God is good. All the time. No matter what happens to me or my family. But it sure is cool when He chooses to bless me. Which happens all the time, but sometimes are more dramatic than others. Recently I had one of those times. Here's the story. (It's clearly not the short version, but it's not the long version either.)
Background
I worked at a Fortune 100 corporation for 19.5 years. I was hired by them right out of college. (My testimony about that experience, and how God was clearly involved, was documented on my website,
here.) In the early years of our marriage, my wife and I heard about Ken Ham and his desire to build a $100 million museum dedicated to encouraging people the Bible is full of real history, especially Genesis 1-11. When construction was completed in 2007, we went as soon as we could. We rented an RV and made it part of a wonderful family vacation.
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| Creation Museum gardens |
The way I describe to everyone what the museum is like is to compare it to the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie,
Jurassic Park. In that movie, there was a scene when they first arrived on the island. There was a small caravan of Jeeps driving and they suddenly stop. The main characters abruptly stop talking and stare, mouths open. The camera shifts and pans to reveal a humongous dinosaur, eating from the trees.
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| A scene from Jurassic Park |
The John Williams music starts, and the camera pans again across an entire field full of dinosaurs. The emotional set up is just awesome, brilliant even. And the visuals, which are still acceptable today (almost 30 years later) were
beyond excellent for their time. That
same level of awe and excellence is what the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky inspires. Only in this case, the awe it inspires is in the Bible, or more specifically in how God has been at work in human and universal history.
That guy, Ken Ham, founded an organization named Answers in Genesis before he built the museum. They are responsible for the museum, which was an instant success. It was so popular, that within the first couple years after it opened they were already thinking about how to take their mission to the next level. Their answer was to build a life-sized replica of Noah's Ark. To do this they would need a lot more land. So they bought some about 45 minutes south of the museum. After raising more funds, they built another $100 million museum, which happens to be the largest wooden structure in the world. This museum is the centerpiece of a larger theme park that is intended to [eventually] deliver a similar experience as Disney World, only with a lot more purpose than simply entertaining.
My family and I were able to visit the Ark the fall after it opened, in 2016. While making the hotel reservations, I asked the receptionist how business was doing since the Ark opened. She said for a month and a half after the grand opening, there was not a room available in 30 miles. There are over 50 hotels in that area.
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| Ark Encounter opening season (top 2) Creation Museum main entrance (bottom) |
Then this last summer (2019) my wife and I took our kids on our 8th visit to the museum and our 2nd visit to the Ark. While there, I found myself thinking "I could see myself moving here to work with these people." But I was thinking in like 10 or 20 years.
One of the top reasons I've always appreciated the Creation Museum, the Ark Encounter, and Answers in Genesis as a whole, is they aren't just a bunch of religious zealots who spout "believe what we believe because we believe it!" The organization is run by a bunch of level headed people who know how to engage PhDs and use science to confirm the Bible. They are very explicit that they start with the Bible because it is truly the recorded word of the living God, and then they discover how science confirms it. They don't start with man's ideas of science (which are always changing) and then fit the Bible on top of that. They start with the Bible and show that all observable reality fits, whether archaeology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, logic, math, physics, etc. And they do it in a way that a child can understand.
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| One of the exhibits inside the Ark |
Change of plans
The day before Thanksgiving, I got an unexpected email. My company leadership was planning ahead. Our customers, through no fault of ours, were going to have a hard year. Another hard year. This meant our company was going to have a hard year. And the fastest way to deal with such difficulty is to lower the salary overhead. But this is a great company, and people weren't fired. As a precaution they offered a program. Anyone who got the invitation to leave would be given a generous incentive package if they permanently left. I got the invitation. I had no desire to leave, and was not compelled to. But I did realize this was a very unique opportunity. I thought to myself, "there's only one place in the world for which I would give up this sweet deal of a job I have here." Of course, I was thinking of Answers in Genesis, builders of the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. But I wasn't going to take company time to look into it, and filed the email away. After Thanksgiving was done (Sunday evening) I mentioned the invitation to my wife. I didn't tell her what I was thinking about it, I just mentioned it to get her honest response. The only thing she said was "Answers in Genesis?" so we prayed about it (together and out loud).
This wasn't the first time we'd prayed something like this. On numerous occasions in the last decade we've asked God if He wanted to use us in another part of the country by transferring us inside the same company. A good six to twelve months of this same prayer had preceded an offer a little over a decade ago to transfer from one of our factories (where my career had begun) to the corporate office. Since then on numerous occasions we've prayed a similar prayer, and God's response was always "no, you are right where I want you." So, we once again prayed "God, if you want us to go [to Kentucky], then make it easy. If you don't want us to go, then make it not easy." Then I went to the AiG website, browsed their open positions, and applied for the one that looked the most aligned to my experience and skill, which was a project manager position in one of their IT departments.
Exactly 9.9 years earlier, I had my only quasi-professional experience with AiG. I went on a mission trip with them to the Vancouver Olympics. (It was my wife's idea that she would stay home and watch the 3 kids by herself while I go off and do this cool thing with a bunch of cool people.)
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| Vancouver Olympics mission trip, Jan 2010 |
The point is, I met a guy there. Not just any guy, but he happened to work in the same town, in the same building, and for that same Fortune 100 corporation as me! We'd never met each other before then, but God used this mission trip to connect us. He runs a local creation science apologetics ministry and has invited to town guest speakers from AiG numerous times in the last decade. I have attended them with one of my kids a few times.
So after applying online, I immediately told this same friend. I told him I was willing to leave the company, had just applied at AiG, and asked if he had any contacts there then I'd appreciate him putting in a good word for me. I knew he must know someone there, because he's invited guest speakers over. Little did I know, he knew their president. He sent a brief, positive recommendation email, and the president forwarded it on with a simple comment to make sure my application was noticed.
By the third or fourth phone call with the hiring manager for that project manager position, he said to me "you're not really a project manager, are you?" Then he asked "have you ever heard of a Business Analyst?" It's been 19 years since I needed a resume. So I rebooted mine that same night after my wife and I prayed about the voluntary separation invitation. In my haste, I'd listed the detail that I earned a Master's degree, but had left out my area of study. I informed him "yes, that's what my Master's degree emphasis was." He said "good, we've been needing that kind of skill for a long time," and he was interested in creating a new position on his team for me to fill.
What?? We all know (hopefully) that God is given credit as being able to work miracles, and otherwise just have an amazing way of timing things. But I don't think we all appreciate how that's not just an academic or theologic ethereal concept. It's real. God isn't in the business of paint by numbers. (If we do this then He's not obligated to do that.) He's much more relational. He cares about each of us individually and wants to be accepted as part of our lives. And even when we acknowledge that God is good all the time, we all hear "no" and "later" a lot, so it's sure fun when He says "yes." Especially on something big.
So the next step was to tell the kids. Before I accepted a career change, I wanted the kids to feel as if they had at least a little say. We had a family meeting and brought the kids up to speed on what was happening and what looked like was about to happen. In short, they were on board. The next day I had to tell my boss I was leaving. I scheduled an informal talk in the café (not in use at the time) and told him there. He took it well, as I suspect he (and all managers) was coached to. In all the stress and hustle of what was going on, I had forgotten that a decade prior, when we both lived in the previous town, we served on the same tech team at the same church (it was a big team at a big church and we never really saw each other). Small world. He of course was sad to see me go, but excited for such a leap of faith I was proposing. The term "bitter sweat" came up, and would be used countless times in the next couple days, weeks, and months.
But there were a lot of details to iron out. Was I for real, applying out of the blue, offering to give up a six-figure salary in a multinational corporation with 60,000 employees with factories in 10 countries to work for a ministry with 600 employees with brick and mortar in only 1 state? Were they for real wanting my specific skills and experiences? I flew out on New Year's day to talk with the hiring manager. I wish I'd gotten a better photo than this:
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| Interviewing on site |
We spent the whole day together and we ended it with dinner with his boss. All went great, we both concluded that we were both for real, and God was clearly at work in both of our lives. That weekend he submitted the paperwork to HR to create the new position for me.
Wrapping up one chapter
I'm not the only business analyst in the world. It's such a common thing that I was able to find a Master's program in it. But yet, it's still not that common. Further, it's actually more rare for an organization to prioritize
having a business analyst than it is to find a business analyst. But finding the right person who's the
right fit for the organization can be deceptively tricky. While God chose to "bless our socks off" with the upcoming transition, don't think everything in our lives is fairytale worthy. This blessing only came after a lot of brokenness, and that brokenness emphasizes God's involvement in this whole transition.
In 2013, my wife and our oldest daughter flew with me to China to adopt a little boy.
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| The lobby of the Garden Hotel in Guangzhou, China |
He turned out to have more challenges than anyone knew. He is non-verbal and didn't cope well with how he spent the first 3 years of his life. (He was raised in an orphanage.) By early 2020, he has been with us for almost 7 years, and is about 9 and a half years old. But in many ways (certainly not all, and not all the time) he still has the maturity of a 3-year-old. In case you're wondering, it's more difficult than it sounds to raise a human who has the self-discipline of a 3-year-old yet the physical and intellectual skill (resourcefulness) of a 9-year-old. Yes, my wife is a saint.
After he'd been with us for two years (and he was 5) we tried sending him to preschool. While we'd sent all three of our girls to preschool, since my wife homeschooled all four of the kids then, our primary motivation for sending the boy to preschool was to give him reinforcement from other adults how he should behave. Unfortunately, that intention backfired. Perhaps I'll write a blog article going into the detail some time, but it's not the point now. I'll save you the time reading if you trust me that we were very frustrated by not just one school, but three. Each of these three schools had their positives. I'm not a mean brute. In their own way, they were fine. But their arrogance of skill for my special needs son was completely ridiculous, their ability to help was wholly inadequate, and their results were often disaster that my wife and I were stuck doing the damage control on. The insight was we were working with perfectly good people with adequate skill and intelligence to deliver on what we needed, but they had a critical flaw that was too embarrassing to admit. That flaw was they were broke. Organizations that are broke have a difficult time handling people who don't fit the one size fits all paradigm. It's especially offensive to call organizations with multiple million-dollar budgets in the richest nation on earth, "broke." But that was more the problem than the individual teachers and administrators who worked with my son. Their financial situation dictated how much resources they could spend on him, and when that wasn't enough their choice was to admit inadequacy or blame him for being too difficult. Sadly, they always chose the latter, and this conscious choice was the source of our annoyance as much as anything else.
Besides school, my son didn't fit in well at church, either. To make a long story short and avoid criticizing people who have more good than bad, the Sunday before Thanksgiving of 2019 was the first Sunday in 9 years that I'd chosen to try another church. And that
same week (3 days later) I got the invitation email to take a voluntary separation. Is that God's timing or what?
The other point is, life is not all peaches and roses, even when wonderful blessings from God are poured out. God often breaks things before He blesses them, and it's in this brokenness that it's most important that we remember God is good
all the time, no matter what happens to us. My family's lives were in significant turmoil, so when we prayed that Sunday night after I told my wife about the voluntary separation invitation, it was not just some academic prayer of "God, if you want us to go, then make it easy, and if you don't want us to go, then make it not easy." We were very serious. If God wanted us to stay in this deeply frustrating town longer, then we would. But if it was within His will to let us go try somewhere different, we'd love that.
Great timing
Not all our reasons for leaving were frustrations. There were at least a couple that were just plain great. For one, all 3 of my girls have been taking Tae Kwon Do for over two years. They've been working hard to earn their black belts. They passed the final test and successfully earned these honors during the window in which I was able to accept the voluntary separation. It took them 27 months to earn their black belts. I had no idea I was going to get the invitation, and the invitation had a limited window of only 3 weeks. By completing this milestone training here (all in one town) makes a very clean break for them. Praise God for His good timing.
Similarly, my oldest daughter is planning to go to college this fall. There are 3 colleges in the community in which we live. We looked at all 3, hoping one of them would suit her. We also looked at a couple farther away. In November, she decided she liked the one farthest away. We were a little sad she didn't pick one more conveniently closer to home. Then all this happened and we decided we're moving to Kentucky, 6.5 hours away. The university she had chosen (before I even got the voluntary separation invitation) is almost halfway between our old home and our new home. Whoa!
If our son's school situation wasn't clearly headed south (for the third time in three tries), or our daughter had chosen to attend any of the colleges in town, or our church was able to meet my family where we are, then any of these may have caused us to just pass on the invitation. But God has His way of pointing us in new directions we otherwise might think are crazy.
Goodwill
As I've made clear, I wasn't planning to leave my company, nor my many friends whom I'd made over 19.5 years, nor the legacy I'd been building up over that time. I'm the kind of guy that my leadership and my colleagues told me countless times they wished they could clone me. I was the only one who knew how to do certain things. Not a safe scenario to allow in a global corporation. I'd asked my bosses every year for the last 10 years (I've had 4 over that time) to have a contingent or a student who could be my understudy. But the answer was always a flat no, we can't afford that. The party line was "this isn't quantum physics. If you leave we'll hire someone and limp along for a few months, but we'll manage." Unfortunately, the terms of the voluntary separation I accepted specifically denied my department the ability to backfill me. This wasn't my problem, but none-the-less, I worked 80 hours that week between New Year's and my last day of work. (The last day of work was dictated by the terms of the voluntary separation, and not my choice.) I've put in a lot of unpaid overtime over the last few years, but haven't worked an 80 hour week in over a decade (when I was helping my factory upgrade ERPs in 2006). But I did a few weeks ago, because I didn't want to leave my friends stranded without me. I got zero overtime pay for those extra 40 hours I put in (and I knew that before I did it.) This translated to five 12 hour days, plus 10 hours on Saturday and 10 more hours on Sunday. Even in those 80 hours I still didn't get everything done, but my friends, and my legacy, were left in better shape than if I had just up and left. There are plenty of smart, talented people I worked with, and between those left after the volsep, they'll cover just fine. This was a wonderful opportunity for me to get out of their way (as much as they appreciated and relied on me) so leadership can see the other talent in our department. All large organizations have their issues, but as corporations go, the one I left is a great one. I wish them success in their professional mission and in their private endeavors.
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| A final photo as I left my office on my last day of work |
Then there's the salary. My wife and I had committed to giving a full tithe before I'd started my job at this corporation in the spring of 2000. Early on, she was working too, and we tithed both our gross incomes the full 10%. Then when the first kid came, she stopped working, we were down to one income, and we still tithed the full amount, trusting God would make it work. A pastor at church said he and his wife challenged themselves to give another 1% every year. So over the next 5 years, we upped our tithe 1% per year until it got to 15%. It's been over a decade like that now. Within a week of it hitting the bank, I had already given a full 15% of my severance package away to various explicit Christian ministries and missionaries whom we already know and trust, and we will continue to tithe at least 10% with the new job at AiG, even though I will be bringing home
less than half as much as I did when I worked for the corporation. Because 90% (or less) with God's blessing is better than 100% without it and, like 15 years ago, we still trust God will make it work. Because God is good, all the time, no matter what happens to me and my family.
Maybe I'll write another post about God's involvement in our housing and other aspects of the transition, later. There's plenty more good stuff to share...
