I have quit my dream job twice now. I am not sure whether that makes me unusually blessed or unusually bad at keeping a good thing going. Probably both.

This is the story of how God solved a problem I didn’t know how to solve — and why solving it means we are closer than ever to stepping onto a plane to South Africa.

The first dream job was in Texas.

I moved my family there for a role that checked every box I had ever written down: worship leader, high school youth director, and all-around tech guy at a growing church that genuinely needed everything I had to offer. I poured years into that church. I helped build systems, shape culture, and watch people grow. And somewhere along the way, I realized something uncomfortable: I had given the church the best of what I had to give, and the next chapter of their growth needed someone different. Someone whose gifts aligned with where they were going as a church, not where I had already taken them.

That realization didn’t make leaving easy. It just made it necessary.

Leaving Texas led us, after much prayer and many conversations, toward missions. Specifically, toward South Africa, toward ABWE, toward a calling that had been quietly forming for years and finally had a name. We began the long process of pre-field preparation: training, fundraising, building a team of prayer and financial supporters who would carry us to the field and keep us there.

However, there was one small problem between Texas and South Africa — in the words of one of my favorite musical artists: “love is not enough; we need some money.” 😂

Before we left Texas, I had what felt like a solid plan. A church I had close family connections to had expressed genuine enthusiasm about bringing me on as a worship leader. I had been upfront with them: my schedule would be unconventional. I would need to travel. I would need flexibility that most churches don’t easily offer. They assured me it would not be a problem.

I believed them. I stopped looking for other work.

We moved to West Virginia, settled in, and I reached out to connect with the pastor. His response was kind, but the message was not what I had expected: the board had discussed it and decided that my travel schedule would make things too complicated. They were moving in a different direction.

On the one hand, that’s fair; it’s hard to work with someone who isn’t always at work. That was exactly what I had told them might happen. I just hadn’t expected them to agree with me after they had already told me not to worry about it.

So there I was: back in my home state, no job, a missions timeline ticking in the background, and a trip to South Africa on the calendar in roughly 90 days.

That last detail made the job search particularly fun. Most employers want a 90-day commitment before you take time off. I needed three weeks off before I had even earned two. Most hiring processes are automated, which meant the algorithm was not especially moved by my situation. I applied. I waited. I applied again. I waited some more.

I want to be honest here, because I think we do each other a disservice when we skip over the hard parts. Books and testimonies love to say things like “I struggled for a few months” and then move on in the same breath to the breakthrough. What that glosses over is what “a few months” actually feels like from the inside.

It feels like waking up hopeful and going to bed discouraged and not being entirely sure which one you’ll feel when you wake up again. It feels like the grating, wearing rhythm of applications and silence, of interviews that go well and then go nowhere, of doing the math on your bank account more often than is healthy. It is not despair, exactly. It is something lower-grade and harder to shake: a persistent, low-level drain on your hope.

God’s provision, when it finally came, felt like a window opening in a room that had been getting stuffy for a long time.

A large church nearby had just lost their creative director; their previous director had received a job offer that wanted her to start the next day, and she had accepted. Unfortunately, that left the church scrambling. Someone who knew someone who knew I had just moved back to the area made a call, and suddenly I had a role that fit my skills, my schedule, and my South Africa timeline far better than anything I had applied for. Within weeks, I was working again.

But only a few months into that job, I got another call. This one was harder.

My best friend EJ had a stroke.

It happened overnight, April 26th into the morning of April 27th, 2025. EJ and I went to high school together; he is 19 days older than me, and he proudly served as the technical director at Horizons Church, my home church and sending church. The church where I grew up. The church that is helping send my family to South Africa.

EJ did not see it coming. None of us did.

He had no notes waiting, no passwords recorded, no systems unlocked. He was thoughtful and security-conscious, which is exactly the right quality for someone managing the technology of a multi-campus church. It just meant that when he was suddenly gone, the systems he had built and maintained were effectively locked behind a door that only he knew how to open.

EJ has not woken up. As of this writing, it has been nearly a year.

I helped his parents set up a GoFundMe to help cover living expenses, as they moved into his home to manage his affairs while maintaining their own property in Georgia. If you would like to pray for EJ and his family, or if you want to understand the weight of what his community has been carrying, that page will tell you more than I can fit here.

Horizons reached out to me shortly after EJ’s stroke. Their ask was careful and generous: they were not trying to pull me away from my current position. They simply knew that EJ and I had worked together over the years to build and contribute to many of the tech systems and solutions still in use at the church, and that nobody understood those systems the way we did. They offered whatever I could give: five hours a week, ten hours a week, or up to full-time if my situation ever made that possible.

They left it entirely up to me.

I talked with the leadership at my current church, and they encouraged me to make the move. By mid-May 2025, I was the full-time Technical Director at Horizons Church.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is not a small thing.

I grew up at Horizons. I have spent years investing in that church in various capacities, always as a volunteer or a part-time contributor. Working there full-time, being trusted with the systems and the vision and the day-to-day rhythm of the place, has been genuinely wonderful. The staff is excellent. The culture is healthy. The mission is clear. I get along well with everyone, the work is meaningful, and I am good at it.

And I have spent the entire time knowing I am going to leave.

There is a specific kind of tension that comes with loving something you are already in the process of giving up. It is not regret, exactly. It is more like a bittersweet awareness that runs quietly underneath everything. I would catch myself in the middle of a Sunday morning, everything running smoothly, and think: I am going to miss this. And then immediately think: There is a continent I am supposed to be on.

The practical problem, though, was real. Missions work requires time that a 40-hour-a-week job does not easily give back. The phone calls to pastors, the emails to potential partners, the relationship-building and event-booking and administrative momentum that moves a pre-field missionary toward the field — most of that fell to my wife Abbey during this season, and she has carried it so faithfully. I showed up when I was invited to speak. I had conversations when conversations presented themselves. But I was not driving the process the way I needed to be.

We had always known this role was interim. The plan was always to scale back as our fundraising grew, bring someone else in to learn the systems and the rhythms, and eventually transition out entirely when the time came. The problem was finding that someone, and timing a transition when I don’t know when I can afford to leave.

Not just anyone can do this job. Horizons is a multi-campus church with layered technology, specific workflows, and a Sunday morning operation that requires someone who is both highly skilled and genuinely adaptable. As I’ve explained it before: this is a Director-level position. The person I handed this off to would not just be taking a job. They would be taking responsibility for the technical heartbeat of a church community I love deeply. The church is not going to hand that to just anyone.

None of us knew how to find the right person. But here’s where the story gets good…

He was already here.

Every Sunday, quietly and faithfully, a remarkably talented technology professional had been volunteering with us: running lyrics, showing up, doing the unglamorous work without being asked twice. His professional background is the kind that would make a church’s hiring committee feel significantly better about their Sunday mornings. And recently, his personal job situation shifted in a way that opened a window: he was looking for part-time work, with full-time availability coming in the near future.

We talked. It made sense. It made a lot of sense.

He is going to come on as my replacement. We begin training together last week, right before Easter. He is sharp, capable, easy to work with, and genuinely cares about the church. When I leave, I will leave knowing that the technical ministry at Horizons is in hands that are, in several meaningful ways, more capable than mine.

(I say that with full sincerity and only mild damage to my ego.)

The timing of all of this is not lost on me. We are currently at 61% of our monthly support goal, and I have recently been able to begin drawing a part-time paycheck from ABWE — which means the financial runway exists to begin scaling back at Horizons as the training progresses. The list of things God needed us to stay in the States for is getting shorter. This was probably the biggest item on it.

I moved to Texas for a dream job. I poured everything into it, and when it was time to go, I went. I landed in West Virginia, lost a job opportunity I thought was guaranteed, spent months in the uncomfortable in-between, and somehow ended up full-time at the church I have loved my whole life — at exactly the moment they needed someone who knew what EJ knew.

God did not waste a single piece of that.

Now, the work I was uniquely suited to do here is nearly done. The systems are more stable than they were a year ago. The person who will carry them forward has been found. And the calling that started all of this — South Africa, the people there, the missionaries already in the field, the communities waiting for the gospel — that calling has not gotten quieter. If anything, it is louder now than it has ever been.

I have quit my dream job twice. Lord willing, this third chapter is the one I have been working toward all along.

As we begin this transition, we would love your specific prayer:

• That I would have the wisdom and insight to train my replacement well, and that the handoff would be smooth and thorough.

• That the timing would align — that our support fundraising would continue to grow as work hours at Horizons decrease.

• That we would step into this next season with clarity and confidence, knowing that God who provided every piece of this story is already in South Africa ahead of us.

Thank you for praying. Thank you for giving. Thank you for believing that this is worth it.

– Joe Barnosky