Janice M. Jones - From Dust to Glory

From

Dust

to

Glory

Janice M. Jones

From Dust to Glory

Trilogy Christian Publishers A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network

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Copyright 2022 by Janice Jones

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved .

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Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-68556-779-8

E-ISBN: 978-1-68556-780-4

Dedication

I want to thank the Lord Jesus Christ for allowing me to come this far in my life to write this book. I also want to dedicate this book to my children, Bralynn, Noah, and Khiren. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength ( Philippians 4:13) .

Blessings
Disguised as
Setbacks

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord . They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11).

Do you live life with your own personal agenda? For most of my adult life, I worked, turning my focus on titles and wealth. Most of the time, I found myself in a position working long hours, not seeing my family, crying on my way to work, and stagnant. I spent most of my career in the logistics industry, which is very physically demanding. I remember in one of my college courses learning that there were not many women in the industry, especially on the warehousing side.

I grew up in a household where I knew the Lord Jesus Christ and went to church on Sunday. I am one of four children to my parents, who both worked hard to provide for their family. Although we may not have had everything, we had what we needed. I wanted to make something of my life that had meaning and purpose. I wanted to be a dentist when I first started college; however, I changed my major. Throughout my life, I feel like there have been periods when I have been lost and needed direction. I have also learned that man will always fail us, and God will not. I have learned that I must live in expectation daily for the goodness of the Lord.

Fresh out of college, I had the mindset that I wanted to prove to myself that I could make it to the top in this industry. I quickly learned how demanding it could be after working for a few years and not having a life outside of work. As time went on in the industry, there were certainly adversities I had to overcome just to be a face in the room. In my career, I have certainly had experience trying to work in corporate America and being held back. I can recall applying for an operations manager position with a company early in my career. The hiring manager told me I did a great interview; however, he did not think the employees would take me seriously because of the way I looked. I worked hard in an industry where most of the time, I had to prove myself working in an environment lacking women. There had been times when I was the only person of color in leadership on my shift, trying to overcome the demands of a challenging industry. Despite the trials, I was still determined to defy the odds and do what I wanted to for my own life. I had become a slave to my own will in life. I did step outside of the management side of logistics to other roles once or twice; however, I always ended up back on the management side. It always paid well, and I had a family to help support.

As I look back at my life as a child of God, it now makes sense to me that it does not matter that I have a double bachelors degree and an MBA. By the worlds standards, that would mean a lot. Someone may look at that as a sign that one may be accomplished and well educated. That may also be a sign to others that weve made it. From a godly perspective, it means absolutely nothing. The only things that those degrees have gotten me are a bunch of student loans and the right to say I have an MBA. The degrees over periods of my life have left me feeling as if I should have been in seats where I was not. It has made me feel like I have failed myself at times, but I now understand that I was only trying to live up to what the world said I should be and not what God said I should be. I would take pride in telling someone I had an MBA, but the MBA had done nothing for my career. It put worldly pressure on me to look at what God had for someone else and compare their plan to the plan He had for my own life. This was only one of the tactics the enemy tried to use on me throughout the years when I tried to work in my own will.

Even now, as I look back on my career, I see the enemy used people to try and push me out of the light of God. What the children of the light do not realize is that not everyone is of the light of the Lord; therefore, Satan will use those in the world to get at the people of God. He will use them to try and bring us down, especially when he knows weve got a great calling over our lives. There are those who have been chosen and those who have been called into this world. If the Lord has woken us up from that long slumber to do mighty things on this earth for the kingdom of God, then Satan will pull all of the tricks in the book along with his demonic forces to stop us. I didnt know this in my early career when I would work on these jobs out of college, and I would face adversity after adversitytrying to work my way up the ladder only to encounter someone always wanting to stop me. It would always be something about my job.

If Id only known the things I know today, I would have known how to bind and rebuke the enemy in his tracks. I can recall on a job how this man would always come up to this other lady and me on my job to have us thinking that one was saying things about the other; it was not until I was leaving that I found out the truth. This is what Satan would do on my jobs to keep me down. Joshua 1:9 says, This is my commandbe strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. For if only I knew at that time that I was under attack because of the calling on my life and that I needed not to be afraid because the Lord my God has always been by my side. He has never left or forsaken me in my darkest hours of attack by the enemy on every job that I have had. He knew that I would walk in the paths that I have walked and that I would choose the paths that I would take. It would not be until years later that He would break me down to the deepest levels of understanding to come to terms with knowledge and understanding that I must either continue in my own ways or choose a new way with Him.

These new ways would be a method of total realignment of everything that I had come to know. It would shake me and wash me to make me into what I am today. I always wondered why I was who I was and why I had to go through some of the things that had shaken me to my core. I always knew there was something different inside of me that only I felt and knew about, but others only did not see. Ive been called everything under the sun, but deep inside, I know I am a child of the Almighty God. It took the calling of the Great I AM for me to fully come into who I am today, yet to realize the things of my past would shape me for my tomorrow. Those experiences would lead me down a path of righteousness for His names sake in order to help someone who would be walking in my same footsteps one day; however, they may not know the Lord Jesus Christ and may not even understand why they will be going through the trials that they will be facing.