As I began this essay, I couldn’t help feeling I’d been asked a third-date question before we finished our first date, which was, after all, just for coffee, not for dinner. I wrestled with how to approach the question, but ultimately decided that there was only one true answer. It is the same answer that my wife, Charity, would give, if you asked her “What matters most to Matt, and why?” It’s the answer I would want given at my funeral, and it is the philosophy that I will teach to my children through my words and actions. It’s what I try to do each day when I get out of bed.
What matters most to me is the person and work of Jesus Christ. The only appropriate response to his person (the God-man) and work (the redemption of his people) is thankful obedience to his word (the Bible), which, directly or by implication, addresses all areas of life. My thoughts on how to live my life, in light of what matters most, follow the helpful formulation of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. In answer to the question, “What is the chief end of man?” the Westminster Divines reply, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” By calling this the “chief” end, they meant to say that this is the one ideal to which all people ought to aim; that in seeking this difficult calling, people find true happiness. The “chief” end is the goal which all other things serve. Theology proper is a narrow slice of my life, but this short prolegomenon provides the interpretive lens for understanding me. When things seem fuzzy or out of focus, I pause to consider this end; my hierarchy of values flows from this source.
At the top of my list of values is my family, consisting of my wife Charity, our daughter Lucy and our anticipated second child, due sometime in April of 2007. I met Charity in AP English my senior year in high school and it has been hard to find one of us without the other ever since. In the summer after our junior year at university, Charity and I were married. Four years later, our daughter Lucy was born, giving me a grinning, giggling reason to clear out of the office before six o’clock.
The Apostle Paul tells us in I Timothy 5 that anyone who fails to care for his own family has denied Christianity. My best efforts in work and at play are focused on satisfying all the needs of my family. Charity and Lucy provide the context in which all the rest of life takes place. I’ve declined a job offer at Intel for a position which required late-night meetings with Asia because the work would have impinged too much on my time in the evenings. To have accepted the job would have been in conflict with my values, exalting work over family, and would inevitably have made me miserable.
My second priority in life is work in the church. I serve as a deacon, caring for the physical needs of church members – visiting the elderly and sick, providing tangible assistance to those in need of help, and maintaining the physical property of our congregation. I strongly believe that God has given us talents for the purpose of serving others. The work at Calvin Presbyterian Church provides a special opportunity to use my energies and abilities, serving on the pastor search committee, leading the youth group and teaching Sunday school. This is my favorite type of work. Beneath family and church, I run into a four-way tie for what’s next-most important. Extended family, professional work, friends, and education are all things I value very highly.
My extended family has been hugely influential in shaping me into the person I’ve become, especially in my work-values. I like to do work and achieve meaningful and excellent results. I come from a family that is always getting the right things done. My grandfather, Walt Miner, began his career as a shipbuilder in World War II. Not satisfied with wages, in addition to building ships for twelve hours a day, beginning at the age of twenty-six, he also built homes on weekends, first for his family, and then for other people. On a wage of eight dollars a day he went into business and he never looked back. He built more than three hundred custom homes in Magnolia, a residential district in Seattle. When a historian wrote a book about Magnolia, My grandpa and his offspring took up an entire chapter. Hundreds of people still live in the well-constructed houses he built. I learned to work from my grandfather and from my dad. I learned, as Rafe Esquith said, that there are no shortcuts. Whether I am remodeling my home or getting more output from Intel’s existing capital equipment, getting good results requires discipline, creativity and enthusiasm to get the job done.
Within the context of work, I have my own particular set of values. One of my ambitions is to start a company with my brother where our business values of Excellence, Integrity, Liberty, Curiosity and Risk-taking can have full force in shaping our firm. We don’t know exactly what we want to do yet, but we’ve both taken heart from reading Built to Last. We don’t need to start with a brilliant entrepreneurial idea to build a successful company.
I love to build relationships. I tend to learn the names of waitresses and baristas. I have found each of my full-time jobs through my personal friends. Close friends, old and new, are a critical touchstone in my life. When we visit Seattle, we always see David and Melissa Friedrich. Dave and I have been friends since I was born (he’s six months older than me). We sit around at Maggie Bluff’s on the Magnolia waterfront. We drink local beers and, at the age of twenty-seven, talk about the good-old-days of losing our shoes in deep mud on Camano Island and having to walk back to the cabin barefoot; we remember finding little league home-run baseballs in the woods behind the diamond at Ray Field. Many times, old friends are the best friends.
New friends, on the other hand, provide the excitement of getting to know someone. They give the opportunity to tell the old, favorite stories in detail and without repeating oneself. I never pass on the chance to tell people about how Charity and I met and ended up married. It is a blast to hear about the unique things that other people have done. We had some new friends over from church recently and, before they married, the husband had spent a year camping in his Jeep Cherokee on the Appalachian Trail. In the morning, he’d shower at the local college and head into work as a pastry chef. It was the first time I’d heard a biography quite like his.
The pursuit of education is a value for me. Knowledge is integral to the success of post/modern-society; it is also a prerequisite to my personal enjoyment and success. To use knowledge effectively is the key to accomplishment, and education is the means through which knowledge flows. My education itself takes myriad forms – daily reading of the Wall Street Journal, interactions with people across disciplines and within the discipline of finance, and learning to teach others, to name a few. I have decided to pursue my graduate business education because I believe that the stuff I learn will itself prove to be a cornerstone in the foundation of my knowledge. This knowledge, in turn, is the means of production I will employ in my development as a manager and as a human being.
Finally, I value leisure and recreation. In terms of absolute importance, these fraternal-twin values rank below the others, but they are still indispensable to my well-being. Their absence makes everything else lose some of its vibrancy. Charity and I make a hobby of throwing big parties. We have perfected the art of entertaining forty people in our 950 square foot home (use the yard and invite guests who like each other); casual parties are our quintessential family recreation. I love to read; sometimes I read pulp, sometimes business-non-fiction, sometimes literature, and sometimes theology. Reading keeps me connected to humanity at large and to the power of words and ideas. I seek out the challenge and adventure of hiking and hunting just to “be out there.” I’m no Sir Hillary nor Papa Hemingway, but I love the mountains and the deserts, open-top four-by-fours loaded with gear, and the intensity of knowing that, to a greater or lesser extent, my skill, ingenuity, and endurance are the only things I can rely on to make it back to the truck and home for dinner. Recreation and leisure provide the experiences upon which I can meditate when work gets hard; they provide fodder for stories around backyard barbecues and in backcountry canyons. Recreation and leisure provide punctuation (exclamation points!) for the fast-passing time.
Pondering what I love has been a great opportunity for valuable reflection, though fraught with all the perils of introspection and careful thinking. I’ve been startled at the immediacy of the impact of organizing these thoughts; even though they’ve been in my head since childhood, I am thinking and doing differently now. The effort has left me exhausted, but it’s a happy exhaustion that has me wondering what I can and do to more fully integrate my values and practice for greater consistency and impact.
