Westward Ho!

If we take seriously the concept that we are sojourners in this world who are ready at a moment's notice to pick up everything and leave when God calls, we need to answer when opportunity comes knocking. It's easy to be a slave to inertia and let the routine of life repeat itself. You go to work the next day at the job that you worked at today and yesterday. You buy the same groceries at the same supermarket week after week because familiarity feels good and safe. We get into patterns around what makes us comfortable, which includes a certain lifestyle and a particular standard of living funded by a certain household income. None of this is bad per se, it's just dangerous when that blinds us to something that God has called us to do.

I could count on one hand the number of job opportunities that would excite me enough to uproot my family from the northeast. As I mentioned at a recent dinner with some friends, the forces keeping us from moving are massive. We are thrilled with our church community and the prospects of church planting. We love the fact that our extended family lives a short distance away. My parents provide convenient and free babysitting and childcare. And despite some bouts with garden variety job stress, I really liked my work at a major biopharmaceutical company. The threshold bar for an opportunity which would get us to uproot ourselves was quite high.

More than a year ago, I had exchanged letters with Richard Stearns, the current CEO of World Vision International. It was pleasant enough, we talked about our respective Wharton experiences and I talked to him about Synergy Ministries and my passion around faith and work integration. A little more than two months ago during a meeting at work, I got on my cell phone from a 253 area code which went to voicemail. The message was from the VP of human resources at World Vision, and they wanted to know if I might be interested in a leadership role focusing on strategy and operations special projects, reporting into David Young, the Chief Operating Officer.

A few conference calls later, World Vision flew me and Sarah to Federal Way, WA for a weekend where I had an opportunity to meet with the leadership team. By Sunday afternoon, they had offered me the position and laid out the financial package and asked if I could provide an answer in three weeks.

I shared with an extremely small group of people this opportunity - my desire being to not create waves and rumors through the grapevine around an opportunity which might or might not be seized. Sarah and I weighed the pro's and con's. Clearly being much farther away from family would be difficult. We would miss the deep friendships that we've made here in New Jersey and the northeast. And, of course, there was the financial reality of taking a substantial pay cut from what I was making before.

But none of those things were deal breakers, and at the end of the day it still came down to a single question: where did God want us? So we prayerfully came to a decision (with a great deal of support from Sarah), that this was simply a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that needed to be seized. Plane travel and Skype makes the world a smaller place, there would be other deep friendships to invest in, and given the health of the housing market where we lived, we could make things work financially. But really what it came down to was the chance to do cutting edge program development and strategy at an organization which I deeply respect.

So after the school year ends, we'll be looking to move to Washington state. Like the earlier frontier settlers centuries before us, we head west with excitement for the unknown. I will still root for my New York sports teams, but will do so in places like Safeco Field and Qwest Field. I will swap my New York Times for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I will trade my Starbucks for more local versions of Starbucks. I don't know what the future holds, but this is why we walk by faith and not by sight.

As you might say in Latin, Carpe Diem.