Lucas White - About Me
I was born on the ship of fools known as the United States of America and in the state of Tennessee — neither of which I asked for, and neither of which have impacted who I truly am on the inside. I was at least granted a Greek name, albeit in the latinized form Lucas. My family name came from a German immigrant Weiss who changed it to White. Racial makeup means nothing to me, but I do embrace the name Lucas White.
So there I was in a town of five-thousand people in the middle of nowhere. I had plenty enough material security, middle class by American standards. My father and mother were public schoolteachers, and we lived for my first eleven years in a house built around the year 1900: rooms interconnected for indoor play, big tin roof, huge flat yard on three sides, semi-busy road nearby for pranks with fallen apples, and a creek with a bridge where I could dam the water and throw rocks at watersnakes. Some of my happiest moments in that godforsaken town were overintaking sodium at Pizza Hut where they had music videos on screen and a quirky little machine in the corner named Neo Geo.
My great crash was in 1995 when our domestic issues began, a couple of years after we moved into a new house that my parents had built. It was of a degree that was too much for me as a thirteen-year-old to handle nightly I suppose, and I was emotionally in a tailspin for about four years as the bad environment persisted after. My birthday August 16th, I went ahead with college courses a few weeks after turning seventeen. The 1999-00 school year was split between that and my last two high school classes, and generally the worst year of my life.
For full-time college, I wanted to major in web programming, and since I was not rich, and since the scholarship would pay the full tuition at the local school, I went with East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, TN. Oddly enough, they had an excellent ranking IT program at the time and the professors were competent. Whether anyone else then or now cares, in those four years I proved to myself that I was beyond obsessive. There was hardly a test in any subject that I did not stay up all night studying, sparing maybe an hour or two for sleep. I felt like I only ate, slept (a little), and studied for four years. My final GPA was 3.979, and the transcript they gave me said 6 of 800. I would like to meet those five people who they ranked above me, and if they outworked me then I pity them. In the end, what I took with me was an exponentially stronger mind than I had previously, paid for by hours of mental shock treatment, not to mention my appearance aging at a two or three times pace. As for the university, I appreciate the professors who generously spent office time interacting with me, but I see the whole as nothing more than a secular institution where the name of Jesus Christ is regularly profaned.
My first objective was to move out of Tennessee, but my resumes were ignored probably because I lived in Tennessee. So after a two months search I took a local job vaguely related to computing, just $20,000 a year, and was able to use that as a bit of leverage to get a better job with an immediate 75% raise. It was "Programmer" at The Pictsweet [Frozen Vegetable] Company at the Bells, Tennessee corporate office. You may have seen their bags in the various grocery stores. Crazily enough, the job was 420 miles west of where I lived but since it was in the same political state boundary, that apparently eased their mind about me. It was August 9, 2004, and by this point I was resigned to earning some professional experience and trying again later. The grand finale was a 13-month assembly line automation project which I alone worked on, because the mainframe programmers could not adapt to the Genexus language that they tried to teach us. Triumphantly I stood in the warehouse-sized 20-degree "freezers" while the line operators used my software to select the product, print the 'best if used by' and lot number on the vegetable bags, print on the cases, and then finally write on the RFID tags for application to the cases. This now live and being used daily, and with over two and half years of experience, I spent a few more months of nights in my apartment digitally sculpting a highly-stylized and animated resume web site, which was my first success in Photoshop, and — somewhat confidently, somewhat nervously — tried to overcome it again.
Now 24 years old, my path was clear, and I wanted to find not just a good job outside of Tennessee, but a truly great situation worthy of what I thought I deserved. Having no restraints, I considered many destinations but resolved to attempt a move to South Florida. In September 2006, we had attended an IBM conference in Miami, which had positively confirmed my prior curiosities. Among other enticements, during a boat ride I unexpectedly viewed Al Capone's mansion, where in 1947 the death had occurred of this rare pairing of "American" and "greatness".
I finally submitted a job application in March 2007 — not to an IT Department but to a Finance/Accounting Department. Instead of submitting another, my intuition of God's plan caused me to wait. I found it hard to believe that anyone would turn me down, that they could possibly find another person who had outprepared me. After four days, I received a call, and then a few days later on a Thursday afternoon we had a phone interview, in which they told me that I could interview on location if I traveled at my own expense. I told them that I would be there on Monday morning.
The distance from Jackson, Tennessee, my current residence, to Naples, Florida was 900 miles. A car tire of mine blew out near Tampa, three hours away, but the Sam's Club automotive workers stayed past closing to fix it. The next morning, I arrived for the interview and was impressed by the luxurious appearance of the medical center building, which was often described as resembling a 5-star hotel. After two quick discussions with my immediate supervisor and her next level boss, I had secured the position (Finance/Accounting "Programmer Analyst", later "Data Analyst"). It had never been in doubt after the phone interview.
Although I did not appreciate Naples then as a young man as I do now, it became a night to day turn for my life. The first year-plus was spent recovering and adjusting, as I still had significant damage. Then in the last days of 2008, I resolved to make 2009 better. God obliged and set me up on January 2nd, in a way that I would be too embarrassed to write, but that led to me serving the people in the community rather intensely for about five years. I had chosen an apartment in the Golden Gate area, a low-income area of a very high-income city, primarily because I was single and did not want a spoiled-brat wife, and secondly because I wanted a more hectic environment within which I could work to improve. I met a thousand people, and gave a lot and suffered a lot, and for extended periods of time it was a train wreck. My lowest moment was undoubtedly three weeks in July 2011 when I had wisely broken with some of my former "friends," or people trying to use me beyond what I could stand, but I remember this interlude well for two reasons. First, there was a Christian man whom I did not know who knocked on my door and gave a kind of prophecy about my life, with regard to how I was to serve God, which I will also keep to myself but I am eager to learn if it will come true. Secondly, it was in the week immediately after these that God brought my beautiful wife to my doorstep, a person who not only fit but exceeded my "type" more than any female I could have ever imagined.
When we married in April 2015, it had been a year since I had left the apartment complex in Golden Gate to buy us a house. I felt like I had definitely accomplished some good there, and my reward had been that it had improved my social abilities and inner peace. That was not to mention that I had been blessed with my dream girl, in my mind the most gorgeous person on earth, and a nice house to live in. This has allowed me to better focus on my studies ever since.
Our joy increased ten-fold when my wife gave birth to our daughter on February 7, 2020. The little girl was fitful that day and has only increased in energy since, with an utterly cute face that has all the expressions of my wife's family and mine, hers being Haitian from the formerly pirate-occupied Île de la Tortue. I find that anything I have lost in time to parenting has been compensated in full.
Now forty-one years old, my greatest aspiration is to serve my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. My greatest mistake of the past was to not claim His name often enough, and I deeply relate to the late-bloomer Augustine and his timeless book Confessions which details how he was intellectually convinced to dedicate himself to Christianity. I have a few surprises to be brought out in the coming years, which will indeed be posted on YomiKing.org and will of course be offered completely free of charge as everything else that I produce.
As for my job, I have now gratefully worked the same day job for over seventeen years. Namely, I type up healthcare data analyses and reporting for financial executives, physicians, and staff. I am still loyal to this type of work, but my greater love has long been Philosophy and History.
Alexander the Great became my foremost historical figure of interest when I was nineteen years old. Later I remember being furious when I heard that Hollywood was going to make a movie about him and, surely enough, it was unbearably horrible. I have spent a great amount of time studying Alexander and many more, among all of which I recognize Jesus Christ as central and most critical to understanding human existence. You are encouraged to join me in the struggle, and perhaps we can contribute something to His glory.
