“May I have the courage to trust, even knowing how frail human promises can be.”
It all started in 1970. I had three travel agency offices already, but I wanted to expand. My goal was to take over the travel department of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in Washington, D.C., now located in Silver Springs, Maryland.
Over the next two years, I made five trips from La Sierra, via the Los Angeles International Airport, to Washington, D.C., to develop a working relationship with the people then heading up the travel department, which was under the treasury department (who controlled all travel arrangements). I thought that if I built up trust with my fellow travel agent friends at the General Conference, perhaps the General Conference would welcome me with open arms to handle all their travel arrangements.
Was there trust involved? Perhaps. But at that point, only from my side; none was coming from theirs. Even though I had my travel office in La Sierra, another one on the Loma Linda University campus, as well as a travel agency next to Andrews University, they still didn’t trust me to handle their travel needs.
The first real break came after my fifth trip to Washington, D.C. Back home in Riverside, at a university board meeting, I ran into the then President of the General Conference and asked if any action had been taken on my proposal.
“Yes,” he told me, and, right then and there, he introduced my business as the new travel agency for the General Conference. I saw that as a promise!
I then called the travel department in Washington, D.C., and talked directly to the associate treasurer, who let me know that there would be a delay, because it had not gone through the right committee.
Now I realized how frail this human promise was.
Yet, I kept trusting in the word of the General Conference President, who had already introduced me to the La Sierra board as their travel agent.
The associate treasurer suggested that I call back in a week. In the meantime, he assured me that he would take care of the official paperwork and send it to me.
That paperwork never came.
I did, however, receive a phone call from another department asking when I was coming. It turns out that someone else was supposed to have called me to give me the official invitation. I responded, “I will come when you invite me.”
The whole thing was a comedy of errors and missteps. But eventually, I got a phone call that said they needed me as soon as possible. I took the red-eye flight and arrived the next morning.
For ten years I handled all the General Conference travel needs. I stayed based here in California. For the last two years I was also working on my Master of Business Administration degree and would often fly to Washington, D.C., on the Wednesday night red-eye flight after my last class for the week. I’m proud to say I was the first graduate from the La Sierra MBA program (there were two in our class and M came before W).
It’s wonderful to work with the institutional church, but also takes trust and courage. For all those years I never did receive a letter of confirmation or a contract.
To be fair, it took trust and courage on their side to allow me to come in and take over the travel department.
David, in Psalms 9:10, says, “Those who know your name trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.”
Human promises are frail indeed. But the Lord, the one we are seeking to follow, will never abandon us.
Jim Manning is a travel agent and one of La Sierra’s longtime entrepreneurs; he first came to the La Sierra University Church in 1962.
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