The phone call

I was browsing through a shelf of Christian devotional books when my phone rang.

My wife and I had gone to a book exhibition at the YMCA nearby. It was an ordinary outing during a period of my life that did not feel particularly ordinary. I was between roles, the three months of severance I had received were drawing to a close, and I did not yet know what would come next.

There had been no plan to meet anyone that day. No professional event, no interview and no carefully arranged conversation. We were simply walking through the exhibition together when the call arrived.

The person on the other end had been my manager during my PGDBA summer project twelve years earlier.

A pause I had not planned

The role before that call had lasted around a year and a half. Then the company was acquired, and the team I belonged to was asked to move on. A severance package gave me three months in which to decide what came next.

My family thought I should take a little time before beginning another search. They called it a vacation. I think they were being kind.

So I slowed down. There were short holidays and visits to family and friends. After years of moving from one responsibility to the next, the change of pace should have felt welcome. Some of it was. But a break feels different when it follows a decision you did not make.

Career uncertainty is rarely confined to the practical question of finding another job. It reaches into how we see ourselves. A title disappears from the working day. Familiar routines stop. People ask what you are planning, often with genuine concern, and sometimes you do not have an answer that sounds reassuring even to yourself.

I had experienced enough by then to know that one role ending did not end a career. Knowing that intellectually did not remove every moment of anxiety or self-doubt.

As the three months drew towards their close, the question of what came next naturally became harder to set aside.

Then the phone rang.

A voice from twelve years earlier

The former manager who called had supervised my PGDBA summer project. We had remained loosely connected over the years in the way many professional acquaintances do. There was goodwill between us, but no active conversation and certainly no expectation that he would play a part in my next move.

He came directly to the point. What was I doing? Was I available for a position he had in mind?

I said yes.

He explained that I would need to meet his boss for an interview. If it went well, the role would also mean relocating from Hyderabad to Noida.

I went for the interview. I was offered the position. Within a week, I had joined.

The speed of what followed stood in sharp contrast to the uncertainty that came before it. For weeks, I had not known how the next chapter would begin. Then an unexpected call in the middle of a book exhibition changed the direction of our lives.

Not every bridge is engineered

I have thought many times about the sequence of events. The acquisition. The severance. My family's encouragement to pause. The visit to the YMCA with my wife. The devotional books in front of me. The call from someone who had first seen my work twelve years earlier. The interview. The move to Noida.

It is tempting to make a professional formula out of a story like this. Keep in touch with everyone. Build your network. Make sure people remember you. There is value in caring for professional relationships, but that explanation has never felt large enough for what happened.

I had not maintained that relationship because I expected a future opportunity. He did not call because I had recently reminded him that I existed. The moment was not the result of a plan I had carefully put in motion.

What mattered was that the work we had done together all those years earlier had left enough trust for him to think of me. The relationship had not been treated as a transaction, so it could remain quietly alive without either of us knowing where it might lead.

Even that does not fully explain what the experience meant to me.

During uncertain periods in my career, I have known the very human urge to control every possible outcome. Update the plan. Make another call. Search harder. Keep moving so that fear does not catch up.

Action matters. We remain responsible for doing the work in front of us. But I have also experienced a particular kind of peace when I have placed what I cannot control into the hands of my Creator.

I do not say that as a polished answer to uncertainty. Faith did not make every question disappear, and it did not spare me from self-doubt. It gave me somewhere to place the questions when I had done what I could and still could not see the road ahead.

The phone call at the book exhibition did not teach me that everything will always unfold quickly or neatly. Life has given me enough evidence to know otherwise. It reminded me that I am not the sole author of my own story, and that the next bridge may be taking shape beyond the limits of what I can presently see.

Faithful work matters. Values matter. Genuine relationships matter. We should cultivate all three without trying to turn them into guarantees.

Sometimes their meaning becomes visible only years later, when a phone rings in a place where we had gone for an entirely different reason.