I read this in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: “If you’re in your 40’s, you are probably pulling down a bigger paycheck than ever before, and your portfolio has never been fatter.” This year I turn 39, so I’m not quite in the WSJ’s cohort. Still, I have to wonder how many people really fit this description.
I thought about this earlier this evening I ate a chicken sandwich at a Wendy’s overlooking Madison Square Park in New York. A little more than five years ago, I was part of a legal team representing a major financial services company with headquarters facing the same park. I probably looked at the same view from thirty stories up in one of my client’s conference rooms. I had no idea then that I’d be sitting today in a Wendy’s only a few blocks away, no longer a big-firm lawyer with Fortune 25 clients, but a junior Professor in a City University college. I had no idea five years ago that I’d be pulling down a much smaller paycheck, with no “portfolio” to speak of, as I approach my 40’s. I had no idea five years ago that I’d leave the “certainty” of a big law firm partnership for a risky new career in college teaching.
All of this reminds me of James chapter 4:
Now listen, you who say ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money. Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say ‘if it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.'”
I have no idea where I’ll be five years from now. I’m grateful that God provided an interesting, flexible teaching position at a unique college in Manhattan, and that he’s given me some success in my academic writing. I’m grateful also for the new web development skills I’ve learned in my outside consulting work, and that I’ve recently been able to represent some clients again in small “everyday” legal matters. I hope I can build my academic reputation, earn tenure, and develop my side businesses to the point where I can start saving real money again for my kids’ futures. But all of this ultimately is out of my hands. God, help me to be faithful today, to rest in your good and perfect will, and to trust you for tomorrow.