Yesterday I went to the mall with Sophie to get a salad spinner to replace one that had crashed to the floor, shattering in plastic shards everywhere. We had gotten sidetracked and lost when finally Sophie, holding my hand said, “We have taken over 100 steps already.” Her sweet little freckled face expressed nothing but pure exasperation. “Yes,” I replied, “Unlike everyone else, I don’t know where I’m going.” I had forgotten that with all of the remodeling that had gone on tens years earlier, that where I needed to be was on the exact opposite end of where we were.
I had tried to careen and cruise around the lolly-gaggers that doddled everywhere, but still, we were hindered with the slow, lingering procession of people actually shopping, actually liking and enjoying the mall. There were people sitting asleep idly in chairs, their heads lying back, breathing heavily and fast asleep. Babies toddled through jovial crowds, big toothless smiles on chubby faces. Couples seemingly on dates smiled coyly at each other, slurping big iced drinks. Strings of girls, arm-in-arm, made impenetrable lines, as Sophie and I attempted to overtake them to make headway to our ultimate destination.
When I saw all the smiles, I thought that maybe I would put my inhibitions aside and try and actually enjoy our outing. At Sophie’s insistence, we visited Build-A-Bear and she coveted every furry thing, but mostly just the pink fluffy things. After much cajoling, I finally caved and bought her a small trinket, but pressed her to call it, “Sherbet” after she refused to call it, “Pretty Mommy Princess” or “Michelle Princess Queen.” The purchase satiated any further accounting of our expended steps and I knew, as every parent does who caves, for $5.00 I had bought priceless time.
Then, hoping to enjoy the moment, I carelessly careened into a shoe store, not even bothering to look at the name. Upon looking around, I realized that most of the shoes were not much to my liking and seemed designed for people primarily concerned with chunky, rubbery comfort, rather than style. Sophie blurted out, “These shoes are ugly!” “Not all of them,” I responded in protest, picking up a shoe from a shelf and examining its ingenious rubbery, faux wood heel. As I turned to Sophie, I noticed another shopper staring drily at us from where she sat trying on half a dozen ugly pairs of shoes. “At least they’re comfortable!” I encouraged.
Getting a cool reception at the shoe store, we left. We then cruised into the eye glass store, since had I was convinced that it would be a short time before I needed eye glasses and the excuse of not really wanting to see things clearly was getting old. Though, with that said, let me just defend my blurry vision with this; Not everything is worth seeing. What you don’t see is sometimes less offensive, and therefore, I think the choice to get glasses or contact lenses is something that should be taken very seriously, very seriously indeed.
Once in the store, Sophie and I tried on numerous glass frames. Sophie was sure that all the glasses she tried on made her see more clearly. She jumped around in her most astute ninja poses and said with confidence, “I can see everything now!” Ninja poses and clear glass in studious frames are obvious confidence boosters. Finally getting bored she said, shoving a pair of pink framed glasses into my hands, “Here, these made me see better. Buy em’, so we can go.” I could see that the Sherbet, Build-A-Bear spell was beginning to wear off. Without further adieu, I quickly picked up and like a nomad searching for the ever-elusive herd of buffalo and we continued onward toward the housewares department at Macys.
Finally, in the housewares department, I quickly canvassed the landscape searching for a salad spinner that was impervious to shattering, since time was fleeting and Sophie had mentioned, yet again, how long our journey had been. It seemed like an assessment of mere factual information, but I knew that in that sweet voice was a complaint. Her expiration date for shopping was drawing near. I had to be quick. Finding a stainless steel salad spinner, one better than I expected to find, I quickly made my purchase and we proceeded to the car.
In reality, we were in the mall for a relatively short amount of time, maybe an hour and a half. To Sophie, it seemed like an entire day was belabored, wasted, and spent chasing nonsense. Who needs a stupid salad spinner anyway? It’s been three years that I’ve been complaining to my Father about the trip, the little errand we’re on. Not always coming right out with it, I’ve postured and hinted, as if it would be less offensive that way.
I’ve never been remiss in pointing out the time that seems to pass ever so slowly. I keep waiting to leave this exhausting little journey of failure and pain behind me, counting the grueling steps, as they linger on, but God is clearly not done with the journey yet. He’s got more in store. How long, I cannot even guess, because He reminds me in scripture, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).
What I know is this, God has a plan for me; “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord. “They are plans for good and not disaster, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). My voice does not go unheard. I know that God hears me, intimately knows my circumstances, and has something better in store. Just as it was an exhausting for Sophie to trek through the mall, not knowing when the journey would end, I knew all along that it wouldn’t take as long as she thought, we’d be done before she knew it, and we’d have at least the journey behind us to account for what we needed. How much more does a perfect, omniscient God know of my circumstances? It’s humbling just to imagine.
“Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:3 & 4).
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Poking Mountain Lions in the Eyes and Other Survival Tips
OK, I’ve been meaning to tell about an amazing God story in our lives, an amazing Old Testament God story. Can I just say this? This is a story you have to share once you hear it. I encourage you to share it with everyone, because it is God working in such an amazing way, you just can’t believe it.
Let me preface the whole story with the fact that, considering our ongoing dealings with an unsavory business associate, I have longed for praise and worship songs that are more Old Testament than New Testament. You know, like the Psalms of David where he mentions jackals, vultures, and lions? What ever happened to getting right to the point and asking God to deal harshly with someone who’s wicked? And, I see no reason to keep the whole mess out of a catchy rhythmic song, something you can dance to maybe? Look, it’s just a suggestion. Peace, forgiveness, compassion all play nice on the radio, but sometimes you need something you can sink your gritted teeth into.
Well, Rick and I have been dealing with this guy for three long years now. Our dealings with him have been excruciatingly painful. Once we signed our names on the dotted line of a legally binding contract to the devil (I will call him Jay for the sake of this story), our lives were cursed. The devil, Jay, sprouted horns, a tail, and scaly red skin. He started breathing fire and…OK, none of that really happened, but my creative license just got going there for a minute.
So, anyhoo, Jay deceived us into buying his business. The big problem was that his major supplier had just canceled him a mere twelve days prior to us signing the contract, the very contract that outlined our purchase of that very supplier relationship. See the problem? We purchased something he didn’t possess, something we would need in order to repay the exorbitant purchase price.
Within the devil’s contract with us, we were committed to employing Jay for an entire year. This contractual employment within the organization gave Jay undue access to employees, files, and relationships that hindered us finding out the truth of what he had done for nearly six months. By the time we finally found out what had happened, Jay had bobbed and weaved, hidden and scammed, deceived and lied so well that we weren’t really sure what had happened.
Given all that I learned in college business classes, I wanted to challenge Jay to an Indian leg wrestling match, seeing no other way to remedy the issue. I’d seen my mother do this with my brother on our family room floor and was pretty convinced I could do it too, but Rick is nicer and more restrained. Rick simply committed to keep plugging along, trying to make the business work in spite of Jay’s persistent sabotage efforts.
It’s when Jay made lewd comments to an employee, a former home-schooler, that made the entire situation go from bad to worse. Suddenly, we had to approach Jay on sexual harassment issues, and while he conceded that he had made some “inappropriate comments,” he was never going to be held accountable for continuously sabotaging the company. However, the fact was that after we approached him about the sexual harassment, he came at us with even more of an enraged fervor. He told us that he would have us “bleeding in a year,” that we had better have prepared well for our children, and he began driving by our home and our office, saying he would own both, throwing us out on the street.
My head swam in a whirlwind of scenarios. He was wealthy and could actually back-up his plans against us. We were weak with three children to raise. Let’s face it, sometimes nice guys just do finish last – sometimes, it’s just the deal. Countless nights I lay awake. Other nights I would sniffle and cry off to sleep, wondering what would become of us.
To top it all off, long after he left his employment with us, he was calling and soliciting customers, though he had signed a non-compete agreement. Jay had done everything conceivable to ruin us, but it was his final commitment to “have us bleeding in a year,” that began to come to fruition with his lawsuit against us.
After seeking to have us served on Thanksgiving for stopping our monthly payments to him, because we could not afford them, he came at us with a vengeance. He had his attorney elaborately draw out legal documentation to triple the costs for our needed responses. He lied about everything and called employees to tell them how he’d already won his case against us, though we still haven’t had our official court date.
In July of 2009, we had one of two court mediations. If stress had been water, I would have drowned. Upon entering into court the first day, I saw a clerk with turrets and wondered why I hadn’t thought of that! What a gimmick! Shouting out the most bizarre things loudly and with utter abandon – how simply fabulous! I could not help but be entranced.
After being called by our attorney the night before, and kept up late by her drunken rant that her strategy was to go to mediation ill prepared, I was groggy. In that bizarre conversation, mostly one-sided from her to us, our attorney told us how her Persian hairdresser was, in reality, a brilliant accountant, her mother was a Montana beauty queen, and her daughter hated her, which was accentuated by her daughter shouting in the background, “I hate you!” Actually, I was also groggy, because our attorney got the time wrong for our mediation, which had us meeting first thing in the morning just hours after her nighttime drunken rant.
While Jay, his wife, and their attorney were getting all their ducks in an orderly row, I was wondering if I could just do prison time without the long, drawn-out charade. From the beginning, I knew court was not for me. First of all, I did not have turrets, and unless you do, they do not let you speak until spoken to, by a very condescending mediating judge. To top it all off, we found out just milli-seconds prior to the mediation proceedings that our judge just happened to be best friends with Jay’s attorney. I think I lost consciousness just after she mentioned something about golf trips and deep-sea adventures they’d spent together. Ugh! I wanted to puke.
This epiphany came right after our own attorney had bragged about knowing the mediating judge personally. In fact, our attorney had implied that they had hung out, known each other in several circles, and were quite close. All of that nonsense came wafting downward, like damp streamers falling onto a gymnasium floor, as the judge told our argumentative attorney that they’d never met: She did not know her at all. Without an ounce of good sense, our attorney retorted with disgust, “You know me!”
In all my nervousness, I began to laugh, smile, twitch, and get clammy cold. With a nervous, stupid smile erupting ever so erratically across my twitchy face, our attorney shot me a look of complete disapproval. ‘What the heck? Doesn’t she know she’s on our side?’ She jumped up from our chair and shot over to me, “Stop smiling. You look stupid with that smile on your face.” I began to cry. I began to kind of freak out, crying and shaking all at once, squeezing Rick’s hand and wanting my mommy.
Jay, his wife, and their attorney snickered and laughed at me. It was humiliating. Being in their seventies, they stumbled and fumbled, as though they could hardly walk when the judge entered the room. They said how they needed the money we owed them for their retirement and implied a dismal existence without it. Not once did they mention their two and a half acre estate in Los Altos Hills, their brand new shiny Cadillac parked outside, the way they were able to suddenly run to it like a couple of sprinters when mediation concluded, or all their various real estate investments.
I remembered the Brady Bunch episode where Mike Brady dropped his briefcase loudly on the courtroom floor to catch his courtroom opponent in a lie, and I prayed that our attorney would conjure up some clever scheme, but instead, she lost her phone and kept giving me dirty looks.
I knew I should have watched more Judge Judy, or one of those cool courtroom dramas, because nothing I was doing in that intimidating courtroom looked even remotely cool. When all was said and done, we mediated nothing. Upon leaving the courthouse, I literally hung over a parking meter and screamed, “Nooooooooooo!” only mildly disturbing a passed out homeless man on the ground. At least it made Rick laugh. Costing us over $100,000 in attorney fees to look stupid and ill prepared had succeeded: Job well done!
That was last summer, but the court system is a slow beast. When it engulfs you, it takes its time, and it really savors the broke, stupid, and ill prepared. So, we waited. It would take time to get a court date. Then, in November my mom killed herself, rocking my world to the core.
This is where it gets way Old Testament Godly! So, Jay had been a professed Christian. Yes, Jay was a professed Christian. With that knowledge we had tried, on our part, to employ the biblical principles of the Bible by mediating our disagreement through church elders, but Jay wasn’t having it, and in a weird God twist, our old pastor was now at Jay’s church as an interim pastor.
With all of that, we contacted our old pastor, our new sober attorney, and the church, and asked them for help, considering all the emotional turmoil we were now in with my mother’s death. The week after my mother died, our former pastor approached Jay and asked him to have mercy on us. Of course, Jay was unmoved and probably a little exhilarated knowing we were in such emotional distress: He said no.
Then, our attorney approached his and asked for a continuance and mercy: You can probably guess by now, Jay said no. On that following Sunday after Jay had been approached at least three times, our former pastor gave a sermon during Jay’s service, simply saying that there was, in the congregation, a person persecuting a young, godly family. From the pulpit, he called on that person to repent.
Now, for sure, you can never know what goes on in someone’s heart, but I do know what happened to Jay’s heart less than 24 hours later – it stopped beating. Jay died of a massive heart attack; face down in the dirt the Monday after that sermon!
Look, I’d like to have some grandiose bit of wisdom here, but simply put, I am glad for the moment that the pitbull has let go of my leg. When we were in court before the mediation judge, she kept saying for us to let go of the lawsuit, as if we were in control. In as stupid a moment as I’ve ever had, I explained to her that we weren’t really fighting Jay, we were in a defensive stance, like hikers fighting off a mountain lion by poking it in the eyes with a twig. I even acted it out a little. Yes, I seriously said and did that – poor Rick.
All I know is that God was in the house when I felt for sure He wasn’t even listening. The lawsuit is not over. Jay’s widow is now coming at us. Our court date is set for either June or July – it doesn’t much matter. We are more ill prepared than before, because we can’t even afford a legal defense. I’m practicing my erratic bouts of turrets and have opted for barking over profanity, since we have kids. I’m aiming for an insanity ruling and I’m grabbing another twig, because I’m pretty sure I’ll have to poke someone in the eye by the time this is all over.
“Arise, Lord, in your anger; rise up against the rage of my enemies. Awake, my God; decree justice…” Psalm 7:6
Let me preface the whole story with the fact that, considering our ongoing dealings with an unsavory business associate, I have longed for praise and worship songs that are more Old Testament than New Testament. You know, like the Psalms of David where he mentions jackals, vultures, and lions? What ever happened to getting right to the point and asking God to deal harshly with someone who’s wicked? And, I see no reason to keep the whole mess out of a catchy rhythmic song, something you can dance to maybe? Look, it’s just a suggestion. Peace, forgiveness, compassion all play nice on the radio, but sometimes you need something you can sink your gritted teeth into.
Well, Rick and I have been dealing with this guy for three long years now. Our dealings with him have been excruciatingly painful. Once we signed our names on the dotted line of a legally binding contract to the devil (I will call him Jay for the sake of this story), our lives were cursed. The devil, Jay, sprouted horns, a tail, and scaly red skin. He started breathing fire and…OK, none of that really happened, but my creative license just got going there for a minute.
So, anyhoo, Jay deceived us into buying his business. The big problem was that his major supplier had just canceled him a mere twelve days prior to us signing the contract, the very contract that outlined our purchase of that very supplier relationship. See the problem? We purchased something he didn’t possess, something we would need in order to repay the exorbitant purchase price.
Within the devil’s contract with us, we were committed to employing Jay for an entire year. This contractual employment within the organization gave Jay undue access to employees, files, and relationships that hindered us finding out the truth of what he had done for nearly six months. By the time we finally found out what had happened, Jay had bobbed and weaved, hidden and scammed, deceived and lied so well that we weren’t really sure what had happened.
Given all that I learned in college business classes, I wanted to challenge Jay to an Indian leg wrestling match, seeing no other way to remedy the issue. I’d seen my mother do this with my brother on our family room floor and was pretty convinced I could do it too, but Rick is nicer and more restrained. Rick simply committed to keep plugging along, trying to make the business work in spite of Jay’s persistent sabotage efforts.
It’s when Jay made lewd comments to an employee, a former home-schooler, that made the entire situation go from bad to worse. Suddenly, we had to approach Jay on sexual harassment issues, and while he conceded that he had made some “inappropriate comments,” he was never going to be held accountable for continuously sabotaging the company. However, the fact was that after we approached him about the sexual harassment, he came at us with even more of an enraged fervor. He told us that he would have us “bleeding in a year,” that we had better have prepared well for our children, and he began driving by our home and our office, saying he would own both, throwing us out on the street.
My head swam in a whirlwind of scenarios. He was wealthy and could actually back-up his plans against us. We were weak with three children to raise. Let’s face it, sometimes nice guys just do finish last – sometimes, it’s just the deal. Countless nights I lay awake. Other nights I would sniffle and cry off to sleep, wondering what would become of us.
To top it all off, long after he left his employment with us, he was calling and soliciting customers, though he had signed a non-compete agreement. Jay had done everything conceivable to ruin us, but it was his final commitment to “have us bleeding in a year,” that began to come to fruition with his lawsuit against us.
After seeking to have us served on Thanksgiving for stopping our monthly payments to him, because we could not afford them, he came at us with a vengeance. He had his attorney elaborately draw out legal documentation to triple the costs for our needed responses. He lied about everything and called employees to tell them how he’d already won his case against us, though we still haven’t had our official court date.
In July of 2009, we had one of two court mediations. If stress had been water, I would have drowned. Upon entering into court the first day, I saw a clerk with turrets and wondered why I hadn’t thought of that! What a gimmick! Shouting out the most bizarre things loudly and with utter abandon – how simply fabulous! I could not help but be entranced.
After being called by our attorney the night before, and kept up late by her drunken rant that her strategy was to go to mediation ill prepared, I was groggy. In that bizarre conversation, mostly one-sided from her to us, our attorney told us how her Persian hairdresser was, in reality, a brilliant accountant, her mother was a Montana beauty queen, and her daughter hated her, which was accentuated by her daughter shouting in the background, “I hate you!” Actually, I was also groggy, because our attorney got the time wrong for our mediation, which had us meeting first thing in the morning just hours after her nighttime drunken rant.
While Jay, his wife, and their attorney were getting all their ducks in an orderly row, I was wondering if I could just do prison time without the long, drawn-out charade. From the beginning, I knew court was not for me. First of all, I did not have turrets, and unless you do, they do not let you speak until spoken to, by a very condescending mediating judge. To top it all off, we found out just milli-seconds prior to the mediation proceedings that our judge just happened to be best friends with Jay’s attorney. I think I lost consciousness just after she mentioned something about golf trips and deep-sea adventures they’d spent together. Ugh! I wanted to puke.
This epiphany came right after our own attorney had bragged about knowing the mediating judge personally. In fact, our attorney had implied that they had hung out, known each other in several circles, and were quite close. All of that nonsense came wafting downward, like damp streamers falling onto a gymnasium floor, as the judge told our argumentative attorney that they’d never met: She did not know her at all. Without an ounce of good sense, our attorney retorted with disgust, “You know me!”
In all my nervousness, I began to laugh, smile, twitch, and get clammy cold. With a nervous, stupid smile erupting ever so erratically across my twitchy face, our attorney shot me a look of complete disapproval. ‘What the heck? Doesn’t she know she’s on our side?’ She jumped up from our chair and shot over to me, “Stop smiling. You look stupid with that smile on your face.” I began to cry. I began to kind of freak out, crying and shaking all at once, squeezing Rick’s hand and wanting my mommy.
Jay, his wife, and their attorney snickered and laughed at me. It was humiliating. Being in their seventies, they stumbled and fumbled, as though they could hardly walk when the judge entered the room. They said how they needed the money we owed them for their retirement and implied a dismal existence without it. Not once did they mention their two and a half acre estate in Los Altos Hills, their brand new shiny Cadillac parked outside, the way they were able to suddenly run to it like a couple of sprinters when mediation concluded, or all their various real estate investments.
I remembered the Brady Bunch episode where Mike Brady dropped his briefcase loudly on the courtroom floor to catch his courtroom opponent in a lie, and I prayed that our attorney would conjure up some clever scheme, but instead, she lost her phone and kept giving me dirty looks.
I knew I should have watched more Judge Judy, or one of those cool courtroom dramas, because nothing I was doing in that intimidating courtroom looked even remotely cool. When all was said and done, we mediated nothing. Upon leaving the courthouse, I literally hung over a parking meter and screamed, “Nooooooooooo!” only mildly disturbing a passed out homeless man on the ground. At least it made Rick laugh. Costing us over $100,000 in attorney fees to look stupid and ill prepared had succeeded: Job well done!
That was last summer, but the court system is a slow beast. When it engulfs you, it takes its time, and it really savors the broke, stupid, and ill prepared. So, we waited. It would take time to get a court date. Then, in November my mom killed herself, rocking my world to the core.
This is where it gets way Old Testament Godly! So, Jay had been a professed Christian. Yes, Jay was a professed Christian. With that knowledge we had tried, on our part, to employ the biblical principles of the Bible by mediating our disagreement through church elders, but Jay wasn’t having it, and in a weird God twist, our old pastor was now at Jay’s church as an interim pastor.
With all of that, we contacted our old pastor, our new sober attorney, and the church, and asked them for help, considering all the emotional turmoil we were now in with my mother’s death. The week after my mother died, our former pastor approached Jay and asked him to have mercy on us. Of course, Jay was unmoved and probably a little exhilarated knowing we were in such emotional distress: He said no.
Then, our attorney approached his and asked for a continuance and mercy: You can probably guess by now, Jay said no. On that following Sunday after Jay had been approached at least three times, our former pastor gave a sermon during Jay’s service, simply saying that there was, in the congregation, a person persecuting a young, godly family. From the pulpit, he called on that person to repent.
Now, for sure, you can never know what goes on in someone’s heart, but I do know what happened to Jay’s heart less than 24 hours later – it stopped beating. Jay died of a massive heart attack; face down in the dirt the Monday after that sermon!
Look, I’d like to have some grandiose bit of wisdom here, but simply put, I am glad for the moment that the pitbull has let go of my leg. When we were in court before the mediation judge, she kept saying for us to let go of the lawsuit, as if we were in control. In as stupid a moment as I’ve ever had, I explained to her that we weren’t really fighting Jay, we were in a defensive stance, like hikers fighting off a mountain lion by poking it in the eyes with a twig. I even acted it out a little. Yes, I seriously said and did that – poor Rick.
All I know is that God was in the house when I felt for sure He wasn’t even listening. The lawsuit is not over. Jay’s widow is now coming at us. Our court date is set for either June or July – it doesn’t much matter. We are more ill prepared than before, because we can’t even afford a legal defense. I’m practicing my erratic bouts of turrets and have opted for barking over profanity, since we have kids. I’m aiming for an insanity ruling and I’m grabbing another twig, because I’m pretty sure I’ll have to poke someone in the eye by the time this is all over.
“Arise, Lord, in your anger; rise up against the rage of my enemies. Awake, my God; decree justice…” Psalm 7:6
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