Where We Belong (22 page)

“I was surprised and I didn’t quite know what to think about it,” Sarah explains. “I could feel there was a seismic shift in Lindley. Was it that Ellie was born? Was it not making managing director? Was it the constantly being on a plane? Something happened and he just said inside,
Enough is enough
. I could not get my arms around it. I come from a different attitude where, okay, you get knocked down and you pick yourself up and you go. So, there was a little bit of me thinking,
Why aren’t you just picking yourself up and going?
”

But how do you pick up and go if you’re unsure about where you’re going? Lindley agreed to further examine his internal “seismic shift.”

“I recognized that this was a huge and sort of nonsensical thing to be talking about, and I wasn’t averse to doing things that would help decide that it wasn’t crazy,” Lindley says. “I agreed to see a psychiatrist and also to spend a couple of days at Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation being aptitude tested. I also opened up conversations with our pastors.”

While Lindley explored, Sarah surveyed the family finances. She felt Lindley’s disinterest could very well cost him his job.

“The whole next year he just sort of checked out,” Sarah says. “He would just get on planes and go someplace. I think he went to South Africa to be a Salomon envoy or something like that. I said to him, ‘Why are you going to South Africa? What’s the purpose?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ I could just feel this pulling away. I knew he was on a downward spiral at work.”

At the end of 1995, Lindley was downsized out of Salomon Brothers at age forty-two.

“Ironically, at that point I was about a year into the most intense part of my contemplation of a change. There was a part of me that felt God was giving me the push I needed to get off the dime and do it. I went ahead and enrolled as an auditor in two seminary courses that began in January, but at the same time began looking at alternatives and options for going back to work,” Lindley explains. “I was pretty well-known in my field at that time, and so I took a number of calls from companies wondering if I would be interested in talking. Enron was one of these. The chief financial officer was looking to hire a head of project financing, which would have encompassed their international operations in electric power, pipelines, and so on. I would need to move to Houston again and continue the sort of global traveling that I had been doing at Salomon Brothers. I could not get interested in more of the same.”

Lindley again reached out to Paul to discuss his plan to audit classes in seminary in Manhattan. Was this a man going through a midlife crisis? Paul says all signs pointed to no. Lindley had a track record of involvement with the church. He’d also shared with Paul the clarity that came into his life after having survived testicular cancer, watching a colleague yet again uproot his life for work, and having a daughter.

“As a layperson he was really involved in the church as an elder, so he knew what to expect,” Paul says. “He was also looking at his friend’s experience of having to move to the West Coast. He experienced losing his job. He wanted to minister. In that period of discernment, he was carefully looking at
What do I want to do? What will Sarah think about this?
”

Sarah was in shock.

“This was really quite scary. I was thinking,
This is really odd. I didn’t marry a minister.
I didn’t grow up in a religious or faith-based home. I grew up Presbyterian, but we were the quintessential Christmas-and-Easter people, if that. It was bizarre.” She thought,
Lindley? Called to the ministry?
“The joke was, ‘Whoever’s calling you, Lindley, have them call me because I want to talk to them.’ We lived a very expensive lifestyle and he was talking about basically making no money. He said, ‘Some ministers make twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars a year.’ And I knew that wouldn’t even pay for the nanny. That wouldn’t pay for Ellie’s school. So, I sort of put that away somewhere and thought,
This is not really real
.”

Any communication issues the DeGarmos had before in their marriage were magnified by having to address Lindley’s potential extreme career change. They decided to enter couple’s counseling.

“I felt we were on a slippery slope,” Sarah says, “meaning that if I gave an inch, Lindley would take a foot or two feet. I knew that if he started auditing and he liked it, the next shoe was going to drop.”

They carved out time once a week for counseling.

“She gets angry and I withdraw,” Lindley says. “I shut down. So, I’m not going to say I was angry because that’s not how it manifested. But I certainly was frustrated.”

Why was it wrong for him to consider a new and more meaningful direction in life? Generations that came before Lindley valued work that advanced general welfare, not personal fulfillment. But Lindley was born in 1953.

“There’s a tension there, isn’t there?” Lindley says. “Notions of duty and self-sacrifice predominated at one time. But we baby boomers have been more inclined to privilege self-realization over the old values. At what point does pursuing your own happiness regardless of the cost to others become just plain selfish? I think at the time I was probably more self-righteous than feeling selfish or guilty.” He adds, “Those emotions came later, I am embarrassed to say.”

The DeGarmos also sought the counsel of close friends and their pastor, Paul. He says Sarah reminded him of his own wife, Fran.

“Fran’s her own person. She doesn’t think of herself as a pastor’s wife. She’s a schoolteacher, so she makes it very clear that
I
was called,” Paul says, chuckling, “not her.”

In January 1996, Lindley began to audit several classes at Union Theological Seminary. He deliberately sampled the new direction part-time, knowing that his wary wife could be the roadblock to the path’s becoming permanent. Sarah was nervous about the family’s economic outlook. Lindley’s earning potential was unclear, and there was growing instability at her company, where a merger was under way. She did her best to stay strong and positive.

“If the tables were turned,” Sarah explains, “and this was a man looking at his wife, say, going from finance to becoming an artist, the world would just say, ‘A man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do,’ right? So, I believed it was the right thing. I also thought historically,
C’mon. My father was a POW in Germany. This is nothing.
We were healthy, we had food on the table, we had a beautiful daughter, and I had a left-turn husband. I could deal with it.”

Sarah’s supportive approach was admirable but also rooted in sheer exhaustion.

“I didn’t have the energy. There were too many other things going on. We were dealing with a one-year-old baby, my father had just died, my husband lost his job and was not sure where he was going, and then I had my mother in Florida who had early-onset Alzheimer’s and we were trying to figure out where to put her. There was a lot of stuff going on in addition to Lindley’s change. My job at that point was to keep my head down and make sure all our bills were paid.”

Lindley felt more secure about their short-term financial future. When he left Salomon Brothers, he took with him deferred income that was realized over about five years. He felt the time was now to investigate the option of a new career path.

“I think for one thing I was incredibly stubborn—something Sarah and other friends remarked on at the time,” Lindley admits. “And I do think there’s an element of ego and selfishness in that:
I know what’s best even though logic says otherwise and you disagree with me.
I was also feeling very justified by the way my initial foray into auditing seminary courses was going and how I was filling my hours at home. It all felt right. Sarah liked my being at home more often even though she was rooting for me to find a job. Ellie was young and I really liked being there to watch her grow.”

In September 1996, Lindley enrolled full-time in Union Theological Seminary. He felt confident he was making the right decision and that he and Sarah were committed to working things out as a couple through counseling.

Lindley’s dream was to attend seminary at Princeton Theological Seminary, but he knew Sarah would not be on board with yet another compromise: a move to New Jersey.

“By and large, my good friends and family were pretty supportive. Acquaintances and colleagues were more frequently polite and somewhat puzzled. There were a few friends who were vocally concerned for my sanity,” Lindley says. “Several advised Sarah to get a divorce.”

Sarah continued her work in finance, Lindley in seminary. He admits life was somewhat lonely.

“It was sometimes,” Lindley says. “I was spinning off in this whole world of seminary and she didn’t really share in that. Part of that was that I was off doing classwork during the day, which was like my job, and she had her job and it was demanding. There was no, ‘Hey, what happened today?’ The quality of the relationship was strained there for a while, no doubt. We just had less time together that was fun and unforced. We never stopped being friends through all of this, but for a few years it was kind of tough.”

For Sarah, life was a blur.

“I would leave our apartment at five fifteen in the morning and I would go to work,” she says. “I would leave between five thirty and six and get home hopefully by six thirty or seven and then do it all over again.”

Lindley thrived in seminary. He loved the coursework, the broad range of subject matter.

“There’s language, there’s literature, history, and I’d long had an interest in the Bible but, like most people, wasn’t familiar with it. So I got immersed in that with some terrific teachers who really brought it alive.” For Lindley and the other seminary students, academics provided the necessary support to discuss faith in a meaningful way. “It’s not like you’re going into a cloistered life and becoming more experientially linked to God somehow. It’s trying to absorb the tradition and the intellectual part of it so you have something to talk about as you go out and practice the profession down the road.”

Lindley’s colleagues at seminary became his new set of “work” friends. In his second and third years of study, Lindley interned in churches—including Paul’s—which led to professional relationships.

“You begin to have parishioners respond to you,” Lindley explains, “so gradually you build a new world of support and interaction.”

Lindley had made the transition to the seminary, but Sarah says his spending habits did not. From the start of their relationship, Lindley was always the spender, Sarah the saver. She says initially, they helped each other come more to the middle. But once their hefty annual income disappeared, Sarah implemented some lifestyle changes. They traded in their Mercedes for a more affordable car. Annual donations of $50,000 to charity were decreased significantly. Plans in place to help Lindley’s family members were halted.

“We always had our own rental house in the Hamptons, and then suddenly we were guests of people. My sense of financial security was changed big-time,” she says. “If Lindley had kept working we would have been a whole lot better off and that would have enabled more freedom for me on some level. I’m not a materialist; I don’t care about things. I’d rather have more money in the bank and security. That’s always been my thing. It just all became more precarious. Where I’d thought we were headed was not where we were headed.”

Money was a heated topic during couple’s counseling.

“Lindley wanted a spiritual life
and
a nice lifestyle. I resented that he wanted me to pony up and give him that lifestyle. I curbed his spending, but for instance, while he was in seminary he had a personal trainer, and I said, ‘What are you doing? You have a trainer who costs seventy-five hundred dollars a year.’ I think he didn’t understand why I was so angry. He didn’t understand the sacrifices that I was making. He didn’t get it.”

Lindley acknowledges that on some level he was stubborn about curbing his spending habits, but that perhaps some of Sarah’s aggravation was actually directed at his pursuing a more fulfilling profession.

“I always maintained that if Sarah was unhappy with her career, she had the same option as I: to do something different. If that meant further adjustments to our lifestyle, we would make them.”

Serendipitously, in the late 1990s, Sarah’s industry boomed.

“My job took off and my income growth covered much of what Lindley wasn’t bringing in. So, the money came,” Sarah says. “It would have been entirely different, I think, if my career had failed. That would have been even more difficult.”

Beyond finances, Sarah says the supportive role she played in Lindley’s career transition was often overshadowed by a certain “halo effect” created by people’s perception of the ministerial field. After all, who was she to question her husband’s calling?

“Of all the professions he could choose, this is a profession that people are in awe of, and I would get comments like, ‘What a journey’s he’s on!’ or ‘Isn’t it amazing what he’s doing? Can you imagine leaving banking and becoming a minister?’ There was one woman who I met and she said, ‘I’ll bet no one ever asks you, “How’s your journey?” ’ And I said, ‘You know, you’re right.’ ”

Sarah and Lindley continued to talk through their challenges in counseling, the impact of their own past personal losses and their issues as a couple. Neither had imagined the blueprints for their future would need to be redrawn.

“There were a few moments where I thought,
This isn’t gonna make it
,” Lindley says. “There were one or two times that she would become so frustrated and angry that I thought,
Unless I’m willing to fold, which I don’t see how I can, I don’t know how we’re ever going to reconcile
. I was devastated—
Oh my goodness, the bottom is dropping out
—a much more desperate feeling than I had with my cancer diagnosis. I think the desperation came from the fact that I didn’t feel like I would be true to myself not to do what I was doing.”

Sarah says she could not face the idea of a divorce on top of all the other challenges brewing in their life.