Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: Shrewdness (03/07/05)
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TITLE: Manna | Previous Challenge Entry
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03/13/05 -
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When I left my company to start my own design business, one of the first clients I took on was a painter, whom I had worked with in the past on some of his gallery catalogs. He agreed to fly me from New York to Florence and pay me for my time so that I could help him lay out a coffee table book of his work thus far. The great thing about working with artists is the sort of bohemian glamour of it. Late nights in huge, messy studios, surrounded by the acrid smells of paint thinner and cigarettes. Seeing beautiful work created from mere ideas. The worst thing, however, is that artists, painters in particular, are either riding their financial high horse, or broke as broke can be, at any given moment. So, this client, seemingly on one of his financial highs, was meant to cover my living and working expensed for the first two months of the terrifying freelance life. I have to say, I felt a very shrewd, orchestrating such a cool job on my first attempt, and thrilled at the chance to exercise my creativity in Florence, of all places. I was to fly there at the beginning of January, and spent Christmas and a New Years Eve, smugly pleased at the way it was all working out. However, an enormous red flag reared it’s ugly head when he called me New Years day to say that he had been waiting on the sale of one of his paintings that hadn’t gone through; the project was off. In the blink of an eye, my little web of success and security was unraveled. My visions of working in some Renaissance studio in Italy, possible fluent in Italian after just the first week, quickly crumbled. The reality of being in New York, without any prospects of travel or work set in. In other words, complete despair.
I did what any Christian, or maybe simply any desperate person does, I prayed. I prayed and prayed for work, but I did not feel peace. In facing the New Year I saw only a gaping unknown where my career path had been. I didn’t even know how I was going to pay my rent. A friend got me a job checking coats at a restaurant, at night and I spent days frantically sending out my resume, samples of my work and trying to round up clients. I would like to say I did it all with grace and a combination of confidence in myself and my work, but I think I was buzzing around in a panic, more akin to a fly banging repeatedly against a glass window, trying find a way out. After a few weeks, when I thought I could not possibly take one more Burberry trench coat and put it on a hanger, something gave. My prayers, which felt until then, like they were being sent straight into a black hole, were answered. One by one, job prospects began to pop up. First, consulting part-time with a magazine, then a new client who needed a website, another who needed a poster designed. The magazine offered me more money than I dreamed of making so soon and asked me to start, on the same day that I was to have left for Italy. During the time of searching for work a friend suggested that I read Exodus 16, the story of the Moses and the Israelites in the dessert. God tells his people, after he has provided for them, to “Take an omar of manna and keep it for generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat when I brought you out of Egypt.”* Those first professional breakthroughs are my Manna, I think, a reminder that it is God’s shrewdness, rather than my own, that keeps it all going.
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