NEW CREATION
FINDING FREEDOM IN A SPIRIT OF BALANCE
Parishioner Ryan Renteria took a professional leap to ‘get in the trenches’ with kids who
needed a friend, and found a deeper dimension to the gifts he might offer the world.
When parishioner Ryan Rent-
eria walked into his boss’s of-
fice in April 2010 to announce
that he was going to leave Wall
Street and volunteer with kids
for the rest of his life, he got a
hug. And a healthy dose of skep-
ticism. “You’re crazy, right?” he
remembers his boss saying. But
Ryan wasn’t crazy. In fact, he had
started on Wall Street ten years
earlier with just this plan in mind.
Ryan’s story is unique, and
naturally awe-inspiring: to walk
away from a lucrative career at a
successful hedge fund — or from
any stable employment that has
required hard work and dedica-
tion — is probably not what most
of us will do. But his is a story
that nevertheless rings true, and
feels necessary, and perhaps
familiar in its urgency to make
sense of and find meaning in life.
God said, ‘This
very night your
life is being
demanded of
you. And the
things you have
prepared, whose
will they be?’
Luke 12:20
12 · SPRING 2018
It calls to mind the parable of the
rich fool, who, having harvested
a greater yield than he knew
what to do with, decided to tear
down his barns and build big-
ger. “I will say to my soul, ‘Soul,
you have ample goods laid up for
many years; relax, eat, drink, be
merry,’” the man says. “But God
said to him, ‘You fool! This very
night your life is being demanded
of you. And the things you have
prepared, whose will they be?’”
Ryan’s decision to leave the
security of a paycheck was the
result of methodical planning
over many years. “There were so
many other things in life that I
wanted to do.
“I was dying to spend a lot
of time volunteering. My mom is
the most selfless person I’ve ever
met. We grew up poor but it was
ingrained in our family identity
that helping others is what we
wanted to do. My Mom worked
her tail off Monday through
Friday, raised me, and then
squeezed volunteering in late at
night and on the weekends. So
I always had this vision that if I
could walk away and volunteer
during the week and have the
flexibility to do that, that would
be an amazing thing.”
And that’s how Ryan ended
up volunteering for five chari-
ties, five days a week, for two
years. But it wasn’t easy, and it
wasn’t a move he made lightly.
“I have always been one of the
biggest nervous Nellies on earth
about money. I buried myself in
my spreadsheet for years.” He
modeled his finances and hoped
his assumptions were right. And
then he made the leap.
“A lot of things came togeth-
er that accelerated my desire to
do it,” Ryan remembers: his own
financial situation, the industry
after the 2008 crisis, and the
sudden death of a former col-
league who was in his 60s. “That
hit me hard because my parents
are in their 60s...I wanted to
spend more time with them.
“I started looking for the top-
ics that I’m passionate about. For
me, it was abused children and
children with cancer and down
syndrome, I can’t really explain
why. But when I put on my geeky
hat and opened my spreadsheet
and my internet browser, weeks
later, I said, ‘These are the
causes I want to go for.’”
On Saturday and Sunday
mornings, Ryan coached Spe-
cial Olympics teams; on Mon-
days and Tuesdays, he was a
friend to children with cancer;
on Wednesdays, he saw kids in
the immediate aftermath of an
abuse report. “You had to foster
feelings of safety and trust, be-
cause they were going to have to
be interviewed by case workers