Don't Be Derailed From Fulfilling Your Purpose
From the Archives: Winter 2013
By Ben Cox
When I was 21 years old, in 1976, I became severely depressed and dropped out of college. I had attended Mars Hill College for two years as a philosophy and religion major, and had transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill. But when my life began to unravel, I knew I needed to take a break and get it back together.
So many things had changed since I left for college, with a sense of destiny, to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a pastor. The plan was four years of college, then seminary, then pastor a church. However, in the fall of 1975, circumstances had conspired to cause me to deeply question my faith, and to pursue a lifestyle that I knew, in my heart, was not right.
I was home for the Labor Day break, sitting on a recliner trying to watch TV, as my mind was racing and tormented. My mom came up from behind my chair and reached over to put her hands on my face, because she was hurting and concerned for me, as only a mama can be. When she felt the tears streaming down my face, she said, “Ben, I know what you’re going through right now is hard and confusing, but I believe God has a good purpose for it.” In my anger and confusion, I shot back, “If this is how your God works, I don’t want anything to do with Him.”
Shortly after this, I dropped out of college and moved to Greenville, North Carolina, because I had two sisters who lived there. My logic was that I could live with one of them, get a job, and maybe work my way out of the mess I had gotten myself into.
I left my partying ways and spent a lot of time alone, writing poetry, trying to reach out to a God who I wasn’t sure was real. Once, in my desperation, I knelt beside my bed with a Bible and said to God, something like this: “Look, I don’t know if you’re real. I could just be talking into the air. But, if you are real, I need some sign of hope. Since I don’t believe that you’re going to talk to me in an audible voice, I’m going to randomly open this Bible and I’m going to ask you to speak to my situation.” The Bible was at my sister’s house and had belonged to my dad. I guess she had it because he had many others.
Imagine my surprise and amazement when the book fell open to an Old Testament passage. There was only one sentence underlined in that whole chapter (and I think, the whole Bible). It was in 2 Kings 20:5, and it said, “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will heal you.” That night I slept peacefully for the first time in months, and from that point on, my life began to change for the better.
Now let’s fast forward to July of 1977. I had found the woman of my dreams, and we had married on May 7, 1977. Her name was Connie McBride, and after we married, we loaded our 3 dogs and ourselves into a van to travel out west. Since I now believed that God was real, I started reading all kinds of spiritual books. I read some of the Koran, some of the Bhagavad Gita, the works of Khalil Gibran, Siddhartha, Be Here Now, and other books by modern gurus, but I also read The Bible. So, in July of 1977, I was on a mountain near Coos Bay, Oregon, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and reading from The Bible. The passage that jumped off the page at me was from John 15:5, where Jesus said, “…apart from me you can do no nothing.” Right then my Bible dropped to my lap, my hands raised to the sky and I said out loud, “I surrender. I’m yours.” In that same week, separate from me, Connie had a similar experience. From that point on, we began to ask the Lord what He wanted us to do with our lives.
We wanted to live in Oregon. We had traveled the state and loved its diversity, but every time I would pray and ask God what He wanted for us, this voice in my mind said, “Go to Boone, and wait.” Since I didn’t know for sure that a person could hear from God like that, I didn’t buy into that as a direction we should pursue. Besides, I didn’t know much about Boone. I had only passed through it once, when I was at Mars Hill and came to visit friends at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk.
One time, when calling home to talk to my parents, who lived in North Carolina, my dad asked me what our plans were. “I don’t know,” I said. “We like it so much here, we’re thinking about staying a while. What do you think?” Out of the blue, he said, “I think you should move to Boone.” I was shocked to hear him say that and asked him what prompted that statement. He said, “I don’t know. I just feel like you should look into it.”
It wasn’t long after this that Connie and I traveled back to North Carolina. We went to visit family and friends in different places, and told them that we were thinking of moving to Boone. To our surprise, everyone except my dad tried to dissuade us. “The job market is not good there. It’s hard to find places to live.” Those were the types of things that people, at least our friends and family, said about Boone in 1977. But, since we couldn’t shake the feeling of needing to come to Boone, we made an agreement. We would go to Boone to visit and stay with friends. We would try to find jobs and a place to live. We decided that if that didn’t happen within one week, we shouldn’t be here. But, it did happen.
In October of 1977, we moved to a small house in Vilas. Connie got a job in a nursing home and I got a job working construction. Little did we know that 36 years, 6 kids, and 8 grandkids later, we would still be living in Boone. But here we are, and we think we’re here to stay.
Now, let me rewind to 1976, when my mama told me that maybe God had a good purpose for the hard stuff I was going through. Though I mocked her then, I now know that to be true. It’s in The Bible in Romans 8:28 that “God works all things together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” It’s one thing to know that in theory, but my journey, from 1976 to the present, has branded this truth in my soul.
When I moved here in 1977, I knew it was important for Connie and me to find a church where we could be nurtured in our new-found faith. The church we found was just being planted, and we slowly immersed ourselves into the life of that fellowship. Because it was a young church, it had young leaders, and they set me in as a leader in 1979, accepted me into their Bible School, and then ordained me as the Associate Pastor in 1982. In 1984, I became the pastor there and grew with that church until I resigned in 2001.
That time in 2001 was difficult for my family and me, because that’s the only church we knew for 24 years. But, since I knew from scripture, and also, in my heart, that God has a good, redemptive purpose for everything we go through, I persevered and tried to keep my attitude straight. However, the thing that confused me was what to do with the pastoral call on my life. It had come to fruition, in spite of the fact that I had tried to run from it in 1976, and now I didn’t have a church to pastor.
As offers from churches and ministries, in other cities, would come in, I would pray about taking them, but I would always feel God was telling me I could not leave Boone until He gave me the OK. So, for the last 12 years, I’ve waited and prayed, done some interim and pulpit supply work, and been involved in other kinds of ministry. I am also on the leadership team in my current church, but the bulk of my time has been spent working for Main Street Marketing, the company I now own.
When the offer came for me to buy the company in 2006, I said no, because I felt it would conflict with the pastoral call on my life. But as I prayed about this, I felt like the Lord spoke this to my heart: “The thing you think will tie you up will free you up, if you build the company right.” On that basis, I bought the rights to Main Street Marketing in Watauga and Avery Counties beginning in 2007. Then, a year later, I bought the rights to Ashe County. Two years ago I added a digital advertising component, High Country 365, to the many niche marketing options my company offers. High Country 365 is available both as a website and a free mobile app.
Shortly after I purchased the company, the national and local economy got very shaky. In spite of all that, I have been very grateful for the way we have been blessed. Yet, I’ve recently battled through a crisis of faith, wondering if I really did hear God tell me to buy the business.
In addition to a fragile economy, the advertising business is highly competitive, with both reputable and unscrupulous competitors. To run a successful company in this environment has demanded all my energy and attention in a way that I had not anticipated in 2007. In short, my passion to fulfill my purpose as a pastor to this High Country region seemed to be getting choked out by the demands of my business. However, I’m pleased to report that I’m currently having some liberating major breakthroughs, and I know I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
On the one hand, we’re making some positive changes in our company, addressing the issue of building the company right. All of us at Main Street Marketing and High Country 365 are encouraged by some of the fundamental changes we’re making. We believe that these changes will lessen the stress on everyone who works here, and enhance the quality of the products we produce to help our clients’ businesses. However, the biggest positive adjustment has been in my own thinking and mindset. The reason I’ve gone into such detail about this is because my experiences tie in with the theme of our other stories in this edition, which have to do with finding and fulfilling your purpose in life.
We all have a purpose in life that we need to find and fulfill in order to be who it is that God intended for us to be, which will also make the world a better place. I now know that God destined me to be a pastor in little ol’ Boone, NC, but not just in the traditional church context. I’ve experienced, for years, the satisfaction of using my God-given pastoral gifting in the context of Main Street Marketing, that’s not a surprise. What is different is that I feel a traditional setting would be counter-productive to what I’m actually supposed to do. Therefore, I have a new determination to no longer allow this business to restrict me or “tie me up” from fulfilling my purpose for being here.
This twelve year sojourn has alerted me to a peril that we all face. That peril is this: Life’s hardships, cares, worries, temptations, and injustices can conspire against us to derail us from the good purpose God has for our lives. It’s very easy in today’s world to get hardened and cynical, and to withdraw into our own selfish worlds, looking out for ourselves, because we think no one else will. Personally, I’ve been tempted to do that many times between 2001 and 2013, and I have just gone to great lengths to describe most of my personal break-through. However, I want to leave you with one final thing.
By God’s grace, He has been inspiring me to make the next 20 years of my life, God willing, full of life and purpose. The purpose is to be fully who God’s called me to be, and to be a force for good in a hurting, broken, and often evil world. He has taken me through a process to get me to this point, but it kicked into another gear when I opened the paper and read the headline about the slaying of the innocents in Newtown, Connecticut.
Though there have been many senseless acts of violence like this in my lifetime, for some reason this evil event shook me to the core of my being. I felt almost as bad as I did when I first heard about the terrorist attack of 9/11/01. In fact, I dropped my paper and looked to heaven and said, “What are we supposed to do in the face of such evil?” As clear as a bell, God spoke to my heart, “The only way to overcome evil is with good.” That statement is also found in the Bible in Romans 12:21. When I pondered this, I knew that He wasn’t talking just about overcoming evil by doing good works. That’s important, but it’s got to go deeper than that. Remember, even people with questionable motives can do good works. What I’m talking about is being good as a person.
The only real way that you, or I, or anyone, can be the kind of good person that this world so desperately needs, and to be who it is He intends for us to be, is with God’s help. In light of that, I’ve been asking God to help me be a good man to my wife, my kids, my grandkids, my employees, my clients, my friends, and yes, even my enemies. I’ve also been asking Him to forgive me for the many times I fail to do this, and to please make perfect His strength in my weakness. I’ve also been praying that God would do that same softening of all our hearts here in the High Country. No matter what your denomination, your religion, your politics, or your opinions, God knows we need it.