With Thanks

By the end of the month, I will have fully completed the season of transition from my life and work in the Chicago area to my new life and new work in Miami. If you missed my reflections on what led to this transition, see this essay. I spent a few days in Miami two weeks ago, including two full days in the office with my new colleagues, and am very happy to say I really like my new team already, received a very warm welcome, and am excited for the point when I can devote my full attention to my new assignment.

But in the midst of packing and finishing projects at my soon-to-be former jobs, I would like to offer several words of thanks, to Calvary Memorial Church, to Wheaton College, and to Chicago. I am sure I have forgotten many important aspects of my experiences with each but what follows it what comes to mind as I reflect at this juncture.

First, to Calvary Memorial Church, where I have served on staff for over six years and where I have attended, with brief pauses when I was in term in college, for twenty. I am thankful for the communities I found in my junior high and high school youth groups and then later in my young adult small groups and friend groups. I am thankful for the opportunity to apply my music degree right away as orchestra director and then acting head of worship ministries and then ministry associate of worship and music, and then the opportunity to learn essentially a whole new profession through service as church administrator and then director of finance and administration. I am thankful for the enduring support and encouragement I received from the leadership, especially Pastors Caleb, Gerald, Jonny, and Todd. I am grateful for the members of the orchestra who gave me the gift of being their director for six and a half years, which to date is the professional role I have held the longest.

Second, to Wheaton College, where I completed my undergraduate education, met the woman who is now my wife, and have served on staff for over five years. For the rest of my life I will carry special memories of my undergraduate years, and I am grateful for all the lessons I learned both formally and informally, and including the ones I had to learn the hard way. I am grateful for the lifelong friends I made there among my roommates and others. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve as a staff member in the Conservatory, the same department in which I studied. I am grateful I was part of the move to the Conservatory's new home, for the inauguration of President Phil Ryken, for the beginning of the CSO at Wheaton College series, and for endless unique and enjoyable concert productions. And I am grateful for my colleagues, my boss Tony Payne, my dean Michael Wilder, and for the many students I was able to formally and informally mentor and support.

And finally, to Chicago itself. I would not trade the experience of growing up and spending the first decade of adulthood in Chicago for anything. I am honored that I can call myself a native Chicagoan and Chicago will always and forever be my hometown. Chicago has institutions that are among the world's best, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where I was pleased to offer volunteer hours for several years, and given its annual visits to Florida, I know I can continue to be an active patron. And it has been a very special last few years to be a Cubs fan. I will be bringing my small collection of 2016 World Series Champion-branded swag with me to Miami, no question. Of course, Chicago is not perfect. No city is. But Chicago, you have incredible potential. You do not have to be defined by the heartbreak and frustration that has plagued you and that comprises most of your national and global reputation. There are so many people, seen and unseen, working hard every day to make Chicago a better place, and I am glad to have been part of that place for my first thirty years. I look forward to visiting as often as I can, and in between I will be ordering those frozen Lou Malnati's pizzas to be shipped to Miami!

So thank you.

Journey to Miami

At the end of November, I accepted an offer to the General Operations Manager for Seraphic Fire, "Florida's Grammy-Nominated Vocal Ensemble," in Miami. I will be moving to South Florida at the end of January.

It has been an interesting journey that led to this move and change of jobs. Certainly when asked ten years ago as a college sophomore where I saw myself in ten years, I would not have answered with either of the current jobs I am leaving or the new job I am starting, though that of course is not at all unique to me among my Millennial peers.

Quick background: I have a bachelor's degree from Wheaton College in music education. I spent my first three years post-college as a middle school band director as well as side jobs as a church orchestra director and events manager for the Wheaton College Artist Series, with a little private trombone teaching and music supplies retailing along the way. Five years later, that church orchestra job has evolved through music ministry associate to church administrator to finance director, and the events manager job has evolved to production manager with a side of digital marketing. I have been now been part of four annual budget cycles and countless employee onboardings, vendor changes, and insurance claims in my church job (while still managing to keep up the orchestra directorship) and nearly fifty major public concert events featuring several Grammy winners and a move to a new music building in my Wheaton job. I just turned 30 this past October, and I am quite pleased with and immensely grateful for the breadth of professional experiences and opportunities I have had.

And yet, it was admittedly fatiguing to balance two demanding, events-heavy jobs, even though my bosses and colleagues at both fully recognized my obligation to devote half of each week's working hours to the other. So for several years I have been looking, with varying degrees of earnestness, to find a full-time role that would match by skills, experiences, and interests. It was a bit of a moving target.

At first, once I felt that I was not destined to be an active music educator, I found interest in the arts management profession, awakened no doubt by my work as the fledgling Artist Series production manager. So I followed arts management blogs and their respective job boards and have had probably dozens of at least first-round interviews with orchestras and presenting organizations around the country. Even had a few second interviews from time to time. Most of the roles I sought were in either the production or education departments of those organizations, thinking I was drawing on my experience as a producer and educator.

But then I had an interesting conversation with my then-executive pastor, Gerald, who was my immediate supervisor at church for almost four years until he moved to the senior pastorate this past summer. He affirmed my skills, and more to the point, giftedness, in financial administration and non profit management. And from that observation (which of course I recognized as true, I simply had never focused on that as a possible lead strength of mine), the thought occurred that perhaps I should look at serving in a finance management role with an arts organization.

And so that has been my main search in the last six months or so. Within a week of that conversation with Gerald I came across a very compelling opportunity to be the finance and administration director for a professional symphony orchestra, and was gratified to get all the way to the second round of interviews before receiving a rejection notice. But I kept at it. Late this fall I found myself interviewing simultaneously for two roles of that same type, one with a summer music festival and one with a Grammy-nominated vocal ensemble in Miami. I made it to the second round with both. But one made an offer first.

I have to pause here and speak again of Wheaton College, but in particular of my undergraduate education there. The professional music degree programs there are informed by the liberal arts context. As I have seen with stark clarity as I have accepted this new job, that liberal arts education ensured that I learned how to learn, and how to transfer my skills to different contexts, and have the potential to succeed in a wide variety of applied disciplines. My curriculum at Wheaton consisted of precisely nothing about the complex field of labor law, for example. And yet here I am as the human resources manager for a staff of 20+ at my church. Not a single lesson in four years about how to interpret a technical rider. And yet I have presented acts that came with technical riders running dozens of pages at Wheaton. And so forth. What I learned is how to learn those things that my eventual job(s) would require me to know.

And that, I think, is how I found my way, and flourished, in my two current jobs to the point where I am qualified to assume this new job, and of course to successfully apply myself to the new particulars of the new role. The view from this proverbial vantage point is as clear as it ever has been, and I see clearly all the pieces along the way I needed to be at this point to have this next step be available to me.

Of course, as I am a follower of Christ, I credit the placement of those pieces, and the fact that I took all the necessary steps along the way, to his grace and provision. The first few days after receiving the job offer were actually somewhat anxious, as the self-conscious part of me wondered whether I really had the skills I needed to succeed at my new job. But as I began onboarding and reviewing documents and files and conversing with my new boss, Rhett, I found everything was clicking. God has been calming my anxious heart, showing me that I have exactly what I need in the way of intellectual aptitude and the right hard-fought experiential knowledge, to succeed in this new assignment.