I Made a Choice

The life you want is a decision, not an inheritance.

I left Oregon.

I prayed about it for a month. I talked to friends, and to people I trust who had no reason to flatter me and every reason to tell me to stay. After all of it, I made a choice. On July 13 I moved to Nashville.

A month before that I read a line from Graham Weaver, the founder of Alpine Investors who teaches at Stanford.

The truest form of intelligence is designing the life you want to live.

I could not put it down. I turned it over for weeks, not because it was clever, but because it indicted me. I had been living where I landed and calling it maturity. Weaver named the lie. Enduring the life you fell into is not wisdom. It is autopilot wearing the costume of patience.

A serious person designs.

So I did the work I tell everyone else to do. I wrote out what I value, what I love, what I want to build, what I want my days to look like in ten years. Then I turned to where I lived and asked the only question that matters. Compared to what. At what cost. Who pays.

I owe that place something first.

God puts you in a season to teach you, and Bend taught me a great deal. It taught me where I belong by showing me where I do not. It taught me who I am while I rebuilt a life from the studs. The friends who walked that season with me, the people from my church, are part of what I am now, and I will not forget them. Leaving a place does not erase what it formed in you. Sometimes the leaving is what it formed.

But a season that teaches you where you do not belong has done its work when you go.

Oregon has a cost. The income tax sits among the highest in the country, and the posture toward people who want to build and keep what they earn is not warm. I counted those. They are real. But taxes were never the center. Taxes are the easy part to put in a column. The cost that moved me does not fit in a spreadsheet.

You become the people you are near.

Proximity is gravity. You do not build your character in a vacuum. You drift toward whatever you stand closest to. The conversations around you become your conversations. What a place treats as obvious, you begin to treat as obvious too. This is not weakness. It is how people are made, and it is why where you stand is never neutral. It is one of the largest decisions you will ever make, disguised as an address.

So the question stops being where do I want to live. It becomes who do I want to be formed by.

I am not running toward a political party. I am not hunting for a tribe or a flag to wave, and conservative has been flattened into a cartoon I want no part of. But I hold more conservative values than the places I have been living will tolerate, and I will say plainly what I mean by it. That rights arrive with duties attached. That a civilization is inherited wisdom you are charged to steward, not raw material you improvise over because the decade feels clever. That the past is a root you draw from, not a thing you escape.

C.S. Lewis put it better than I can.

We all want progress, but progress means getting nearer to where you want to be, and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

I came to believe a few of the roads I had been standing on lead somewhere I do not want to go. I did not want to be formed by that direction any longer.

That is the honest center. Not hatred of anywhere. A refusal to keep absorbing defaults I do not hold while I pour my life into building the opposite. I am building a Christian company. I want to build it among Christians, in a place where faith is the water people swim in and not the odd thing in the room you learn to explain at parties. Sixty-two percent of this country is Christian. There are places where that is the texture of ordinary life, and places where it is the exception. I lived as the exception long enough.

Nashville was not a guess. I looked at all of them. San Francisco has the most density and the most money, and it is eating itself, expensive past reason and proud of a decline the people I know there cannot wait to leave. New York runs on the same fuel. Austin is the only one that tempted me, and Austin keeps drifting back toward the coast it came from. I did not want any of them. None of them sat where I needed to stand.

Because what I am building needs three things in one place, and almost no city has all three. A real tech center, so the talent is close enough to run into. A living faith, so the mission is not the strange thing in the room. And a life people actually want, so the people I hire want to stay.

You cannot walk into a coffee shop in Bend and sit down next to two founders. In Nashville you can. Its tech workforce has crossed 60,000 and is still climbing, the state takes nothing out of the paycheck, and Tennessee is among the most religious states in the country. A Christian company built on AI does not get made by faith alone or by engineers alone. It gets made by Christian engineers, by people who know the work and know the One the work is meant to serve. There is one city where that overlap is not a stretch. When I moved I did not know another soul in that city. I moved toward the confluence, not toward the comfort, and I have learned to tell those apart.

Here is the part I will not pretend around.

My family is in California. There is a cost to moving from Oregon to Nashville, and the cost is distance. I am fully aware of it. I did not walk into this with my eyes half closed, telling myself the miles do not matter. They matter. I weighed them, and I moved anyway.

I cannot make this decision for anyone else. I made it only for myself, for my company, and for what I am building, so that I can provide for the people who depend on me.

God made airplanes, and I will use them. But a flight is not a driveway, and I will not insult the people I love by pretending it is.

This is the thing nobody tells you about designing your life. The design has a price. Every yes is also a no. I said yes to the place that fits what I am for, and that yes was also a no to keeping the people I love close. I looked straight at that trade and made it anyway. Not because the cost is small. Because the life on the other side is worth carrying it.

That is what choosing is. Not the absence of loss. The willingness to carry the loss you chose.

And there is one more thing, the truest part. If you are going to build a company and live a life, you had better live that life out loud, hold those values where people can see them, and show who you are every day. If you will not live it, people see through you in a heartbeat. The most honest thing I could do was move myself and this company to the place that already looks like what I am trying to build.

So I did.

I get to decide where I live. That is not a small freedom, and it is not an accident of my circumstances. It is the structure of this country. The states were built to be different on purpose, so a man could sort toward the life he actually wants instead of accepting the one nearest to where he happened to be born. I used that structure exactly as it was meant to be used.

I am not running from anything.

I turned back onto the right road, with my eyes open and the bill already counted.