by Rob Castro Jr.
My wife and I were in a church service one day. The youth pastor preached a sermon that encouraged people to “do the perfect will of God over the acceptable will of God”. We had no idea that this encouraging sermon would influence a life changing decision one month later.
WYSIWYG had begun production on a movie titled “The Roman Trilogy”. As an intern, I was introduced to the concept of sound design for this film. I began using my part-time intern hours to design the sound effects of “The Roman Trilogy”. This became difficult to do while maintaining a part time job at CompUSA as a computer technician. I was also a newlywed trying to spend quality time with my wife Melissa.
After six months of marriage, I received notice that I was laid off from my job at CompUSA. This was extremely odd since I had seniority and a good work record. I accepted the fact that God allowed this to happen. I took advantage of being laid off to work full-time at WYSIWYG.
About this time, WYSIWYG decided to take its interns on a trip to L.A. to visit a few companies in the film industry. I gladly went. During this trip, Richard Gazowsky, president of WYSIWYG, initiated a visit to Genex Audio. Richard felt lead by the Holy Spirit to record film audio at the highest resolution possible. Through our research we found that the highest audio resolution possible is a digital format called DSD. At the time, Genex Audio was the only company in the world that made a DSD recorder.
As usual, it was a sunny day on Santa Monica Blvd. in Southern California. As my wife and I crossed the busy street, we had no idea that this meeting would result in the development of several audio products that are bound to change the film industry.
After the meeting, as we drove home to San Francisco, I felt like I had been to heaven on earth and back. I could not imagine going back to work at CompUSA.
I had a doctor’s visit a few days after returning home. While my wife and I were waiting to see the doctor, my cell phone rang. It was my boss at CompUSA offering me my job back. Literately 10 seconds later I received another phone call. It was a well-known recording engineer, Mike Pappas of Colorado. Mike heard that I was inquiring about DSD recording. He invited me to the University of Michigan to join him in the control room while he recorded the Count Basie Band in DSD 5.1 surround sound.
I realized that these two phone calls were timed perfectly by God. I felt that the two choices were weights on a balance scale waiting for me to choose which one weighed more. Truthfully, I could have requested time off from CompUSA to go to Michigan for the recording. But I knew that this was the time to choose whether or not I would pursue my passion of audio design full-time; if not, I would be taking time off work for certain WYSIWYG events for the rest of my life.
During the course of the next few days, I told my wife that I believed this was God’s time for me to work full-time at WYSIWYG. My wife did not agree. Then one day while she was alone in our apartment, she felt God’s presence and heard Him say, “If you don’t do my will now, then when will you do it?” I arrived home from a day of work at WYSIWYG and my wife told me what God had said to her. We immediately went to go pray at the beach. We sat alone on a wooden deck that overlooked the San Francisco coastline watching the sunset. We prayed, asking God if I should go back to CompUSA or work full-time at WYSIWYG.
After about 30 minutes of praying in other tongues, we both agreed that if we did not take a step of faith now, we would look back on that moment 10 years later and say, “I should’a, I could’a, I would’a….” During this discussion it was obvious that the main sacrifice would be the ability to pay our rent. Suddenly, we felt a weight lifted off of our hearts. We began to cry and laugh at the same time. Without any more words spoken, we both knew that something supernatural had happened. There was no going back now. We went straight to my parent’s house to explain what was going on. As we sat in the breakfast nook that evening, my mother said, “God already told your father and I that you two would be living with us”. My parents had generously agreed to let us live with them until the Lord provides another home for us.
My wife and I knew without a shadow of doubt that this was “the perfect will of God” for us.
Robert Castro is a team leader in sound design for WYSIWYG. He has done sound design for “The Roman Trilogy” and has worked on the development of the Sarah DSD location recorder, and H. Ghost (WYSIWYG’s wave field synthesis theatrical sound system).
