Tad Brockway’s Post

Transcript

Hello everyone. On this Christmas Eve, December 24th, I'm delighted to share that I'll be retiring from Microsoft and the technology industry at the end of the year. I'll start in my new role in January and I'll share more about that in a few moments. But first I want to use this opportunity to thank all of you for your amazing work and for our time together in the tech industry, the life that I've had as a result of this career. Has been far beyond anything I could have possibly imagined around 30 years ago when I received my Computer Science degree. In these 30 years, I've had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented and fascinating people in the world. I'm grateful for all of you, and I'm grateful for your support, our friendships, and the time that we had together. Now let's go back to many years ago. On Christmas morning. When I was 13 years old, I received my first computer from my parents as a Christmas gift. I immediately fell in love with programming. I was able to be a software developer for around 10 years where I had the opportunity to write many lines of code inside and outside Microsoft. What I loved about developing software was a creativity and beauty and logic and the power in being able to create things and then see the results of my work in near real time. In a similar way, I see creativity and beauty and logic in the world around me. I believe that this reality, the universe, the beauty and perfection in this world, even time itself, were created by God. I believe this because God has transformed my life and because God's design and his creation is self-evident. Now let's talk about human beings for a moment. God created all human beings in his image, and while God is perfect, human beings are not perfect very much, me included. And the reason we're not perfect is because when God created us, he gave us the ability to choose good or to choose evil. Now we all do and have done things that we know we shouldn't be doing. We've all had evil thoughts, we've said cruel things to others, and we've even hurt other people at times. This is, unfortunately, the normal experience in the life of a human being. And like most people, I've tried to do good things in this life. I've tried to do good things for my community, for the people around me at work and in business, as well as in my personal life. But in the end, I know that my life is short and insignificant, at least in an eternal sense. It's just a fact that hundreds of years from now I'm going to be dead and forgotten by the people who live in that era. That's true for me, and that's true for all of us. We are here in this world for an extremely short period of time, yet God is eternal. Even with my imperfections and my relatively insignificant and short life here in this world, I know in my heart that God loves me. God does not want for my physical death to be the end of the story. God wants for me and you to be with them for eternity. The issue, though, is that we have and then. Accountability Problem. God's perfect goodness is incompatible in an eternal sense with our imperfection. God loves me, but his standard for holiness is too high for me to fix my mistakes in life by just trying to be good. God wants for us to be with Him for eternity, but perfection and imperfection don't mix. The good news is that God has provided a solution to this incompatibility problem. In his Son, Jesus Christ, He provided first the ability to exchange our imperfection for God's perfection. Now I know that this is a deep and even perhaps new and confusing concept. But God has provided this ability so that even when we die physically, we can continue living with Him in heaven and in perfection for eternity. Now this is something that God has provided to us for free. We actually cannot even earn this gift if we were to try. God's given it to us as a gift, and the only thing that we need to do is to accept this gift in our hearts. All that we need to do in order to receive this gift is to believe that God sent His only Son in Jesus Christ down into this world. We just need to accept that his son willingly gave himself as a sacrifice on the cross and rose again as a solution, as the only solution possible for our imperfection and errors. Although we must do in order to have eternal life is to declare with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that he died and that God raised him from the dead. All of this is the good news and the reason that we celebrate Christmas. This is the real reason that we celebrate Christmas. This news is absolutely the most important thing in my life. This changed everything about me. In 2016, I had an opportunity to go to Zimbabwe with a group from our small church and our mountain town in Washington state. During that trip, I was able to spend time with some of the wonderful people of Zimbabwe. I felt that God was pulling me in the direction of eventually leaving the technology industry so that I can use all of these skills and experiences that I've accumulated over 30 years in tech and apply them to serving God and serving as people. In 2016, I decided that 2024 would be the time frame in which I would make this kind of transition. In January, I'll be starting in a new role where I'll be the Chief Technology Officer for a nonprofit called Bible Study Fellowship. Bible Study Fellowship is a global organization that provides community based, in-depth Bible study to people all over the world, in person or online. My family and I have been involved with Bible Study Fellowship since around 2011. With Bible Study Fellowship, I study the Bible daily and then I meet once a week in a small group where we discuss what we learned. In my case, online, the Bible was written over hundreds of years by at least 40 authors. It tells the full story of Jesus Christ and about our purpose in this world from beginning to end. If you're interested in catching U and discussing or maybe even challenging some of the things that I've talked about in this video, I would love to talk to you if you're feeling that you just want someone to chat with you and maybe even pray with you. I would love for you to reach out to me this week or really anytime in the future. You can always find me on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Thank you very much for watching this video and helping to contribute to the wonderful life that I've been able to have in the technology industry. Merry Christmas and I hope that you have an exceptionally great 2024.