Something Has Shifted

In the past I’ve written about leadership and organizational development. Mostly out of proximity. It’s what I know and love. With a side of conviction that we desperately need better leaders and better organizations.

However, something has shifted.

In January of 2023 my father passed away. In July of that year the board of the company I had started eight years earlier decided to restructure the company in order to sell it to a private equity firm. A decision I supported, but that didn’t stop it from feeling like giving your child up for adoption. I had given up so much equity by that point that I was simply a bystander watching this happen. An unemployed bystander.

Without much warning I was an out-of-work father of three and a husband with a mortgage. I was also in crisis. By the end of 2023 I had lost a hundred and fifty pounds, down from my heaviest at my father’s funeral, where I weighed close to four hundred pounds. It was a planned, medically supervised change. But I was lost. I felt and looked like a fraction of my former self. We made ends meet by contracting work in tech until, two years later, the sale of my company finally went through and I was offered a position with the new owners. That was the tipping point. The point when any connection to the way things had been was finally severed and I was truly lost. Watching someone else parent your child while you play pretend nanny is soul-crushing. No matter how they make it look in the movies.

I knew three things: 1) my wife was behind me no matter what, 2) I really needed a job and 3) I had a far better understanding of what I wasn’t good at than what I was. And then out of nowhere I received a job offer from Hope Mission. That changed everything.

That story needs to be kept as dry powder for later, but at my lowest point in that season I received an email I wasn’t expecting with a job offer. To be clear, this had never happened to me before. To be even more clear, it wasn’t a job I was particularly excited about, but it was a job. It was an answer to prayer. It was the only open door I had, so I walked through it. Six weeks after starting with Hope Mission I was asked to build what we now call the Innovation Hub. A safe place to experiment on problems and build out novel solutions. It’s been nothing short of the joy of my life, and something I would call my dream job, if it were in fact something I could have dreamt or imagined prior to it being real.

My first experience serving people struggling with homelessness was when I was twelve. A group of teenagers from my church travelled from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where I was born and raised, to Calgary, Alberta, where we spent a week at the University of Calgary learning about serving random strangers and then spent our afternoons travelling to different parts of the city to basically go out and see where we could serve.

I remember walking through Prince’s Island Park on the banks of the Bow River and sitting down next to a man whose shoes no longer looked like shoes. They were filled with holes, and I could clearly see his bare feet. They were too small for him, and his big toes had burrowed their way through to open air. I looked down at my shoes. By no means new, they were whole. They were warm and dry. So I proposed a trade, which he gratefully accepted. Walking throughout the rest of the week in those shoes was excruciating. There was no insole, so I was walking on the honeycomb pattern of the bare rubber sole of the shoe. I walked several miles in his shoes. Please trust me when I say I don’t share that story as any kind of flex. I share it because of the profound impact that experience had on me, and because of what happened when I got home. I had no idea how my parents would react. I don’t remember them getting upset. Instead, they bought me new shoes. It wasn’t a hardship for them. It wasn’t really a hardship for me either. But this started something in me that has shaped me in visible and invisible ways over the past twenty-five years. It’s what Inside Out would describe as a Core Memory. It went beyond seeing material poverty first-hand. Beyond putting a name and a face to a narrative. There was an empowerment in being able to, even as a twelve-year-old, do something meaningful for someone else. There was a connection with another human at a level far deeper than the surface. There was a realization of the intrinsic value and worth of every human. And yes, a sense of the love that God has for every person.

Since that first experience I have spent time working with people experiencing homelessness in some of the largest cities in North America. I’ve also spent time in Uganda working with a rural secondary school where, though material poverty is the norm, homelessness is almost non-existent. I’ve seen a mother with six children living in a small shed, but the idea of hundreds of people relying on an emergency overnight shelter is basically unheard of. There are reasons that’s true, but again, that will have to wait until later.

Over the past year I have had the privilege of being able to bring together parts of myself I didn’t know could co-exist: an intense desire to serve people and make a difference, and a love of building valuable tools.

Living purposefully and loving to build tools somehow also need a third leg on this stool: communicating about it.

Writing, for me, has always come naturally. I’m not saying that I’m an above-average writer, but that expressing my thoughts through a pen or a keyboard has never been a challenge. The reason I don’t write more often is a lack of prioritization.

This blog is going to serve as a personal journal made public. I’m writing from the perspective that no one will read it. I don’t mean to be self-deprecating, only that there are more blogs than there are people. But this should give you a sense of trust, knowing that what I’m saying is an honest reflection and depiction of my perspective. I will be honest with my opinions and do my best to label them as such. I will often hold up two truths that seem to oppose one another because it’s what I’m struggling to bring together in my head.

For example, I am a follower of Jesus, and I also know that the church of Jesus has committed terrible acts upon humanity, not least of which is the cultural genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the country I call home. A breaking of humanity that will have consequences for all involved for many generations. An act, which was really countless acts, so far divorced from the nature and character of God that I can only now begin to put into words. Sorry is not enough.

I will open myself up to conflict and criticism by being vulnerable. I will not use this as a platform to promote myself or Hope Mission or any commercialized product that I’ve helped build.