Moving On. . . Again, or I Guess He'd Rather Be in Colorado

The Coffmans are headed back to Colorado, plus two from the time we left almost seven years ago. Sing along to some John Denver with me.

One more:

Alright, now that we have that out of our system. Here are some details, or 'tails if you are Tom Haverford. The short version: a couple of weeks ago I was offered and accepted a position teaching English at Valor Christian High School in Highlands Ranch. 

The longer version, for those inclined to hear it: To those who have had much contact with me in the past couple of years it would come as no surprise that I was less than engaged at my current place of employment. Water under the bridge, bygones being bygones and all of that, I will just let that comment stand. About a year ago I really started considering seminary as an option, a sort of lifeline. I started an application and got counsel, but for some reason I could never really commit. 

A couple of months ago there was an opening at the Christian school in our little Kansas town. A friend told me about it and recommended that I apply. I didn't really want the job because I did not want to stay here, but I filled out an application anyway. Part of it included writing a statement of teaching philosophy. It took me about ten minutes to write it. Not that its great writing or anything, but it just flowed out of me. Writing that out was sort of an epiphanic moment. I realized that while I didn't want to teach junior high at a school in Salina I did want to teach.

The next day I started looking for jobs, starting in Colorado of course. There was nothing available that I could find on the website that I was using so I decided to be a bit more proactive. I went to the website for Vail Christian and emailed the headmaster. I told him who I was, what my background was, and asked him if he were me where he would start. He told me they would have nothing available but pointed me to two schools in Denver, one of which was Valor.

I went to their website and they had an opening in the English department listed for next school year. I browsed further and got really excited. It seemed to be the perfect fit. I filled out the online portion of the application that day. A good part of the job hunt consists in being excited, but not too excited. I tried to suppress my anticipation and just trust that if this is what God had for us then it would happen. Two days later I got an email telling me to go through to the second part of the application, which included answering about a dozen questions in essay form and the school making contact with my references.

As a sidenote, this was easily the most rigorous application process I have ever been involved with (I'm still ending sentences with prepositions until I start teaching). I wrote over a dozen essays that probed deeply into my beliefs, theology, and teaching style. It was very intimidating, but it also only served to confirm that this was what I wanted to do. A similarly intense process at a business job would have felt tedious.

About a week and a half later I got another email, this time from the head of HR, asking me to do a Skype interview. During that hour I was interviewed by the Director of Academics, the Academic Dean, the head of HR, and the head of the English department. At the end of the interview they asked me to come out for an on-site interview as well as a teaching interview (I would teach two classes). Given spring break and other scheduling issues it was not until April 7th that we were able to arrange everything.

I took the whole family out to Colorado for the interview. The night before I was preparing and Owen came and sat next to me on the couch. I asked him if I would do a good job at my interview tomorrow. He said no. I asked him if I would still get the job. He said yes.

Gentle reader, my son is a prophet. I felt tongue-tied and out of sync for much of the interview day, an eight hour whirlwind of teaching two sections, being peppered with questions by the rest of the English faculty, a spiritual interview with the Director of Spiritual Life, and a lunch interview with two other English faculty. I didn't feel like I bombed or anything like that. Interviews in general are followed by a round of self-incrimination where you go through what you could or should have said. When they last all day you only have that much more fodder for reflection.

In any event, my only option was to trust that if God wanted me there I would be there. I had to wait three agonizing weeks after my interview while other candidates went through the same rigmarole. And then I got a call while I was at work from the Director of Academics offering me a position. I thought I was going to jump through the roof. There was much sushi-ing, wine drinking, and general merriment in the Coffman household that night.

I was puzzled most of the time I was in Salina over why in the world I was here. I now have my answer. My discontent over my job here prodded me into reading about 70 books last year, dreaming of a world where books meant something to people. That time of study laid the groundwork for this job. In fact, it was mentioned to me during my interview that one of the things that caught the school's attention was the amount of reading I do. And from there everything clicked.

I am so happy to be moving close to family and close to my mountains, but more excited to feel as if I have found my vocation. There was a famous Latin saying during the Reformation: post tenebras lux. After darkness, light. I am awash in light.

Praying With Owen

Every night after we have finished getting Owen ready for bed I hold him and both mom and I sing a song to him and then I pray before we put him into bed. The songs are generally some old hymn. I used to think that he probably wasn’t retaining much of what we sang to him, but then one night I stopped while singing a line from “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and he finished it for me. Since then I like to pause in my singing to hear him chime in. And then we pray.

It is interesting praying with a two year old because he has no idea about who or what God is except that which we have given him through the stories we read him, the songs we sing him, and the way we pray when we tuck him at night. It is a sobering thought. And given how much he picks up on the words we use and the way we use them, it really means that I can’t just do this by rote unless I want him to think that is what prayer is. (Cute sidenote: whenever he hurts himself Clara has taught him to pray for God to heal his pain. So he will bonk his head and come up to me crying “God heal it.” God may heal it, but daddy still has to kiss it.)

We always pray and thank God for everything good he has given us and ask him to help us acknowledge all of the blessings that we routinely overlook. We ask him to bless Ellie and help us figure her out and help her to grow up big and strong; we thank him for mommy and how hard she works for us and how patient she is with Owen and Ellie and how much she loves us; we thank him for daddy’s job and ask him that he would guide daddy on what we should do in the future.

But the crux of my prayer is when I pray for him. I want him to know what my desires are for his life. What I consider to be important to his future and his happiness. I begin by thanking God profusely for the chance to be the father of this little boy, for what a joy and grace he is to me, and just how fun it is to play with him and read with him and eat popcorn and watch football with him. And then I pray that God would save him and pour out his grace upon Owen’s life and that my boy would grow up to give glory to God and treasure God in all things. When I pray for his character I pray that God would make him strong and humble (he used to laugh whenever I said the word humble and repeat it), someone who is soft-hearted but firm in his convictions, someone who lives a life of love for the people around him, and lays his life down for his friends and gives them life by his sacrifice.

I pray other things on other nights, but those are the things that are always there. That is what I want for my son. That is my vision for his life. And as I have prayed those things night after night for the past several months, it has become clear to me that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I don’t mean this in a self-centered way. I very much am praying for Owen at night. What I do mean is that in order for these prayers to come true I need to model a lot of this stuff for my son. If I want him to be strong and humble, then I need to show him what a strong and humble man looks like. If I want him to have a soft-heart but firm convictions I need to orient my life in the same way. That is what I mean when I say that when I am praying for my son I am praying for myself. I am asking that God would make me that way so I can show it to him, not because it will save him, but that God may use my example to call Owen from darkness into light and from death to life.

Parenting is hard regardless of how you do it; praying those types of prayers for your kids only ups the ante as far as I am concerned. I am the most influential person in my son’s life and the question I confront every day is how I will use that influence. And by God’s grace it will be doing my part to help my requests to God become the reality of my son’s life.

Of All the Places I Thought I Would Never Live. . .

The great Kansas rectangle does its work again. And we return this weekend to the Sunflower State. I had taken a temporary job in July in Tulsa working under the same parent company umbrella of my dad's company in Colorado. I had hopes of turning my two month Okie exile into a career in Colorado, but alas those hopes were dashed (for the time being) upon the rocks of practicality. Colorado is still the long-term goal and realizable, but the company (and myself in my better moments) think it would be great if I could learn the business and get some solid experience apart from the supervision of my dad. Even the owner's son when at my age he decided to come aboard began in the company at the parts counter in Commerce City, Colorado before moving his way into operations in the headquarters at Wichita. The plan, then, is to spend a few years working hard for the company in Kansas--I am going to train for about two months in Wichita before moving on to a new location in that great World City, Salina. In all seriousness, it is a wonderful opportunity and a tremendous blessing. 

One quick story. I found out only yesterday that Wichita for two months was a go. I had been hoping for a break in between Tulsa and whatever was next, accustomed as I became through graduate school with regular and lengthy vacations. But yesterday I found Wichita was on and I was to start there Tuesday after the holiday weekend. This deflated my vacation prospects, but I took that in stride. It was good to grow up, good to not have a break in income, etc. But it also meant that I had to find a place to live in Wichita, preferably furnished lest I be forced to move our stuff twice in two months, starting in six days. This was considerably more stressful. 

I spent the bulk of the afternoon yesterday trying to find something and came up almost entirely empty. Deals that looked good were not good and everything that would accommodate our needs was well over $2,000 per month. When I got home I was stressed out and feeling sorry for myself. My wife, levelheaded as she is most of the time, suggested a website we have used in the past to find vacation rentals. Destination hotspot that it is, Wichita has three such homes available. Two were vastly more expensive than I could afford. The other was booked until the middle of September. 

I decided to call anyway, figuring we could live out of suitcases for 10 days if we needed to. Less than an hour after I requested more information, the owner of the home called me back. That morning the maid who cleans this property informed her that the man who had been renting was no longer there. She emailed him and he responded that he had in fact moved out. The owner told him that if she could find someone to take over she would stop charging him. And then she got my email. She called me to size me up and it turns out she has gone to church for years with the owner of the company and knows him and his family well. She gave us a discounted rate and we can move in this weekend. My hours of depression and melancholy dissipated and I was happy for the opportunity to move for this company, believing again that this was the right decision for our future. You can choose to believe that this is coincidence, or you can choose to believe it to be Providence. For my part, I pick the latter.

Off we go.

Like a Rolling Stone

I am writing this from my new temporary residence in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I knew coming into Manhattan that my time commitment in this town was short. The graduate program would last for only two years and then it would be time to figure out a next step. And until quite recently I had no idea what that step might be. It turns out, in an odd twist of fate, to be a two month stop in Tulsa. My recent tour of the middle states continues. (I would sooner move to Cuba as Castro’s masseur than move to the state just north of Kansas). Allow me to explain how this happened. Quickly, if I can.

The big debate for the past year was what to do in the future—more graduate school (i.e. PhD program), seminary, or returning to the business world. I was waffling as it came time to make the decision, per my usual tendencies. There is a lot to debate, a lot that I don’t have time to rehash, but when push came to shove I decided to go back to the business world in the hopes of landing back in Colorado. This isn’t necessarily an irrevocable decision—PhD and seminary are both still on the table—but it is the one I felt the best about making as I did a lot of deep reflection.

I like myself better when I am working full-time at a job. It structures my life, gives it a rhythm, and from looking at my past I thrive around structure. Grad school is great in a lot of ways but it gave me a constantly open, yet burdened schedule. I had very few strict time commitments—teaching and taking a couple of classes—which gave my schedule a lot of flexibility, but also a lot of potential to waste time. Further, even though I did not have strict commitments, it always felt as if there was something I could/should be working on. So I was free, but felt busy the whole time. Some people with different dispositions can and do handle this better. I just don’t feel cut out for it.

When I was working full-time I was extremely committed time-wise. Generally 55-60 hours per week including commuting time. But it sharpened me. If I was going to run it had to be right after work or right before work. If I was going to read I had a precious short window of time in the evenings to accomplish this. If I wanted to hang out with people I had to sacrifice to make it happen. But I did all of these things more when I was working full-time than I did in a much freer graduate school schedule. I am not saying this wasn’t my fault—it completely was, but I never seemed to be able to shake it. And that worried me when I thought about doing something like a PhD—four more years of trying to fight my tendency to be lazy when my schedule is up to me.

As I was working through some of this, I took a personality test. It said a lot that I already knew (I’m good at taking tests; I like teaching), but one category that surprised me was my military preference (something like 90%). In other words, what I was sensing throughout school—structure and discipline=good—was borne out by my test. I figured that meant something.

Another thing, having a kid changes the way that I think about everything. The first time I held him when he was born last year my life changed, including the way I think about the future. As I watched my parents hold him and we took him to Colorado when he was a couple of weeks old to meet the rest of his family something changed. My life was no longer only about where I want to be and what I want to do but about how I could provide for this little person who was all of a sudden in my charge. I also decided then that I wanted him and the ones that come after him to be raised around as much of their family as they can be. This is a precious and increasingly rare ambition. But I want him to know his cousins, his aunts and uncles, his grandparents. Given that all of these people happen to be in Colorado, I also want him to grow up around the mountains, skiing, hiking, climbing, and breathing the mountain air.

In many ways, these ambitions supersede my career goals. Our generation has been taught to make much of our personal preferences and goals. Sometimes this can lapse into outright selfishness. We are increasingly reticent to rescind our independence because we don’t want others to have the right to make claims on us. We want to be able to do what we want to do. My life does not have that option. I gave that up when I got married; still more when we had a child.

There is a lot to be said for duty. I am banking on the idea that there is also pleasure in duty. We are taught to look for the next big thing, to not limit our options lest something better come around the corner and we’re stuck. I am deciding that my best life is here with this woman and this boy and whoever else joins our bunch over the next few years. I am deciding that Sunday lunches at grandma’s, watching my kids running around in the backyard playing with cousins, is more important than me getting to teach Milton every three years at a junior college in North Dakota.

There is also a lot to be said for doing what you love. I would never deny that and I don’t think that someone trying to do so is selfish. This is about me, not about others. But I think in large measure we can decide to love what we are doing. I am also banking on that.

Here’s to the next step.