quiet weight of what I believed I had lost. This job felt practical. It felt like the best next step available.

What I couldn’t see then was that this decision would unfold into a twenty-three-year journey through seventeen different roles.

My early work placed me face-to-face with the realities of public mental health—its limits, its pressures, and its quiet opportunities to serve those with few advocates. What felt like a substitute for a missed calling slowly became a classroom I never planned to enter.

As the years passed, each role stretched me in new ways. I learned not only clinical care, but how systems function, how funding and policy shape services, and how leadership decisions ripple through entire communities. At the time, I called this career development. In hindsight, it was formation.

With each position, I was being quietly equipped—learning to lead without clear answers, to make decisions affecting many, and to remain compassionate in environments where pressure often erodes tenderness.

God also shaped me through people. A supervisor saw ability in me before I fully saw it in myself, trusted my input, and invited collaboration. That professional relationship grew into a lasting friendship. Through him, I learned the power of being seen and given room to grow.

Consultants we worked with also left deep marks. John Izzo’s Putting the Soul Back in Health Care connected organizational health with the inner lives of those doing the work. David Hutchens taught the power of story—how people and systems change when they can see themselves within the narrative. At the time, it felt like professional development. Looking back, it was divine alignment.

During these years, I earned my Master’s in Counseling and became a licensed Professional Counselor. What once felt like a diverted path became a place of deep skill-building and endurance.

Much of that season felt ordinary—meetings, budgets, policies, training schedules. Slow. Incremental. Unseen. Yet those very tools later placed me in ministry settings I once believed I had forfeited.

What I thought was a detour was actually the curriculum.

What I thought was delay was preparation.

What I feared was failure was, in truth, mercy.

Seventeen positions in twenty-three years weren’t restlessness. They were formation—clinical, administrative, relational, and spiritual.

The long middle didn’t feel holy at the time.

But in hindsight, it was quietly sacred.

Who has God used to shape you in ways you didn’t recognize at the time?

What seasons once felt merely “professional” that you now see as deeply formative?