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
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