A (Very Brief) History Of My Time
January 30, 2023 — 18:00
Life has been interesting.
As I've mentioned in various places, I'm in a bit of transition. Part of it, as alluded to in the last post, involves unraveling the stories told about me. Part of it is understanding where I've been and how that shapes things moving forward. To that end, a brief timeline of life has been helpful to consider:
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I grew up moving around a lot. The longest I lived anywhere was about 5 years until leaving for college. My parents were in the ministry and moved "as the Lord willed". My father's speciality (if you can call it that) is finding healing in broken church situations.
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That continued until I left for university. I stayed in my university town for about a decade. Some key milestones here were:
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Working 8+ years in the university's IT department. I started as a help desk technician and quickly found myself on the sysadmin team were I worked primarily with various flavors of unix, some OS X and some windows machines.
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I found a deep appreciate for simple church setups where church life is found in a genuine community of people living life together.
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I met my wife and got married near the end of that decade.
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Career wise, I made what turned out to be a dramatic shift at the end of this decade. Leaving everything behind, my wife and I moved to southern Africa where we spent the next 4 years.
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I had gone to focus on tech stuff in the ministry we had joined but that gradually shifted though as I increasingly got involved on the ministry side of things.
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By the end of this 4 year window I was primarily in an active ministry role, discovering a love for coaching and training.
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At the end of this 4 years we transitioned to eastern Africa for 4 1/2 years.
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Here, my primary focus was coaching and training indiginous church planting leaders and I loved it.
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Near the end, it was increasingly challenging due to some tensions with the home base.
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The tensions became worse and a transition became necessary. Organizationally we were asked to return to southern Africa to help rebuild after some unfortunate internal conflict. We did, and were there for the past 4 years.
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While there, my love of coaching and training continued to develop and I:
- Helped revamp the core tranining curriculum
- Worked to shift some of the paradigms of outside/inside workers
- Began to develop additional training for decolonizing the work we were doing
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But it was also quite difficult due to some dynamics best left for another time.
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We have just transitioned back to the US and are settling into some new things now. Oddly enough, these new things seem to be marrying my time spent in IT and my time spent in ministry so I'm curious to see where it will all go.
It's been an interesting life so far. I wouldn't trade the majority of it for anything. The experience of living in new places, of learning new cultures, of seeing a much bigger world is worth more than anything I can think of. Our kids as well have such a unique view of the world around them. And my own personal journey in it all is so valuable as well. I found myself starting out adulthood as a tech nerd who found a love for coaching people he never expected to have. Who knows what will come? What I do know: other people don't get to write the story no matter how hard they might try.