Without Ceasing

In the summer of 2008 the Lord moved my family and I to San Antonio for a two year stint to finish prepping us for our move to Mexico. We moved there via a management transfer with my company at the time, Sam's Club. As our time in San Antonio continued to unfold I ended up having a run-in with my boss at work. She accused me of doing something I did not do and it became obvious in the course of time I was being pushed out, ableit by the Lord. Believing that the Lord had told us that we would only be in San Antonio for 2 years, and seeing that I may not make it the full two years in San Antonio with Sam's, I started looking for another job where I could make comparable money.

In the course of time I realized that this was God's will. He opened a door for me to go to work in sales for Frito Lay in our final 8 months of our time in the U.S. The Lord had a very specific reason for doing this although I did not realize why until this afternoon.

Typically my prayer life has centered heavily around spending large amounts of time in prayer and study in one sitting and then going about my day full force. To explain this in a physical parallel, this would be like someone eating only one large meal a day and then not eating another bite of food until the following day's large single feast. It's just been the way I have functioned over the years. I know some people say that they pray throughout the day. I have never been one of those people. I will sit down and pray for 2 to 4 hours at a time and then if I do pray at another time in the day I just pray in tongues or at very specific breaks of time. But never in a conversational pattern throughout the day.

This is not to say I haven't had conversations with the Lord or meditated throughout the day. I do. But I typically wouldn't pray about every step I took. I did that before I stepped out of the house and then I would go all-out while trying to be discerning as I went along. Well, this was why the Lord sent me to work for Frito Lay. He was trying to break me out of the deficiency of this pattern by eating smaller meals throughout the day instead of one large meal in the morning with a couple of very small snacks in the day. Let me explain how.

When the Lord opened the door for me at Frito Lay I was hired in as sales rep. Starting out in this job, your primary responsibility is to cover sales/delivery routes for the other reps that are on vacation or leave-of-absence. It's sounds easy on the surface and the base pay is good for what you do. But the job has many difficult variables that I've never experienced in any job I have ever had. Right after I started my immediate supervisor told me that this would be the toughest job I would ever have. He was right. Let me explain why.

• Frito Lay pays their sales reps a base salary plus variable-over-time (VROT). VROT is calculated as your base salary divided by all hours worked that week, divided by two. This determines your wage rate for every hour worked over 40 hours. There is no time-and-a-half for Overtime with VROT. This means the longer you work, the less you get paid per hour of overtime worked. This means you become cheap labor. The longer you work the less the company has to pay out in labor per man hour. This means they give you an extraordinary amount of work each day/week and there are no state or federal overtime laws regulating how much work they can dump on you. 
• Your normal work load keeps you in the field at least 60 hours per week with some holiday weeks easily taking you over 70 hours. I had one week where I worked over 70 hours in 5 days. One of the reps that I trained with worked 80 hours in 5 days.
• The average sales route has 10 to 12 deliveries a day, each taking at least an hour on average. This does not include your drive time to and from the plant across town in traffic plus your drive time to and from work in your own vehicle.
• Covering routes for other reps means your routes change every week. This means you have to learn a new route every week. This puts you in different geographic areas of the city each week. It feels like you are starting a new job every week. In fact, you are starting a new job each week, week-in and week-out.
• They don't provide you with GPS. You work everything off of your own maps that you provide for yourself after you get home from working your 70 hours.
• Every delivery truck drives differently and many are built differently. Just when you get used to driving one truck they put you in a different one. And the backs of the trucks are made of aluminum and don't have heating or air conditioning. This means that between deliveries you are either sweating to death in your polo-shirt and dress slacks or you are freezing like a pop-sickle. 
• Driving safety is a major company priority and liability. This means if you get in a wreck you are probably going to be looking for another job right after you get back to the plant. The risk is high.  
• All retailers (large and small) have different check in procedures. Target, Valero, Exxon, Sam's, HEB, Costco, all local mom and pop gas stations and grocery chains, .........They all vary and all have their own cut-off times for delivery. If you are not familiar with their systems it can set you back substantially.
• Every manager of every store can impose certain check-in and delivery stipulations beyond company policy. This means that two Exxon managers may have two different ways of checking in based on their personal preferences.
• When you do show up for delivery you may not get checked in right away, losing precious minutes to get through the rest of your route.
• Most employees that work in receiving departments of food retailers have poor people skills. That is why they have been moved to the back of the store....so they don't have to deal with the public. That means when you show up they treat you with very little if any respect.
• You are constantly rotating dated product on the shelves seeing as you are selling food items with sell through dates. Most of the routes that I covered for the full-time reps on vacation or LOA were neglected with regards to product rotation. This meant that I had to report back to their supervisors that their routes were not being properly managed. And then guess who had to spend extra time on each stop fixing and rotating all of the dated product? That would be me. Almost every bag has to be touched, popped and laced on the front row. It's very tedious once your start merchandising. It's boring and mind-numbing work.
• Products are often displayed in each store in unknown and unfamiliar locations. Every time you show up at a new location you have to spend valuable minutes locating displays and shelves, locating your product because this is not your usual route. It's like cooking in someone else's kitchen every day and asking, "Where do you keep the steak knives? Where do you keep the salt? Where do you keep......"
• You are having to order for each store for the following delivery without any knowledge of their selling patterns. Each store has different sell-through patterns on various products and the ordering system Frito Lay gave us to use on our handheld computers was often unreliable and useless in forcasting sales trends and ordering requirements.  
• It's overall physically rigorous. You move around hundreds of pounds of freight every day. You are constantly moving from standing back to kneeling back and then back to standing positions while stocking. You are up and down all day long. You are constantly on the move. In the San Antonio plant we had 150 sales reps total. 148 were men.  After I started I lost close to 10 pounds. My immune system was severely challenged for about 4 weeks. Every time I blew my nose blood would just spurt out from the sinus infections I had contracted while working.



Fun for who exactly????


The job had nothing but obstacles, obstacles, obstacles. The stress was unending from week to week. Never had I needed God more in my work from situation to situation, moment to moment, delivery to delivery, day to day, week to week.

"No discipline seems pleasant at the time but painful." Hebrews 12:11

The pattern of familiarity that develops in most jobs was gone. Just when you would get used to the nuances of one sales route the company would move you to another one with a whole new set of obstacles and challenges. The pay was great but the stress and demands were unending. You could never get into a pattern of predictability and it was frustrating for me beyond anything I had ever experienced in any job (Olive Garden management, Real Estate Sales, Sam's Club Management). The sales managers were constantly on us to meet ridiculous corporate sales quotas that were being set by home office in Plano, TX. The hours were incredibly long. And to top it all off the plant was on the other side of the city from our home meaning I drove to and from work at least 30 to 45 minutes one-way.

I could just keep going. I was grateful for the pay. I was grateful to have a job. But the job was mind-numbing and difficult in just about every way imaginable. At 40 years old I was feeling physically outmatched for the first time in my work life. I try to stay in good shape by running and swimming but this job was whipping my back side.

Through all of this I found that I didn't have time to pray like I used to. I didn't have time to gorge on the presence of the Lord everyday, fill up and go out with my stomach full of God's wisdom and power. Granted I was off on the weekends but I was so beat up physically and mentally I just wanted to sleep in and veg for two days on Saturday and Sunday.

"We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead." 2 Corinthians 8,9

The Lord had me under a type and measure of pressure that I had never faced and because of it I found myself relying on God like never before. There were so many things that could go wrong on any given day that I could only cry out to the Lord for deliverance from day to day, shift to shift, delivery to delivery, check-in to check-in. I found myself praying about things all of the time throughout every day. Truck safety, traffic, knowledge of routes, unloading of freight, check-in efficiency, favor with managers, favor with employees working in receiving departments, stocking proficiency, merchandising efficiency, ordering efficiency, meeting sales quotas from week to week, getting to each delivery with speed and ease, ......I found myself praying over details of my efforts on an ongoing-basis like never before in anything I had ever done.

All of this difficulty was there in my life by God's design to teach me to spread out the icing on the cake. The Lord was forcing me to pray without ceasing throughout my day. He was forcing me to change.

"But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed." Luke 5:16
"Be faithful in prayer." Romans 12:12
"I keep asking...." Ephesians 1:17
"And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests." Ephesians 6:18
"Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful." Colossians 4:2
"Night and day we pray most earnestly...." 1 Thessalonians 3:10
"...pray continually; ..." 1 Thessalonians 5:17

This dynamic has been critical for us in Mexico. I needed to learn this on a really deep level before we came down here. It is one of the main things we have had to learn to walk in on a regular basis out of sheer necessity. Safety in driving, finances, physical safety, protection from corruption, our immigration status, making friends, learning Spanish, speaking and communicating in every situation, paying bills, setting up our lives in every area, raising our kids in a foreign country ............All the things we took for granted in the United States we can no longer take for granted.

We find ourselves praying over things we never prayed over throughout our days and not just in our prayer times in the morning. And why? Stuff appears before us over the course of our day. Needs arise over the course of the day. The Lord shepherds us over the course of a day. Our focus is over the course of a day and throughout a day. We are called to function with Him over the course of a day. Psalms 23 bears witness to it.

I normally only write in the mornings but I felt that the Lord had me sit down this evening and put this out there, prophetically if you will. If you find yourself reading this in the Lord, and you have yet to have this worked into your life, then the Lord is going to bring a change in the circumstances of your life to bring about this level of relational prayer and faith. Changes are coming to the Body of Christ throughout the world to increase our intimacy and faith in God. And this will be a good thing in God.

Be Blessed,
JEB
http://www.miraclesinmerida.blogspot.com/