Matt: A couple weeks ago I turned 40 years old! Its also now 3 years since my initial diagnosis. I’ve felt the weight of that more and more the past several months. 2022 was tough. I lost my voice again for a few months, mourned the death of a family member, and to start 2023, lost my job due to company restructuring.
I’m convinced that long COVID, combined with significant stress from work, contributed to a re-injuring of the nerves which control my speaking and swallowing mechanisms. Internal scans this summer did not reveal any obvious signs of cancer recurrence and I’ve found several stories of people, including a popular country music star, getting a hoarse voice while recovering from COVID or other illness. However, given my health history, this has not been an easy time. One of the early commitments I made to myself was to not engage in ‘what if…’ thinking. As my voice and swallowing muscles have continued to heal, this remains my approach with things I don’t fully understand. What I’ve learned about the body and nutrition, is now expanding further into mental/emotional health. Topics I’ve explored briefly are now the center of my focus as I seek to build resiliency. It’s also helpful to be married to a world-class speech pathologist who can help me with my voice.
Everyone complains about their job from time to time, but here’s what I had to deal with last summer: in the span of 1.5 weeks the CEO announced he was bringing in a co-CEO with a different management style, the leader of our entire department was fired, the VP quit, my direct supervisor quit, and my team was re-organized to a new department without clear goals.
Additionally, in Q4 they reassigned a recent new hire to lead our team. She was the wrong fit professionally, rude, lacking clear goals despite our feedback and recommendations, a poor communicator, would give inconsistent requests, and was indecisive. It got to the point where the 7 people on our team, led by her 2 closest direct reports, met to plan a unified recommendation to HR such as manager training. Annie and I spent a lot of time in prayer before this day as I believe Jesus wants to be with us in every part of our lives. What happened next was shocking in some ways, but in others may be the beginning of an important change.
My team was prepared to begin the process with HR (or, as I told Annie, a mutiny!) when we woke up on the morning of Wednesday Jan 11th unable to log into our work laptops. Logging into work email from our phones revealed that the company sent an email to notify us that our role was eliminated effective earlier that morning. We were also blocked from logging in to the work servers to view or save work samples. By the end of the day we learned the company cut 20% of their global workforce (nearly 650 people) in several areas of the company (including the boss we were going to mutiny against, yay, but also, huh!?).
An answer to prayer? I’m still processing what went on, and recovering from a bad migraine in the tension leading up to all this. I now feel disappointed that I won’t be around to see how things play out, not just with the bad supervisor, but on work projects I was excited about and that had momentum internally. My work feels invalidated and I can’t give my point of view or let my voice be heard. This only reinforces past feelings of ‘am I doing enough here?’. Lessons have been learned and I’m getting organized before exploring what to do now. But I do know that my next step will be just as prayer filled as the past few months.
‘Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them…he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built.’(Lk 6:47-48 esv).
Here’s what else I’m loving during this season: literally any hike in this area. (clockwise from top left: Snoqualmie Falls, Echo Peak just a short distance from our house, Rattlesnake Ledge, Little Si, Mercer Slough.)
The Myth of Normal – Gabor Mate,
The Lord is My Courage – KJ Ramsey,
pick-up soccer in downtown Seattle,
and thankful Lizzo keeps cranking out the hits…what 😉?
2022 in photos: Moved Faith to a new barn, lots of hiking, community involvement/business promotion, neighborhood Turkey Trot (the fastest couple!), riding in the snow
Matt & Annie - Journey 