Chapter 1 Have Faith
This is Chapter 1 of something I’ve been working on about family. I’m putting it here today because I want to see what happens when it leaves my computer.
Chapter 1
Have Faith
My oldest sister surprised us with a week at an evangelical marriage retreat. Really surprised us as a matter of fact. Lots of things can be said about what I thought of the idea right then, but it was set in the mountains of Northern California, along the Scott River, which was known for its vistas and fly fishing.
100% in, cautiously.
It was a messy stage of life. Things were horrendous at work, and my wife’s mother was quite aggressively dying of cancer. But a trip like this, at this point in our lives, it was kind of like having kids. When is there ever a good time/ right time? And it was just a week.
I remember thinking, would the company make it without me? Pretty egotistical. But the company was also in bad shape, so I wouldn’t totally fault myself for that.
Anyway, this was the summer of 2016.
I had a 14-unit delivery and takeout pizza company. It was doing horribly, and I was doing the best I could, which wasn’t very great. I’m no financial genius. But I knew how to bring people together and make them work for a common cause.
As with any stage of my life, though, I could always get a pretty bad attitude. Kind of out of nowhere. Luckily, it never lasted very long.
The people around me had been with me for a very long time. They knew me well, and they knew where my heart was. To this day, I’m not sure there’s ever been a group of people who took better care of me. With all my faults and everything else, I guess they knew I was doing my best.
And somehow, my best always kept that pig afloat.
God willing.
So I was cautiously optimistic about this camp.
We arrived too early, got in a little trouble, had to fart around for a while, and eventually were shown to our room, which was freezing. My wife is very cold-averse, and it was not a good situation. Nobody wants to be uncomfortable the whole time they’re on vacation.
After the first night, where everyone turned in early after pleasantries and some kind of meal, we were taken to a Christian evangelical dude ranch where parents went with their children for a week of conditioning.
The first thing we were greeted with? A rodeo / cowboy-and-Indian show-hoedown mash-up. It was one of these things—so bad it was good. And it completely opened my heart, with the (literal) ring leader crying out, over-loudly: * ‘You paid all of this money, so you want it to work, right?* * Well, you’re going have to put on your “partici-pants.”’*
For some reason, I heard this. I normally wouldn’t, being so protectively cynical and cool. But I heard this loudly.
After the rodeo, we took a walk up a hill. Surely we were going to do some kind of ropes course or something.
But I saw it before we got there.
I knew exactly what was happening.
It was a tree stump with steps leading up to it and a level patch of ground below. Very well trodden.
It was a freaking trust fall.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
So people got up there, said this or that, and then did the fall. I was moving toward the back of the group, happy that I wasn’t going to participate but still really enjoying myself.
Then a woman got up and said she wanted to leave behind the memory of her son, who had just died.
He had been in rehab for some time. He got out, and on his first night alone, his dealer found him. He took the dose that had always worked before, but since he’d been clean for a while, it killed him. Probably instantly.
She was racked with guilt and sorrow and shame and everything else. She just wanted to start feeling some relief.
It may not surprise you that this brought me completely into the present moment.
Cynicism gone.
She fell off that tree stump, and I felt it.
Not enough, of course, to do it myself.
And since it was almost lunch, I figured I’d gotten away with another one.
The bell rang, and we headed down the hill.
The leader caught up with me.
She looked at me and said, “JD, I can tell there’s something you wanted to say. So I’ll tell you what. After lunch, we’ll come back up here so you can do that.”
What the hell?
How did that happen?
Sure enough, after a very short lunch—which could have been three hours and still felt short to me—we were back up there.
I had no idea what I was going to say.
There was a couple on the retreat who had clearly been sent by their church. They weren’t rich. They seemed sweet and sincere.
So I got up there.
I looked at everybody.
And it came to me in an instant.
I wanted to stop feeling guilty for all the bad stuff I’d done at the company.
And by bad stuff, I mean bad decisions.
I don’t think I ever intentionally did one bad thing.
But all the mistakes I’d made. All the trouble I’d caused. All the investors I hadn’t paid back. All the dumb real estate decisions. All the stupid buys.
I was killing myself with that stuff.
I just wanted to start letting it go.
I’m pretty sure I cried.
I made some other people cry too.
Who was this person standing up there?
I said it.
Turned around.
And fell.
I wasn’t even thinking.
Glasses flew off my head. They were crushed.
To say I didn’t care was an understatement.
I did feel it leave me when I fell. I can remember the feeling. It wasn’t instantly gone, but it was like I had a partner in the thing, or had all these people as partners. It was incredible.
It was definitely the start of something.
It wasn’t a low point.
It was a point of strength.
A place I could use as a base of operations to move forward.
The rest of the trip, I had my partici-pants on every day.
The overarching theme was abiding. And believing. And that with those things, you could do anything.
More or less, I’ve carried that with me to this day.
But more importantly, it gave me the strength to do what I had to do next.
Get the company right.
Hang on.
And sell it.
A friend once told me that ten years is long enough to do anything.
I was entering my twelfth year and was done. Just finished. I had taken it as far as I could.
And lo and behold, by the end of 2018, we had fixed it. Or at least fixed it enough.
It was growing again.
Sales were in the green instead of the red.
Then we got an offer to merge with somebody.
I think by the end of the phone call, I was already at their office.
And to alleviate the suspense, that sale went through.
But it took forever.
I think we signed the documents early in the year for a spring closing.
Instead, it closed on the busiest pizza day of the year.
October 31.
It was a long year.
And a lot of things happened.
I’ll tell you about those next.