This is the longest job I’ve ever held. I have been there six and a half years. I felt, I felt ashamed being a janitor. I mean like, I’m not saying that I’m too good to be a janitor. I’m definitely not, but I just knew that God had a higher calling on my life. I quit school early, so I didn’t get any education. I just did whatever I wanted.
I was born with this condition. It was rare at the time, in ‘81. It’s called Ectodermal Dysplasia. My teeth were affected. I had to have mouth surgeries. My skin just had dry skin and things like that. I grew up without sweat glands, so I have grown up not sweating. That’s kind of a big deal. I love sports, so I couldn’t play sports and do all of that fun stuff because I got hot. In elementary school, kids are kind of cruel and just like not understanding why I was born the way I was or whatever. It was kind of devastating, and I kind of got made fun of. I was a loner. I got called so many names. I just didn’t want to be around that, so I got pulled out. I failed early on, like first grade. I re-did it, passed it, and went on. Failed almost every other grade (just about failed) because I just wasn’t focused in that. At age seven I got saved watching the movie Tremors. It scared me, so that’s when my Mom gave me the plan of salvation, but then, later on, I still got made fun of.
So then my teens hit, my teenage years, and that’s kind of when I got angry at God a little bit. I went off the deep end and got mixed up in drugs and all that stuff. I did every drug under the sun, but then I really got hooked on meth. Once I did it, it gave me this confidence that I had never felt before. It’s a lie, definitely a lie, but it just gave me this confidence, and I felt good. I felt secure. It was the best, most amazing drug I have ever felt before.
But then about 2005 is when I just hit the wall. I hit the wall. I didn’t overdose, but I remember calling my Mom and said, “I want out of this. I want to be clean. I don’t know what’s going on with my life.” So somehow miraculously I got off of it. I didn’t have any kind of withdrawals. I wasn’t angry. It was like God, His grace just swallowed all of that pain as far as that goes, the want of that drug. Then in 2008 I discovered who Jesus really is to me and His love for me, how deep it really goes. Like that verse, nothing can separate us from the love of God. It really just flooded my soul.
At this point, I’m somewhat stable. I’ve got a job. Of course, I’m a janitor at this point. I clean toilets and pick up trash, clean bathrooms. That’s what a janitor does.
I’m cool with being a janitor right now. I don’t know about the rest of my life. Like I said, I know God’s got something for me. I see what God’s doing right now as far as helping me to see that I’m secure in Him, so it doesn’t matter if I’m a janitor or not. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing.
Ministry is everywhere you are. Everywhere you go we are to minister to people. Ministry is not just one specific place, so now I take that, and I minister to the people at work. When people are struggling, I talk to them at work. You know, I just pray with them.
People might be nervous to go to someone higher up and talk to them about their personal life, but someone like a janitor or something, someone they feel not over, but just kind of like they might open up to me. I might be able to share some Jesus to them.
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