Our office is overflowing

A few days ago, we had a full office here in Asheville. It was nice to walk through the buildings and see people chatting and working and meeting in spaces that have been mostly empty for the past year. I’ll be honest: We were full because of a scheduling error, but it was nice nonetheless.

In just 16 months, we’ve seen a lot of fluctuation: Our offices have gone from overcrowded, to empty, to not-quite-empty, to full again.

Crowded back in pre-pandemic 2020 was great, but probably not efficient, and obviously not sustainable for us. To remedy crowded, and to give us space to produce our daily video news for students, WORLD Watch, we leased the building across the street from our main office.

Just after we leased the space came COVID-19, and empty struck.

Empty was sad, but it did give us time to outfit the new space without impeding the work. More importantly, it helped keep us healthy. To this day, we have not had a single case of COVID-19 transmitted at our workplace.

Still, we all were eager to move past those empty days.

And we did move past, arriving at not-quite-empty. Our buildings have been open to employees now for a few months, but we’ve been pretty careful about our return to on-site work. We have staggered our work locations—home vs. office—within departments so we could give extra space to those coming in to the office. We plan to continue that way for a while.

We also are starting to see a return of visitors to the office. Our visitor traffic coincides with the spring and fall tourist seasons in Asheville and the summer family vacation season, so we hope we’re at the beginning of a full visitor roster for the next several months. If you’re planning a trip to or through Asheville, we’d love to welcome you to our full house.

I have to say, full feels just right, and we pray that full will become an everyday occurrence instead of the result of some sort of scheduling mix-up.

In the meantime, our cup overflows with the blessing of pursuing this calling from God, in or out of the office.