It is time to return to the narrative storyline, after a nine month break from that aspect of things. When I left camp at the end of that summer, I returned to LA immediately. After being gone for 11 weeks, there was a lot to be done there. While Ben had been working in the office, things hadn't gone as smoothly as we hoped. They had almost called me back down three weeks early, but that request had gotten cancelled after I made the preparations. The issues weren't entirely his fault. He had made a couple of mistakes, but there were a lot of other things going on at the company as well. Two different major projects had been cancelled and a number of people had been let go.
Ben was anxious for me return, so he could escape what had become a very uncomfortable situation. He took off after only a day transition for me to get re-acclimated, but things got better once I was back in the office. He headed back home, but I let him keep most of the outside clients that I had been previously doing web site work for. He had taken care of them while I was gone, and I didn't see a reason to transition back. Since I was getting busier at the office as Bandito expanded, I didn't need the extra work, nor did I have time for it, and Ben was trying to get his freelance web programming enterprise off the ground. So the addition of my previous clients gave him a jump start. And that is how I got out of the web design business.
When I got back, I soon realized that Mouse, the company president was treating me very differently than he had before. We didn’t usually directly interact very much anyway, so it took a while to notice. I was probably the only employee in the office that he treated with the slightest shred of respect, and that was much more pronounced when I returned. My boss is the one who brought it to my attention, attributing it to my absence at camp. “He can’t figure out how someone as smart as you can still believe in God.” And it clearly challenged his existing world view: that you have to be stupid to believe in God. And I continue to challenge that view to this day, without directly rising to his occasionally provocative comments, attempting to draw me into a debate that is never worth winning. But my decision to forego three months pay and obvious career ramifications to go work at a “Church Camp” for the summer definitely made a statement at work. It tied my clearly different lifestyle, which everyone was already aware of, to an explicitly Christian connection. It allowed me to demonstrate and share my faith in a very powerful public way, through my actions, without preaching at anyone.
I work with many strongly opinionated atheists, but I have managed to maintain their respect of both my views and my lifestyle. Some would say that comes at the cost of forgoing any explicit evangelism, but believe that merely representing the alternative to their worldview through my actions in a consistent and genuine fashion, is a stronger message than anything I could verbally say to them. And most of them do not hold their views out of ignorance of the other options. Many were raised Catholic or in various Christian backgrounds. It is a conscious decision at the end of the day, it always is.
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