Post 7: A Storm is brewing
Image: AI generated image of a man looking out of his office window with a storm showing outside
Post Summary: In the previous post, I discussed how I began my search for finding a gospel centered church in my local area. This post discusses one of my earliest examples of finding the peace of God amidst the rising pressure at work.
In March 2024, a few weeks after God's salvation found me, I was put on a 60 day performance improvement plan at work. This came after receiving a poor end of year 2024 performance review, and then making a fairly bad error in my work (according to how my boss described it to her boss). My boss had cited a few reasons for the 60 day performance improvement plan, including procrastination that lead to several missed deadlines from the previous year, lack of interest in growth within the team, and poor performance in internal client care. The bit about poor client care was especially surprising, given that every internal client that I had worked with on various projects had only good things to say about their experiences working with me. She also said I did not communicate efficiently about workload, deadlines or anticipating needs of internal clients better since I'd been there over 5 years at this point.
The jist of this Performance improvement plan was that my manager was now going to evaluate and report on every aspect of my work, from taking on projects, to planning and executing new projects. This plan also included keeping a typed journal record of every thing that I was doing each day to measure the use of my time. If she thought I was not doing enough work in one day, she would add more work. She also began pointing out every little mistake, as infrequent as they were. She also became overall more nitpicky about every little thing. I would imagine (though had no actual proof) that she would speak to HR using the right corporate buzz words to make it seem like I was a terrible employee. She began making it seem like she just could not wrangle me to do things the way she wanted. It was almost like she was trying to make things ridiculous so that I would quit and they would not have to deal with firing me, which ultimately happened later.
When the PIP initiated at the beginning of March, that introduced a bit of anxiety around my job security. I began including this situation on my prayer list, asking God to work this situation in my favor, change the heart of my manager, and help me with the anxiety and uncertainty I was feeling about the job. As the PIP progressed, there were some hits and misses in my expected performance improvement, but overall my manager seemed to be giving more positive feedback than negative feedback. However at the conclusion of the PIP in May 2024, she informed me that I was “unsuccessful at completing the PIP” and therefore deemed “unsuccessful in the current role”. This honestly came as a bit of a surprise considering a greater portion of her overall feedback as we worked through the PIP was postitive. Though I failed the review, they determined they were not going to make any decision right away.
Despite the growing pressure at work and the subsequent failure of job performance, I was finding peace during this storm. I had been praying for peace regardless of the outcome and the Lord was answering that prayer in real time. During this period of job uncertainty, the bible verse Romans 8:28 kept coming into mind. This verse says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose”. Having recently come into the salvation of the Lord, this verse gave new assurance that although a negative outcome may result in this situation, it would somehow lead to seeing more of the goodness of God in my life.
In summary, the worry about this storm that was brewing at work was being redirected in prayer and trust in the Lord. In seeking the Lord instead of focusing on the anxiety of the situation, I came across a very important bible verse that reminded me about the peace of God. This verse, Philippians 4:7 says "And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus". Meditating on this and focusing my attention on Christ instilled me with His amazing peace about this situation and removed the anxiety about what was to come.
Indeed, I had found myself in the midst of a storm at work, but despite this challenge, staying focused on the Lord removed my worry about the outcome. Stay tuned for the next post where I discuss one of the first people I attempted to witness to about the salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ.