Leaving Microsoft To Change the World

It's been a very long week at work. I've been working 16 hour days and I'm going straight into the weekend. Deadlines deadlines deadlines - who comes up with these schedules?? Ok. Fine. Maybe part of this is self-inflicted. slack off a couple weeks ago, pay for it now.

In the midst of this busyness at work, my housemate (whom I don't treasure enough) sent me a webcast link to listen in on a discussion that she thought i might be interested in. John Wood - author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World and founder of Room to Read - had come to campus to talk about his non-profit organization and his life after Microsoft. He was a big shot executive who, after seven or so years of working without vacation, went on a well-deserved one to Nepal to trek the Himalayas - perhaps if you climb high enough, you won't be able to hear Steve Ballmer screaming at you! While he was there, he got an opportunity to visit a local village and their school. He also got to see their library - a small barren room with a dog-eared outdated world map on the wall - the books were so precious and few that the teachers locked them up in the cabinet so that the children would not ruin them. When the book cabinet was unlocked, the books inside consisted of romance novels or tour guides through Mongolia - books which had been discarded by previous travellers through the mountains. These books would not help children in grade school learn how to read. He felt a passion at that moment to do something about this - he promised the school he would return with books to fill this library. A year later, after fulfilling this promise, he began to think that perhaps there was more to life than selling Windows to the world. While he had met the needs of one library in one village in Nepal, Nepal had many other villages with other schools in the same predicament as this one village. And why stop at Nepal? There are other countries that are developing third world countries - also lacking in resources. He began to see a need in the world and it became his growing passion to try to meet that need.

His talk (and book) was about how he was able to use the skills he learned while at Microsoft and apply it to his now growing non-profit organization, Room to Read.

I have been working now for one year. My anniversary just passed a couple weeks ago. I have this uneasy feeling in my heart that this is not a permanent place where God wants me to be. Now, i realize i had promised to return to Toronto one day... one day soon. But i feel as though maybe God is planting something bigger. He has most definitely blessed me with a life of abundance. I don't have to worry about food on the table, or providing shelter and clothes on my back. I look at my peers who are also exactly like me. Then i think about the world and the people who lack so much - the very things we take for granted - and i feel a sense of guilt almost for enjoying so much while another is suffering.

I don't know exactly what this means. Perhaps i'm like every other person who can read stories like John Wood's, get fired up inside, vow to go out into the world and work towards changing it, and then once reality hits again, the fire gets put out and the passion is lost. The thought of this happening actually frightens me. One thing that I read in John Wood's book - "The fact that I have money does not make me a better person. What really matters is what I do with it" - is a challenge for me. What does God want me to do with His blessings....?