Where We Belong (21 page)

“One of my good friends recommended the church. The liturgy and especially the preaching appealed to me,” he says. “It was probing, aware of the world, intelligent. The church’s music was also simply outstanding.”

Work at Salomon Brothers was mentally and physically demanding and Lindley wasn’t taking good care of himself. He was smoking, out of shape, and in 1986, two years into the job, he made an alarming find.

“I was traveling a lot, and during one trip I became aware that my groin was feeling odd,” Lindley explains. “I had an enlarged testicle. My doctor examined me and said, ‘It doesn’t feel right and we need to do exploratory surgery.’ ”

Lindley was diagnosed with testicular cancer and a month later underwent surgery to remove the mass, which had not metastasized, as his father’s cancer had.

“It was interesting because until that time I didn’t realize that my father had testicular cancer. I thought he had lung cancer. It was only after I told my mother that I had testicular cancer that she said, ‘Oh my God, that’s what your dad had!’ I wasn’t freaked out for some reason,” Lindley says. “It was more like,
This is a bother
.” His father died at thirty-one. “When this happened I was thirty-two, so I’d already gone through the magic thirty-one. I thought more when I was thirty-one,
Oh my goodness, what’s going to happen to me?
but I got through that.”

Lindley continued to work during the six weeks of radiation he underwent.

“I’d work and then take a car to go get irradiated, and then walk back home from Cabrini Medical Center to my apartment on Eleventh Street,” he says. “There was some impact. There was a sense of mortality. I think I got a little more serious about going to church at that point.”

In 1988, Lindley experienced another unexpected sensation, but this time it was chemistry. That May, Lindley’s boss, Bill, and his wife, Linda, set him up on a blind date with Sarah Finlayson. Sarah went to college with Linda and worked in the city as a vice president in institutional sales of mortgage-backed securities at Shearson Lehman Hutton. They thought Sarah and Lindley would have a lot in common. The plan was to eat dinner at Bill and Linda’s house in Rye, New York. Lindley and Bill would fly in from a work trip to Bermuda to entertain clients at International Invitational Race Week, then land in Westchester County and drive twenty-five minutes to Rye for the dinner date.

But the weather had a different plan. Large storms rerouted the flight to Hartford, where Lindley and Bill had to wait to clear customs and for a car to take them to Rye, about an hour and a half away.

“We had been partying from the time we got on the boats down in Bermuda, so Bill and I rolled in two and a half hours late, and if not three sheets, then two to the wind,” he recalls, laughing. “It ended up that the blind date was primarily just driving back to Manhattan with Sarah.”

Enough time for Lindley to find Sarah personable, pretty, and smart.

“I remember thinking he was really quite cute with beautiful eyes,” Sarah recalls. “I was thirty-five years old at that point, so I thought,
I wouldn’t mind seeing him again
.”

That wouldn’t happen right away. Sarah was headed for a vacation in Sweden, and by the time she returned, Lindley would be on a getaway to Scotland.

In June 1988, six weeks later, the two had their first real date. Bill and Linda had good instincts. Lindley and Sarah hit it off and were engaged by Thanksgiving. The following May they were married, Sarah age thirty-six, Lindley thirty-five.

Once he was married, Lindley stopped smoking. He began training to run the 1989 New York City Marathon (which he finished) as an incentive to stay healthy. Church continued to be a source of serenity for Lindley, and he and Sarah alternated their attendance between both of their churches. She introduced Lindley to her preacher, Maurice Boyd of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian.

“He was a real artist in the pulpit. I began subscribing to his weekly sermon tapes,” he explains, “and often listened to them in my car when I was on my way out of the city on the weekend.”

Lindley and Sarah both had demanding jobs in the exciting but grueling high-stakes financial world. She was in the sales and trading business, where the daily high velocity on the trading floor was relentless. As an investment banker, Lindley managed expectations to constantly land the next big deal. For many in their industry, the heightened stress levels led to physical burnout and mental-health challenges.

New York City, 1989
(Courtesy of Bachrach Photography)

“Anger management and substance abuse were not my issues, but I tended toward depression,” Lindley explains, “which Sarah noticed after we’d been married a year or so. I was definitely having a tough time keeping myself engaged. The chairman of my company was quoted in a magazine article saying that he needed people who got up in the morning wanting ‘to bite the ass off a bear.’ I think I was noticing that I wasn’t quite at that stage, which was an issue. I was finding it more difficult to concentrate, feeling tired, and being grumpy, particularly toward those I could afford to be grouchy with, like Sarah.”

Sarah encouraged Lindley to go to therapy, something she was quite familiar with, having grown up in a trying family environment.

“I come from a background of enormous amounts of therapy,” Sarah explains, “so I guess I had gotten to the point in my life at thirty-seven that it wasn’t my job to work on someone else’s issues. I wasn’t a professional.”

Lindley admits he considered therapy “a luxury for spoiled Manhattanites,” but he agreed to go. He began a several-year exploration with a female psychologist who specialized in career-decision cases. She helped Lindley navigate his childhood.

“I would often find myself in tears over certain memories, and I was still trying to work out how I felt about my mother,” he says. “I found so many pictures where my father was noticeably proud of me and that I was special to him. She helped me process a lot of the grief about my father and eventually sent me to a psychopharmacologist. I started getting some Zoloft originally, and I’ve been taking some sort of medication pretty much ever since, with good effect.”

In January 1990, Lindley’s hard work at Salomon Brothers was rewarded with a promotion. He was now a director with the Project Finance Group. He began work on a project to privatize the Thai telephone system. One of his favorite side benefits of the frequent international travel was exploring and analyzing his faith.

“One of my Salomon colleagues on the deal was an evangelical Christian. We spent a lot of time together in Bangkok and religion was a topic of conversation. He lived in Hong Kong and I spent a number of weekends while stopping over there going to his church with him and his family,” Lindley says. “His faith was much more ‘out there’ than mine, and I think I was challenged to try to understand better what I believed and how it was different from what he believed. All of this got me reading—and with all that travel to Asia, there was lots of time to do it.”

Despite the promotion, Lindley was feeling unfulfilled by his career path.

“I guess I had felt for a while that Salomon Brothers was not a perfect fit for me. There is a quality of competitiveness in the best investment bankers that was not my strongest suit. A lot of people say the money doesn’t really matter; it’s just a way of keeping score. I think for me, the game was just never that all-consuming. We were trying to put together deals that would allow our clients—and us—to make a lot of money, but there was nothing inherently worthwhile in a lot of what we were trying to achieve,” he explains. “Much of the business I worked on was highly structured and negotiated. You had to live with individual transactions as they came together over months or even years. There were a lot of big egos and a constant jockeying for position and advantage. I found it hard to maintain the fevered pitch. Also, as I became a manager and began to be responsible for people’s careers, I was frustrated with how hard it was to create a real team in an environment where everyone was always expendable.”

Lindley resumed therapy with the same female psychologist who had helped him several years earlier.

“We talked a lot about issues I had at work, concerns I had at work. I had just been promoted, I was making a lot of money, I was getting good feedback in the form of a promotion, and yet I wasn’t happy about it,” he says. “So, what’s going on here?”

What
was
going on? Between the two of them, the DeGarmos were making enough money to qualify as the top 1 percent of earners in the country. They lived in a spacious apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

“One of the perverse things about New York and Wall Street is, there’s always someone who’s doing better, and so you’re less likely to say, ‘How marvelous! How well I’ve done!’ but rather you think,
I’m as good as so-and-so, why am I not doing that?
It’s hard to get too uppity there.”

Lindley recalls having those conflicted feelings at his sister’s 1993 wedding in Pine Plains. His humble past and successful present mingled on the lawn of his mother’s house. Lindley was chatting with his dad’s older brother.

“We were standing out in the yard, and my car was sitting there, and I remember him looking down at it and he didn’t say anything to me,” Lindley describes. “I was driving the S-Class 500 Mercedes and he didn’t quite know what to say. I was thinking,
This guy taught me to drive a tractor when I was twelve. What does he think?
”

The following summer brought a momentous change in the couple’s life. In August 1994, at forty-one, Sarah gave birth to their daughter, Ellie. Lindley, now forty and the family’s main breadwinner, took off a rare few weeks to spend with Mom and baby.

“I stayed home and we played house. Sarah had a cesarean so she was kind of out of it for a while, so I got to do a lot of the diaper changing and feeding and I just loved it,” he says. “I wasn’t at all prepared for how much I responded to having this little person there.”

After two rewarding weeks at home, Lindley had to travel abroad for a ten-day business trip. He flew twenty-four hours to Islamabad as part of a trade delegation to discuss joint energy privatization opportunities with Pakistani officials. Trying to make a phone call to the United States—before advanced technology was available—was virtually impossible. The ten days dragged on.

“I’m thinking to myself,
I’ve got this baby back in New York and here I am sitting in blankety-blank Pakistan. What am I doing?
”

Within two months, they hired a weekday live-in nanny to help Sarah, who would return to work in nine months. Lindley was working full-time. Ultimately, the nanny would remain with the family for nine years.

Once Ellie was born, Lindley and Sarah both became members of the same church, the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn in Brooklyn Heights. The pastor, Reverend Doctor Paul Smith, had a history of fostering congregations that represented a myriad of ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds. By the time the DeGarmos joined the church, Reverend Smith, an African American, had spent eight years creating a multiracial, multicultural, all-inclusive congregation of two hundred fifty people in the neighborhood where “Wall Street lived.” Lindley was drawn to the mission and became a very active member of the church. He served as an elder and partnered with Paul in fortifying the framework for a diverse congregation.

“He was a corporate banker, so he brought organization,” says Paul. “That’s a very disciplined kind of organization—slide presentations, PowerPoints, five different ways to do this-that-and-the-other—and I’m just the opposite. We were a very good match because he was very well organized and I’m very spontaneous.”

During the week, Lindley was finding it more and more difficult to stay engaged. His career focused on the almighty dollar, but it was instead the Almighty and religion that he found most compelling and meaningful.

“My mind was wandering increasingly away from the business things it was supposed to be focused on and toward thoughts of preaching.”

Lindley turned to Paul: what would it take for him to pursue a career in the ministry?

“He started asking the more serious questions,” Paul says, “like ‘What do you think about this? What other kinds of courses should I concentrate on?’ ”

By November 1994, work provided Lindley’s mind with another reason to wander.

“My dissatisfaction at Salomon was crystallized when a promotion I had been expecting did not come through,” he says, “and then shortly thereafter, my immediate boss and mentor left Salomon for another firm. All this turned up the heat competitively, accentuating parts of the job that I liked least.”

Could he really become an ordained minister? Should he?

Lindley kept the thoughts to himself until early 1995, when he shared with Sarah that he wanted to audit several classes in seminary.

“Sarah was not wild about the idea,” says Lindley. “She worried that I was depressed or otherwise going through some sort of midlife crisis.”

Sarah was blindsided. She tried to wrap her mind around the idea of Lindley trading his silk tie for a clerical collar.