But one day, it wasn’t.

One day, when I opened my small mailbox, I found a slip of paper, but it wasn’t a postcard from a friend. It wasn’t a letter from mom and dad.

It was a pink slip.

I had been fired.

As a photographer for the school paper, I thought things were going good. Sure, I had forgotten the film once for an important shoot but that was long behind me. Things were moving along, I was doing my job. But there it was, a pink slip of paper that made me feel like a failure.

I would later come to learn that the editor of the paper had fired me so that her boyfriend could become the new photographer. I got the pink slip because he got a new camera and was curious about photography. There was nothing I could do about it.

Sometimes life gives you pink slips. Editors have boyfriends. Companies have lay offs. Politics push you out the door. We’re all going to get some pink slips from time to time.

My hope is that when you do, when your mailbox has an unfortunate piece of paper in it, you won’t see it as the end of something. You won’t give in to stinkin’ thinkin’ and think this is where things stop. I hope you’ll see this as the start of something new. Something fresh and different.

One thing has ended, but you never know what that means about what is about to begin. Having spent years as a member of the Chick-fil-A leadership team I can’t imagine my life any other way. Sure I might have been fired, but there’s no denying I was meant to spend my life behind a Chick-fil-A counter, not a camera.

And that is the story of the day I got fired.

“Make sure there’s film in your camera.”

Now granted, with digital photography, the need for “film” has changed dramatically, but the lesson of being prepared is one that will forever hold true. And it’s one I learned the hard way.

I was in college. I was a staff photographer for the school paper. Things were going well with my budding photography career until one fateful afternoon. It was homecoming, an event that in college is kind of like the Super Bowl and the World Series and every other big event times 10. I had been staffed with taking photographs of all the girls in the Homecoming court.

Imagine a warm fall day in the South, me with my camera, and 7 beautifully dressed young ladies ready for a big event. In full gowns we walked through dozens of photographs. All in all, it was a perfect afternoon.

Until I got home.

I looked at my camera, ready to unload the film, when I realized to my horror, there wasn’t any. It was empty. In my nervousness, I had failed to put film in the camera!

I was horrified. I instantly felt sick to my stomach and lost. As a college student perhaps only sleeping late and missing a final is a worse experience. I had to call all the girls back. We had to shoot the whole thing over. It was a miserable day.

I learned a lot of empathy in that moment. I learned how to show grace when people mess up. I learned how to fix mistakes.

But more than that, the lesson I walked away with was very simple:

Make sure there’s film in your camera.

Recently, Dr. Billy Graham showed me how wrong that thought is.

Part of the reason we care about relevance is that right now, people have so many different options when it comes to how they spend their time and their money. Think about it, thirty years ago there were only a handful of magazines available on the stands. You either got Life or Time Magazine or maybe National Geographic. Your options were extremely limited. Those publications didn’t need to worry about being terribly relevant. They were the only game in town. If you wanted a magazine, you had to buy one of those.

But today, your magazine choices are endless. There are dozens if not hundreds of options available and they all have to be incredibly applicable to what their particular niche audience cares about. But what about Dr. Graham? How does he fit into this conversation?

Well, early on in his career, Dr. Graham became just about the only option when it came to evangelists in America. He was the one who prayed with the presidents. He was the one taking God’s message around the world. He was the one on TV. And when he was on one channel, he was shown in 33% of the homes in the country because there were only about three channels at the time. He had the sort of legacy and reach that didn’t require him to worry too much about local relevance. And yet, he did.

A few weeks ago, Dr. Graham told me that months before he went somewhere, he would subscribe to the newspaper of the town he was visiting. For weeks and weeks he would pour over the issues that mattered to the people who mattered to him. He would invest time and thought and prayer into a region long before he got there. Today, we’d call that “building relevance.”

Dr. Graham would probably call that “living compassionately.”

Caring about the things people care about is a great way to show kindness and grace to the people in our lives. Whether that means attending a coworker’s softball game or reading up on an issue you know a family member is deeply invested in. It’s an incredibly easy way to show somebody that they matter to you.

Today’s I want you to do something simple – find one way to be relevant.

Think about the people you interact with everyday. What do they care about and how can you show them you care about it too?