As I Recall

Short Devotionals from a Long Career

You too Can be Replaced by a URL

(Jeremiah 29:7)

In the tech company, my boss handled a wide variety of customers in the “Gov-Ed” market: State and local governments, and education organizations. This put my emergency communications niche squarely but insignificantly inside his area of responsibility. The fast movers handling state purchasing agreements in the millions of dollars swamped my paltry sales of tiny server farms and routers to rural sheriffs and county commissioners.

But the work my group attended to was critical to public safety, and we were no strangers to high-risk service implementations. So, it was only natural that when our company struck a deal with Kansas regulators that involved providing distance learning infrastructure for public schools, my boss gave me the opportunity to succeed… in a business that had absolutely nothing – nothing! – to do with emergency communications. Other than the fact it was fraught with politics, impossible schedules, virtually no budget, and untimely decision processes. Virtually all the work had to be done during the first two weeks of August, every year, and over Christmas break.

This meant the experienced technicians with union seniority, who did not report to me, were perpetually on vacation when installation, testing and troubleshooting were required.

And did I mention it was cutting-edge technology? Our company was determined to lead the field and deliver a working model. What could possibly go wrong? (Some call this “bleeding edge.”)

Rural schools always struggle for funding and are continually limited by the availability of high school teachers. What 23-year-old college grad with a brand-new teaching certificate in German or French wants to live in western Kansas when instead, he/she could go to the big city and find a social life as well as a teaching gig?

Distance learning meant that a German language teacher in City A could remotely teach a class at the same time in Cities B, C and D… if the network and video rooms were in place. Remember, this was about 1995. The internet itself was something of a novelty, and collaborative tools like Microsoft Team, Zoom, Skype and Duo were still science fiction.

Commitments had been made to public school customers, contracts had been signed, equipment had been ordered – none of this by me, of course – and now all we needed was an implementation manager to get it all assembled. And deal with customers extremely concerned that we meet schedules and have zero defects. Parents – rural flyover country people, I would never call them hicks, because I was one of them – looked with great suspicion on this new technology.

Which was why I found myself in a conference room in Topeka with two dozen managers, including our group President, discussing a technical problem that had no solution.

At one point, the President, a political rather than a technical resource, looked down the table and asked, “What if we fire Ghormley? Maybe that would help?” He looked at me. “It couldn’t hurt, right? Worth a shot?”

All eyes turned toward me, most of them unsure of my relationship with this man. “Sean,” I said, “Just remember that you, too, can be replaced by a website URL, just like everyone else around this table.”

It was a delicious moment. He broke the tension with a sudden laugh, and the others tittered nervously, still not quite comfortable. In those days one was rarely casual about termination of employment. But, hey, I didn’t create this problem, and my responsibility was limited to setting timeframes and communicating with the customer. No small chores, but way outside the arena of interfaces, servers, data circuitry, bit error rates, and video latency. Whatever those were.

Theological Contemplations

Do I really care whether high school students in cities B, C, or D get to study German? As a matter of fact, I do.

While I am not willing to understate the moral risks and outright rejection of a Christian Worldview by some in public education (and it seems to be getting worse, or maybe that’s just the news feed I follow), I do believe we ought to see that our next generation has a broader focus than merely their own local experience. Much goes on in the world of which we need to be aware; otherwise, we will raise citizens who have no frame of reference to understand developments outside our borders.

If the American Founders had had such a limited view, with no knowledge of such thinkers as Locke, Kant, Voltaire, Plato or Plutarch, a fine hash they would have made of things.

If I am going to participate in a secular business that brings distance learning to teens, then I need to be fully engaged.

Jeremiah bemoaned the exile to Babylon in 586 BC and following. Jerusalem had fallen to the siege of the invading army and the best, brightest, and richest were carted away to a foreign land. What was God’s message through the prophet to those exiles? Resist and rebel? Push a stick into the bicycle spokes? Sabotage the king’s initiatives?

Quite the contrary: “…Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7).

To an extent, we are, all of us Christians, exiles in this land. Seek its prosperity, seek its peace, that it may go well with us and with our children and with our children’s children. And with everybody else’s children too, for that matter.