Meeting Jacob

The first time I saw Jacob, it was in a photograph on a freelancer website attached to a couple sentences that described him as a friendly guy who enjoys talking to people. I’m not even sure how I stumbled on his gig. He looked more like a kid in the photo and I was there looking for computer help for a website project, the website project I started working on after God began pursuing me. Jacob listed his interests and we had a couple things in common, but, seriously, I wasn’t going to pay someone to talk to me and, anyway, he was just a kid, how much could we have to talk about?

There was something that caught my eye in the photograph though, a red reflection in the window behind him and for some reason I can't explain, I became really curious about it. I have an artist's eye that gives me an interest in color, shapes and shadow, so this wasn't out of the ordinary for me, but this time my curiosity was intense. The next day, I went back to his page, copied the image to my art program and started manipulating it. I enlarged it, I color split it, I wondered about it—a lot. I began thinking that if I bought his freelancer offer to chat, at the very least, I could ask him about the reflection in the picture and I could let this preoccupation go.

I did have one other personal hurdle to overcome though. In his profile he said, "No cursing." For me that was a red flag that I was going to be talking to a Christian. In the past, that would have been enough to stop me from talking to him, but because of my recent experiences with God my stand on this wavered more than usual. Plus, I just had a question about the photograph, it's not like this was going to be an ongoing thing. Those were my thoughts as I pressed "Order Now."

Once we started talking I found out that he wasn't a kid at all. He was a college graduate and worked with computers. We talked about our educational backgrounds, our careers and and we discussed why I had bought his freelance offer, but somehow the red reflection didn't come up in that conversation. After our first text exchanges, I thought he would be a great person to have as an accountability partner for the website project I had been struggling with. He agreed to that and we made a plan for him to check in with me a couple times a week.

The next day, Jacob had just returned from church when we started texting and that opened the door to our first conversation about religion. He told me he was Christian and that he attended the Church of the Nazarene. He asked me if I was religious. I told him what I believed, which at that point was a recently updated version of what I used to believe. Yes, I believed in God, but beyond that I was sticking to my old if there is a God convictions—If there is a God, He wasn't interested in me and He offered nothing that I needed or wanted. That is how I met my wonderful God-friend Jacob and how our journey with God began.