Things You Don’t Put on a Resume

August 31, 2026

I wasn’t at Bio-Rad long enough to know where to order the paperclips. Ninety days was about all it took for me to realize that sometimes the most important things a man learns in a job are the very things that will never appear on his resume.

I came from red dirt in Northeast Alabama, right up against the Georgia line, where the Coosa River bends around the land near Cedar Bend Road and the foothills of the Appalachians begin to rise. My father raised about a hundred and ninety head of beef cattle, and every year he bet nearly everything on those animals. There were calves to pull, fences to mend, feed to put out, grass to watch, markets to worry over, and weather that could undo months of work in a single afternoon. That was my first classroom. Dirt, cattle, work, risk, and the slow arithmetic of a year lived outdoors.

A farmer learns early that he can do everything in his power and still remain dependent on something greater than himself. You can mend the fence, plant the seed, pull the calf, and put out the feed, but you cannot command the rain. Scripture says, “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6). I did not understand that verse as a boy the way I understand it now, but I lived inside its truth long before I knew how to explain it.

Eventually, I left that world and went into politics and sales. In 1988, I worked in Washington for Richard Shelby. After that came Chesebrough-Pond’s, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and then VWR Scientific. At VWR, I sold chemicals, clean-room products, laboratory equipment, and just about anything else a laboratory could need. I became good at selling because I learned how to read a room, get around gatekeepers, take rejection, study people, and keep moving after somebody told me no.

I won VWR’s NASA VIP award and got to watch STS-104 launch in July 2001. For a red dirt cattle farmer’s boy from Northeast Alabama, standing there watching a spacecraft leave the earth was something I never could have imagined when I was growing up around barns and pasture fences. I had traveled a long way from where I started, but I had not yet learned that distance can be dangerous if a man forgets where he came from.

Before Bio-Rad, there was a rainstorm.

I was still with VWR and going through a divorce that was tearing my life apart. My marriage was disintegrating, and a heated custody battle had begun. At the same time, I was working toward what may have been the biggest sale of my career, the Boeing Delta IV contract in Decatur, Alabama.

I had done my homework. I knew who the decision maker was, and I knew the people around him guarded his time. One night, in the middle of a hard rain, I found a way to get in front of him. I stood beside a trailer soaked to the bone, introduced myself, handed him my literature, and made my case. He was impressed that I had figured out how to reach him, and eventually we got the contract.

The night before I was supposed to be there to sign it, I was arrested during the turmoil surrounding my divorce. Instead of sitting across the table from Boeing, I was sitting in the Etowah County lockup. I had to call my boss from jail and tell him I could not make the biggest signing of my career, and VWR had to fly someone down from Philadelphia to finish what I had started.

The case was later thrown out, but the consequences did not disappear when I walked out of the courtroom. The arrest became part of the record surrounding me, and I felt the effects of it professionally. There are some things that can be dismissed legally and still follow a man socially. There are wounds that never show up on an X-ray, accusations that leave no scar on the skin but settle somewhere much deeper.

I carried a lot of anger from those years. Scripture says, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26). I wish I could tell you I knew how to live that verse then, but I didn’t. Sometimes the sun went down on my anger for months. Sometimes it went down on it for years.

Then Bio-Rad came along.

At the time, the offer looked like an answer to prayer. The salary was around $130,000 a year, and the position included legal insurance, something I had hardly heard of in those days. I was fighting for my child, paying attorneys, and trying to hold my life together. Bio-Rad looked like stability, protection, and a way forward. In my mind, it had all the markings of rescue.

Looking back, I see something I could not see then. I was asking a company to do something no company can do. I was looking to a job, a paycheck, and a benefits package as if they could save me. Scripture says, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7). My chariot just happened to come with a salary and legal insurance.

I wasn’t at Bio-Rad long enough to know where to order the paperclips, but I was there long enough to hear something that I have never forgotten.

Bio-Rad’s headquarters in Hercules, California, sat along San Pablo Bay. The company restaurant was the kind of place that made a farm boy notice the distance he had traveled. Large windows looked out over the water and sky. The food was as fine as anything you might expect in an expensive restaurant.

During one of those meals, I heard a conversation about mad cow disease detection kits and the potential business that could come if the disease appeared in American cattle. I cannot tell you what was in the hearts of the people at that table. I can only tell you what I heard and what it did to me.

They may have heard a discussion about markets, testing, and product demand. I heard my father.

I saw one hundred and ninety head of cattle standing in an Alabama pasture. I saw feed bills, mortgage payments, veterinary bills, and a man standing at the kitchen table with a pencil trying to figure out whether the numbers would work for another year. I understood what one sick cow could mean. I understood what fear spreading through the cattle market could do to families whose entire livelihood was standing on four legs behind a fence.

That lunch taught me something I have carried ever since. Distance can do something dangerous to the human heart. The farther we get from the people affected by our decisions, the easier it becomes to stop seeing them as people.

A farmer becomes a market segment. A customer becomes an account. A voter becomes a constituency. A struggling family becomes a statistic. A sick animal becomes a business opportunity. Somewhere along the way, flesh and blood can be replaced by projections and percentages.

Jesus never looked at people that way. Matthew tells us, “When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them” (Matthew 9:36). He saw people. He saw hunger, sickness, grief, fear, loneliness, and need. He did not see a demographic.

That was the part that troubled me most. I had spent years getting good at selling, but I had begun to wonder what selling could do to a man if he stopped seeing the person on the other side of the table. Once somebody becomes nothing more than a mark, a number, a vote, or a potential transaction, it is not far from there to forgetting that the number has a name and the customer has a family.

Jesus asked the question more clearly than any business school ever could: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).

That question was becoming personal for me.

Richard Shelby once told me that a constituency and a customer base were a lot alike. In both cases, you had to understand people, communicate, persuade, and earn trust. In business they paid you in money, and in politics they paid you in votes. He also believed football prepared a man for sales because football teaches you to take a hit, get back up, read a situation, perform under pressure, and keep moving when somebody is trying to stop you.

He was right about those skills, but life eventually made me ask another question. What are those skills for?

What is toughness for if it never helps somebody weaker? What is influence for if it only benefits the person who has it? What is leadership for if it never bends down to lift somebody else? What is a platform worth if a man only uses it to make his own name bigger?

Jesus said, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required” (Luke 12:48). I have come to believe that influence is not merely a reward. It is a responsibility.

I remember another moment from Washington that helped shape the way I began to see this. Two actors came into Shelby’s office to advocate for Tibetan art. As I remember it, they were earnest and sincere about their cause. Shelby responded by pointing to hungry children in West Virginia.

That moment stayed with me because it showed me another form of distance. We can care deeply about something far away and still fail to see the person suffering right in front of us. That does not mean the distant cause is unworthy. It means compassion has to remain close enough to touch somebody.

Jesus told the story of a man beaten and left beside the road. Several people saw him and kept walking, but the Samaritan stopped. Scripture says that “when he saw him, he had compassion on him” (Luke 10:33). Then he did something with that compassion. He got down beside the wounded man. He bound his injuries. He spent his own money. He allowed another person’s suffering to interrupt his plans.

That is the part of the story I understand better now.

Compassion eventually has to get down in the dirt.

For many years, I thought the lesson of my experiences was that systems do not care about people. I do not believe that is the whole lesson anymore. Governments are made of people. Corporations are made of people. Churches are made of people. Nonprofits are made of people. The real question is what happens inside the heart of the person sitting at the table.

Do I see the person across from me as somebody to use, or somebody to serve? Do I see a customer, or do I see a father? Do I see a donor, or do I see a widow? Do I see a voter, or do I see a family? Do I see a number, or do I see somebody God created?

I left Bio-Rad after only a short time. I never put it on my resume, not because those ninety days were meaningless, but because I did not know how to explain what they had done to me. A resume has a place for titles, dates, awards, and accomplishments. It does not have a place for anger. It does not have a place for disappointment. It does not have a place for the moment when a man realizes that the ladder he has been climbing may be leaning against the wrong wall.

Some things you carry, and some things you bury.

For a long time, I buried that story.

But God has a way of digging up what we bury when He intends to use it.

In 2004, I ran for mayor of Southside, Alabama. I lost, but looking back, I think the more important part was that I went home. I went back to the Coosa River, back to Cedar Bend Road, back to the people who knew my family, back to the kind of place where you could look a man in the eye and know something about the life behind his name.

Then came April 27, 2011.

Tornadoes tore across Alabama, destroying communities and taking lives. I was coaching football in Atlanta at the time, caught up in practices, schedules, and all the things that seemed important until I saw what had happened back home.

Suddenly, football did not feel quite so important.

But football had given me something I could use.

I knew players. I knew coaches. I knew people on both sides of a rivalry that had divided Alabama living rooms for generations. Alabama and Auburn men had spent years trying to beat one another on Saturdays, but tragedy had a way of reminding us that there are things larger than a scoreboard.

I helped organize a flag football game involving former Alabama and Auburn players, and together we raised around $150,000 for the Governor’s Emergency Relief Fund.

Out of that came Lettermen of the USA.

Looking back, I can see the connection now in a way I could not see it then. The very skills I had once used to sell products, win accounts, get past gatekeepers, and close deals could be used for something entirely different.

I could use them to serve.

I could make the phone call because somebody else needed help. I could walk into the room because somebody else needed a voice. I could persuade people not to buy something, but to give something. I could bring rivals together, not to determine who won, but to help people who had lost almost everything.

The scar went to work.

That may be the real reason this story was never supposed to fit neatly on a resume.

A resume tells people what I accomplished. God seems far more interested in what He can redeem.

Joseph told his brothers, “Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:20). That verse does not mean everything that happens to us is good. Some things are wrong. Some things hurt. Some things leave marks. The promise is that God is not limited by what wounded us. He can take what was meant to break a man and turn it into something that helps build another man back up.

For years, I carried anger about the arrest, the divorce, the custody battle, the corporate world, the lunch in California, and all the times I believed people had been reduced to numbers.

Today, I see something different.

I see training.

Not all of it was training I would have chosen, but God has never asked me to write the curriculum.

The farm taught me work.

Football taught me to get up.

Politics taught me people.

Sales taught me persuasion.

Failure taught me humility.

Divorce taught me pain.

Fatherhood taught me what was worth fighting for.

The tornadoes taught me that somebody else’s suffering could not remain somebody else’s problem.

And ministry is teaching me what all of it may have been for.

Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee and saw Simon Peter and Andrew casting a net into the sea. They were fishermen. They knew weather, water, patience, disappointment, hard work, and what it felt like to cast a net and come up empty.

Jesus did not tell them that everything they had learned was useless.

He gave it a new purpose.

“Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19).

I understand that verse differently now.

God does not always throw away the old net. Sometimes He teaches you what the net was really for.

I spent years learning how to reach people, how to talk to people, how to walk into rooms where I did not belong, how to take rejection, how to make the next call, and how to keep going when somebody slammed a door.

For a long time, I thought those were sales skills.

Maybe they were ministry skills waiting on their assignment.

A fisherman cannot catch anything with a net folded up in the boat. At some point, he has to cast it.

That is what I believe I am supposed to do now.

Cast the net a little wider.

There are men carrying things they will never put on a resume. There are fathers who have been arrested, divorced, embarrassed, fired, abandoned, falsely accused, defeated, or simply worn down by life. There are men sitting in expensive offices who are starving spiritually and men standing in muddy fields wondering how they are going to make the next payment. There are veterans carrying memories they do not talk about, athletes who no longer hear the crowd, executives who have reached the top and discovered it is lonely there, and young men trying to figure out what being a man is supposed to mean.

The world may see categories.

Jesus sees souls.

That is where my story has brought me.

I do not want to spend the rest of my life selling people something. I want to spend it helping point people toward Someone.

I am still that red dirt farmer’s boy. The Coosa still bends through the land. I can still see my father’s cattle in my mind. I can still remember the rain outside that trailer, the phone call from jail, the restaurant overlooking the bay, the tornado damage, the football field, and the men who answered the call when somebody needed help.

Those things are all part of the same story now.

The anger did not disappear. God changed what I could do with it.

The wounds did not disappear. God gave them somewhere to serve.

The skills did not disappear. God gave them another purpose.

Peter had a boat.

I had a resume.

Peter had nets.

I had salesmanship, football, politics, relationships, scars, and a stubborn refusal to stay down after getting hit.

Jesus told Peter to follow Him, and He would make him a fisher of men.

I believe He is still doing that with people.

I believe He is doing it with me.

So maybe the things I never put on my resume were never meant to stay hidden forever. Maybe some of them were meant to become testimony. Maybe the places where I was hurt were meant to help me recognize hurt in somebody else. Maybe the doors that closed taught me how to stand beside a man when his own door closes.

And maybe the boy who grew up watching his father bet a year on one hundred and ninety head of cattle had to travel all the way to Washington, California, corporate America, courtrooms, football fields, tornado zones, and back to the bend in the Coosa River before he finally understood what God had been teaching him all along.

You work the ground.

You mend the fence.

You cast the net.

But God gives the increase.

That is why I am writing this down now.

I do not know who will read it. I do not know which man will recognize his own scar somewhere inside mine. I only know that I believe the net is supposed to go farther than it has before.

So I am casting it.

And trusting God with what it brings in.

Darryl

My father, Robert Frank Fuhrman — Korean War Marine, factory man, cattleman, and the man who served on the Etowah County Board of Education from my first grade year until well after I graduated. This is him in the 1990s, walking his herd on the land the Coosa bends around. A hundred and ninety head. A whole year riding on them. This is the pasture the men in the nice restaurant never had to stand in.

My father had to work the red clay — the cattle, the factory, the school board — so his boys could study law and go to Washington. He never wanted us to carry the stick and the hat. He wanted us to carry something else.

He did the hard, unglamorous work so we could study the things he never had time for. Not because he was bitter about it. Because he believed the work was a kind of prayer — that turning the soil, feeding the community, serving the county, was his way of saying thank you for the life he’d been given. And his way of asking for one more thing: that his children would have a better one.

John Adams said it in France. My father said it in the field. Same prayer. Different dirt.

March 1993. The Blizzard of the Century, seen from my mother’s bathroom window — one side of the farm, the gate, the pines, the sloughs where the Coosa bends around the foothills. Below it, the soil farm that once belonged to my great-grandmother Lister’s brothers, Bob and Dye, now tended by our friends the Sewell family, who also rent and farm my deceased Marine Corps father’s land. Twenty inches of snow on red clay. The land didn’t care. It just waited.

Dolly. Given to us by the Abernathy family for my mother’s years of caring for their mother. A barn horse on red clay, standing at the fence like she owned the place — which, in a way, she did.

Photo taken by Angela Barksdale

July 12, 2001. Four-oh-four in the morning, Central Time. The Star-Spangled Banner rolled across the lagoon to the VIP stands as Atlantis climbed off the pad — the sound wave of the rocket reaching us before the light did. I had the NASA VIP award in my hand. My son Miller sat on my shoulders, not yet two, watching a beast rise into the sky until it became a tiny dot. He didn’t understand what he was seeing. You can see it in his face — he didn’t know what it was, but it had him. Completely.

A few days later I left VWR for Bio-Rad. The contract I won, the one I never got to sign. The award I earned, the one that couldn’t save me from what came next. Ninety days in a restaurant overlooking the bay, and I walked out carrying something I couldn’t put on a resume.

My father worked the red clay so his boys could study law and go to Washington. He didn’t want us to carry the stick and the hat. He wanted us to carry something else. I carried a rocket instead — and then I carried the thing I heard over scallopini, and the thing I heard in Shelby’s office, and the thing I heard in the arrest that got thrown out. None of it goes on a resume. Not because it wasn’t real. Because some things you carry, and some things you bury.

The red dirt farmer’s boy went to the coast and came back with something he couldn’t sell. But he came back. That’s the part the resume never needed to know.