The WTS Pivot Point

That time I was jobless, placeless, and unmarried, right before absolutely everything changed.

When I interviewed for the Director of Admissions position at Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008, I was pessimistic at best about getting the job. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t happen.

I was only 28, and had zero experience working in higher education.

But it was probably the single biggest turning point in my life. If things had gone another way, I have absolutely no idea what I would be doing right now; no idea what career field I would be in, no idea if I’d be married, no idea where I’d be living.

Only a couple months prior to the interview, I had been living in Florida, working a soul-crushingly dull job at a secondary market insurance company. The company buys life insurance policies from people, then collects when they die.

It’s hard to get motivated and find career purpose at a company that profits and rings a celebration bell when old people die.

I was just a paper pusher, and my position had no real meaning to speak of. My friends, family, and girlfriend at the time were all up in the Philadelphia area.

Fortunately in early 2008, after the company moved me down there just a year earlier, they started dissolving my department and letting people go one by one. On February 4, I was the second to last one to be let go.

Outside my Florida apartment. I actually wore Hollister shirts and a newsboy cap back then. Full cringe.

There was no way I was staying in Florida. As I walked out of that insurance building for the last time, although it was a little scary, I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of freedom, knowing I was headed back to Philadelphia where I had family and friends.

That was a nice feeling for a few minutes, before reality hit.

On March 14, 2008, I drove a moving truck with my friend Ben up to Philly so I could stay with my parents until I found a place and, more importantly, a job.

At 28 I was living at my parents’ again, unmarried and with no job prospects, and my girlfriend had a brain tumor.

It was a low point.

But there was an unexplainable, psychological shift inside me that happened around that time.

Somehow I just committed to doing something. I was going to solve these problems by taking action. Keep moving.

I wasn’t going to just sit around and scroll job boards with irrational hope.

So I decided to simply volunteer at my alma mater, Westminster, where I graduated three years prior.

I mentioned last time that Westminster wasn’t only the place I got my master’s. It had also been my home and backyard, the place that employed my dad, and my dad’s alma mater years before.

It was and always will be home, in a way.

But Westminster had changed a ton in those three years since I graduated in 2005: a new President, some new administrators, and a new, internal controversy over inerrancy (I’ll get to that later) that was about to go very public.