Griffith follows God’s plan and not his own

Complicated is not a word one would use to describe Lou Griffith. In fact, he will admit he doesn’t like complicated.

“What’s complicated? People make things complicated quite a bit,” he said. “You knock out one piece at a time and you build on that.

“You come to a point of, am I turning right or turning left? I’m turning right. I’m never going to worry about turning left. What would have happened if I turned left? I have no idea, I don’t care.

“So now I’m coming to another fork in the road and I’m making a choice and I’m going with my choice and hopefully I’m being directed in that right choice.”

Griffith’s latest fork in the road was the decision to become a deacon.

“There was a time that I said, ‘God, this is in your hands; I’m a passenger,’” Griffith said. “Because I said yes, I will do this. I’ve been moved along at each step. It’s not my will, it’s God’s will that’s keeping me in the game. We must be heading in a direction that you’re guiding. That’s not me pushing.”

To keep things simple, Griffith applies this approach to everything in life, including at his job as a project manager for 2K General Company, a commercial construction business. He works with a lot of people either on his crew or with subcontractors, mostly on projects for the City of Columbus, and because of the tight schedules demanded by the city, he is upfront with everything he knows about a project before he hires.

“I try to answer as much of the unknown to begin with,” Griffith said. “You always run into discovery in the middle of something. As long as everybody knows, everybody’s good. It’s when you try to go around something that there’s a problem. We’re dealing with a lot of historic buildings where you’ve got 100 years of hidden something and nobody knows when we start.”

Griffith is also a guy who stays busy, whether at work or in his family life with wife Karen and sons Grant, 25, and Peter, 23.

“I never stop. I’m always busy doing something,” he said. “I have a hard time sitting. There’s not a lot of idle time for me. With work there’s always multiple things going on because that’s the nature of my projects, but it also runs into the personal life, too, that there are stages of things that can get done … timing, financial, weather. There’s always something going on.”

Staying busy was ingrained in him from an early age. The family owned an 80-acre farm with mostly livestock. He started working for his father’s contracting business at age 13.

“I started doing a lot of cleaning,” Griffith said. “I would help in the shop with the cleaning and taking stuff apart, learning the equipment and machinery. I had to mop the office and take out the trash. We had a family business and we had to do everything.”

He observed that his faith is woven through the happenings of his daily life, whether work-related or personal. 

“None of this is my plan,” he said. “So, I can’t have a kneejerk reaction, I can’t have an emotional reaction. I really have to stop and just let it sink in for a second and then make that assessment and you go with your faith, your knowledge, your history or how you dealt with situations before and that’s your guidance.”