Humility VIII

I have wanted to share the result of my brush with blackmail at the end of last week. I thank readers who commented on the situation; the comments helped to clarify my thinking. In the end, though, it was not my thinking that mattered. The ending was extraordinary, another example of God spoiling me.


Realizing my mistake (thinking that I did not need God's help for such a little task as informing an employee that he would be transferred), over the weekend I asked God to guide me in the decision whether or not to prosecute the employee for blackmail. I felt no guidance all weekend. On Sunday, I missed the morning Mass. Doah had wanted to go with me but did not call until too late. By the time he called, it was too late even for the noon Spanish Mass. However, there was an evening Mass in a church in the town where he lives. So, we made arrangements to go there.

When I entered the church with Doah, I was hoping that God would use something in the readings, music, or homily to provide guidance because I certainly would have to make a decision on Monday. It was more a matter of expectant waiting and not stress. I long ago learned that once I give a problem to God, I don't have to worry about it anymore.

Nothing in the readings or music provided any help with my difficult decision. So, I settled in to listen carefully to the homily. It was short, but good -- and had nothing to do with my situation. The homily was short because the priest could barely speak. He had spent a year at home in Colombia. (No, this is not Padre Julio, for those of you who recognize that name; Padre Julio has been assigned to a parish in San Diego.) While there he caught bronchial pneumonia, was hospitalized, then put on long-term bed rest at home. As a result, he had returned two months late to the parish in Doah's town. Although regularly taking antibiotics, he still suffered from bronchitis.

How fortunate that I was there, I thought. I suffered for decades from bronchitis, including four bouts of bronchial pneumonia with hospitalizations. No American doctor could cure me, and in 1993, when I was lecturing in Siberia, I spent as much time coughing as talking.

"Why are you coughing so much?" asked the regional minister of education who had invited me there to lecture to university administrators.

"Oh, I have bronchitis," I answered.

"Why do you still have bronchitis?" she asked. "You have been here four days already." Now that was a strange question and comment.

"I have had bronchitis for 18 months," I explained, puzzling over her question. "I have no cilia in my bronchi tubes because of many bouts of bronchial pneumonia, so colds turn immediately into bronchitis. I have it every year for many weeks."

"No, no, no," she remonstrated. "Bronchitis should not last more than three days. No one in Siberia has bronchitis for more than three days. So, American doctors don't know how to cure bronchitis? Our doctors do. You will go see our doctor when you finish your lecture."

True to her word, she led me, protesting in vain, to the doctor after the lecture ended. The doctor checked me out and confirmed the diagnosis from the States: bronchitis.

"You must come to the clinic every day for three days," he told me. "After that, your bronchitis will be gone. Please don't skip a day; it is important that we clear up this condition."

Three days? Entirely skeptical and not one bit hopeful for any amelioration of my condition, I dutifully followed the doctor into the respiratory therapy room. There he turned me over to a nurse, who gave me a hand-held device that emitted a cold, thick vapor. Ingalatsiya efkalitom (eucalyptus inhalation therapy) had been ordered for me. For 15 minutes, I slowly breathed in and out the cold vapor and noticed that during the therapy session I did not feel any need to cough.

My cough, in a milder form, did return in a few hours. Nonetheless, I returned the next day hopeful and no longer entirely skeptical. The nurse recognized me. Ingalatsiya efkaliptom, she said, handing me the inhaler that I now knew how to use.

After 15 minutes, I returned the device to her, thanked her, and left -- feeling no need to cough. It was not until the next day that I felt a need to cough once or twice. Amazing! I seemed to have licked the coughing. With one day of therapy left, after the morning lecture, which I got through without coughing once -- something I had not been able to do in 18 months -- I headed off to see my respiratory therapy nurse with alacrity. I took the device and, convinced now of its merits, deeply breathed in the vapor for 15 minutes. Done, I handed the device back to the nurse and left the clinic for the last time. That was in November 1993. I have never had bronchitis since. Certainly, I suffer from time to time from colds that would like to slide down past my cilia and develop into bronchitis, but, having learned the Siberians' secret, I pull out a bottle of eucalyptus oil and sniff it the minute I feel a cough coming on. Generally, it takes only 2-3 uses over a morning or an afternoon, and the bronchitis germs scamper off. I have given away my bottle of eucalyptus oil on many occasions. Each time, the recipient has related a story similar to mine: bronchitis gone in less than a day.

Once, I observed one of our secretaries taking antiobiotics upon her return from a two-week illness. "What are the antiobiotics for?" I asked her.

"Bronchitis," she said. "I have been fighting it for more than two weeks."

"No, no, no," I remonstrated, just like the Siberian minister of education 17 years earlier. "Bronchitis should not last more than three days." I handed her a bottle of eucalpytus oil, instructing her to sniff it whenever she felt a cough coming on. (Lacking the Siberian inhalation devices, sniffing is the closest I can come to emulating the Siberian natural cure. It works.)

Near the end of the day, I checked on the secretary. "How are you doing" I asked.

"I have not coughed all afternoon," she said. "It's like this stuff cured me instantly. Amazing!"

So, after Mass on Sunday, I stood at the very end of the line so that I could share the Siberian remedy for bronchitis with the priest. "I don't come to your church," I told him. "I attend Mass in San Ignatio, but today I missed Mass there so decided to come here with my son." Doah shook the priest's hand. "I think I was supposed to be here today," I explained, telling him my history and suggesting that he try eucalyptus oil.

He thanked me and assured me that he would do so. I am certain that he will, and I cannot imagine any result other than his bronchitis disappearing quickly. I suppose if that happens (or, I should say, when that happens), he may think that I was some kind of angel sent his way -- just once -- to help with a just-once need for a cure to a troubling and uncomfortable medical problem.

AsI left the church, I thought of the irony: I came for an answer, and instead, I gave an answer to a priest in need. Then it hit me. Wham! That was my answer. Sometimes God's answers are too brilliant, too out-of-the-box, too perfect for my imperfect mind to recognize them immediately. I was looking for an answer to the question, do I prosecute or not? God re-framed the question for me. It was not a question of whether or not to prosecute. It was not a question about what I should do. In fact, I had been looking at the problem upside-down all along. The problem was not about me. The problem was about the employee. I made the connection when I realized that my attendance at Mass was not for my good; it was for the good of the priest. There was my answer: stop looking at me as the central player, at what I should do, at how I was affected, and what I was feeling. Look, instead, at the employee, what motivated him, how he was affected, and what he was feeling. How much above our thinking is God's, as the psalm says! When I realized that, I knew what the next step had to be, and I knew I would, with God's help, be able to share God's grace and love with the employee when I next met with him.

As soon as I arrived at work, I called the human resources officer. No answer. So I sent an enote. Subject line: Occurrence of a felony in Division C. In the body of the message, I wrote: "If I have successfully gotten your attention, please call me." I had. She called me within minutes. I explained what had happened and what I wanted to do about it. She liked the approach.

After lunch, the human resources officer came to my office, read the contents, and confirmed that they contained nothing that could get me into any kind of trouble. I had the employee's supervisor send him to me. I welcomed him, as if nothing had happened, talked to him about a few routine matters, then asked him to sit down. At that point, I pulled out the envelope with the condemning file.

"Is this the envelope you gave to my secretary on Friday?" I asked. He confirmed that it was.

"Is this the negative 'documentation' that you told me you had on me when your supervisors and I met with you on Friday?" I asked. Again, he confirmed that it was.

"Did you hope by means of this document to get me to change my position on your transfer?" I asked. He was quiet, unsure of how to answer, clearly worried about what lay behind this line of questioning. His eyes looked for a place to hide, but there was none. I was looking directly at him, and so was the human resource officer.

"Let me share with you my perception of this," I said and went on to talk about the seriousness of blackmail, informing him that, since I hold a high-level security clearance, I cannot allow myself to be blackmailed, no matter what the nature of the documentation, without potentially losing the clearance.

"You have put me in a very difficult position," I added. Then I showed him the legal definition of blackmail, which he could see for himself pretty much described what he had done. I also gave him a printout of the legal codes (US and California penal code) that listed blackmail as a felony and the punishment as imprisonment and heavy fine. From his expression, I realized that he had not known that he was committing a felony.

"I would like to know why you did this," I said in a questioning tone, one that I hoped would come across as interested and caring, not accusatory, because I was, indeed, interested in knowing his motivation, especially if my perception was not the actual motivation.

He melted and asked if he could talk to me privately. The human resource person would not allow that, interjecting, "It is too late for that. The minute I leave this office, this becomes an official investigation, and she may not discuss this with you again. If you have something to say, you need to say it now."

He hesitated, then broke down. He had felt singled out by the transfer. Something I had said during the meeting had made him feel that I did not respect him. Most important, the document he had given me, in his opinion, showed that I had favored one particular employee, and he felt that was unfair. With the human resource officer concurring with my sharing the information and confirming what I said, I told him that the employee he considered favored had received one of the lowest ratings in the department and had received more disciplinary actions than anyone else, which is the reason he had left the department -- four years earlier.

There was one more question in my mind. "You accidentally found this file four years ago," I said to the employee. "Clearly, you have kept it for four years. Why? Do you really mistrust me so much that you felt the need to save something that might some day help you defend yourself?"

"No," the employee responded quietly, and then astonished me with his answer. "I was not looking to defend myself. I was not looking to make you do anything at all. Or to stop you from doing something. My feelings were hurt. You did not care enough about me to let me stay here in this department that I love, where my heart is, and, from what I could read in this file, I really did believe that you liked this other employee much more than me. I gave you the document to get you to think about whether you were really being fair."

The human resource officer stepped in at that point and iterated that every employee in the division who could not travel had been reassigned. Everyone was being treated the same. It was surely something that the employee needed to hear. What he wanted to hear, I was certain, was something else.

"I know your heart is here," I affirmed. "Unfortunately, your body has to be somewhere else. Both you and I know that your health will not permit you to travel. If I put you on a plane, I could be killing you." He admitted that I was right on both counts.

At the end, we agreed that he would accept the transfer. We also agreed that he would erase the file from his computer. We shook hands on it. He told me as well that he had made only the one printout that he had given me. I told him that I believed him, and that since we had shaken hands, I accepted his word as complete evidence that the problem was resolved and the file would be erased, that I had no intention of double-checking or of investigating further. At the point, the human resource officer returned the envelope to me, and both she and the employee left, in different directions.

I am confident that the matter is resolved. The employee is a Middle Easterner, and Middle Easterners prize being known as honoring their word.

I am thankful that this situation had a happy ending. I am grateful to God for once again spoiling me and taking care of my problem so easily. I am also grateful for the lesson learned: arrogance got me into the mess, humility got me out of it. If I can just remember to stick with humility only, I just might avoid most such messes in the future.

Promises II

I had planned to upload this post much earlier, back in June, when I posted some information along this line on my 100th Lamb site. Somehow, though, this particular posting got waylaid, and it has been lurking in my "edit posts" box ever since. Perhaps that is all well and good because my understanding of the situation has improved in the past month, and more "stuff" has happened in the past month so, clearly, I can update information at the same time as I relate it. In essence, what this post is about and why its essence changes with time is that the job God put me in seems to be going away. Well, not going away, but changing dramatically. The proposal going before the Board of Directors is to dissect it into a number of pieces (see my post, The Price of Success), give away to other division heads whole departments that have been highly successful and grown tremendously in size, and give me a new chain through which to report (equidistant from the big muckety-muck but not through my current boss).

Needless to say, all this reorganization and proposed reorganization has created a lot of stress for everyone involved. I want a stress-free, happy job, one that is focused on me and my needs, perhaps. That would be a change, for sure. I keep getting indications, though, which I stubbornly try to ignore, that indicate that God wants me focused on others and that it is not important if anything at all in my job focuses on me. Currently, I cannot point out one thing or one person who puts me, my wants, my interests, or my needs [not that I could state any of those, anyway] at the center of anything. Rather, my bosses throws tasks at me, expecting me to support them, and my employees are used to a servant leadership approach, also expecting me to support them. (Since I enjoy my current job for the most part, I don't think that deep down I really care where I fit in. I focus on mission and the people needed to accomplish the mission. When the mission is accomplished well and the people are happy, I am pleased.) But with the whole nature of my job changing over the next two years, if plans are implemented, I foresee potential mission failure and definite unhappiness among my employees, which will leave me displeased and ill at ease.

With all this weighing on me on one of those late-June days, I finished the work day rather discouraged and before coming home opened one of our trade journals. There I found advertised a good job, for which I could easily qualify, for 125% of my current salary. It was located in Portland, Maine, not far from family and where I grew up. An international job, it would have been a perfect fit for me. However, I know better than to consider a seeming match like this to be some kind of sign. I've been through that before, and I have been wrong before. I have to admit that Mme. Stubborn (i.e. yours truly) considered very strongly applying for the job even though I know that God wants me in the one I have. Most of the way home, I dwelled on the thought of escaping to greener pastures (the proverbial other side of the fence, which I do know is not really greener). And then I heard the compelling words, Come Walk with Me.

The last time I was tugged outside for a walk was with the ice halo. Then it was a gesture of love and made me feel humble (humility, I admit, is not my strongest trait as much as I would like it to be and as much as many others, including most of my employees, think it is; they simply don't know my heart as I do). This time, too, the walk was a gesture of love but in a different way: it served as a time and place to provide gentle, overt guidance. That is what I was asking for, but I did not expect to get it so concretely, so openly, and so lovingly. But I get ahead of myself.

Before taking that walk, I dropped by the Post Office, as I do every evening on the way home, San Ignatio being too impoverished to afford home delivery of mail and too small to need it. There was good news all around. Every letter I opened contained something positive. "You spoil me," I whispered, marveling that God does spoil me. I don't ask why God spoils me. I just accept the kindnesses and care with gratitude.

After reading the mail, I put on a light jacket as protection from the cool, somewhat blustery (even in the summer), evening winds, literally dropped everything, and went out for the walk I had been called to take. There I encountered peace from merely being in the Presence. That alone would have been a loving gift. God, however, is lavish in His love, and so I received more than that. I received guidance. I complained that I had spent four years building a division that someone from the national office would now lead with my assistance and would have the authority to tear apart or move into new directions with which I disagreed. Ah, right! That was pride speaking. Hm, a little more humility might be in order here. I was beginning to comprehend, but imperfectly. Then, in a way that only God can manage and that I can never explain, I realized that the question of where I should be and what is happening to my job is not about me at all. It is about the people for whom I am responsible. What will happen will be as difficult for them as it will be for me, and they will need someone to shepherd them along the new path and out into the new fields. That someone can only be me. I did not want this to be the case, but it is what it is, and that is something I can accept in spite of my stubborn tendency to fight against what I want not to be the case or what I understand only in part.

Abruptly, the wind changed from harsh to caressing, maybe because of the trees in its path or maybe because the evening had waned on or maybe just because. And there in the soft evening breeze and fading light, stubbornness met unreproving love. I would have stayed wrapped in the comfort of that love for hours, but soon I felt a little push, "Now go; you have work to do. I will be with you." There was something more, too: a promise.

So, I left the field and returned to the house. I sat down and looked at the briefing that would be given in the early morning by my boss's boss to the highest local muckety-muck, who would soon be presenting it to our national muckety-mucks. Instead of thinking about my role in the new organization, I thought about how the reorganization would affect those who work for me. One group of nearly 100 people would severely suffer. I would not be able to help them because under the new plan, they would not be working for me nor would they be working as a group but rather scattered among many teams in order to share the expertise they had gained. Suddenly, from out of nowhere (nowhere? really?) into my mind popped a "scathingly brilliant idea," to use Hayley Mills' The Trouble with Angels' character's words that always preceded some kind of momentous plan that would shake up her staid school and land her in the kitchen doing dishes for punishment. My idea was scathingly brilliant: it would shake up my organization's plan, and, since the plans had all been finalized and, more important, completely power-pointed, there was a risk in presenting a significant change right before the morning's presentation that I would probably be pushed aside with annoyance at best and angrily reprimanded at worst (but not required to do any dishes). Nonetheless, I sketched out how the changes I envisioned could be charted, and early the next month drew my boss aside and made my pitch. None of my fears came to fruition. My boss, who would normally have been strongly opposed to my suggestion, accepted my changes and quickly re-did the power points. (I think that had to do with the part about "I will be with you" from the night before.)

I still understand only in part and only imperfectly. I will, however, some day understand why God put me in this job at this time. That was the promise made in the night. It is enough.

Arrogance

I don't know where the words came from. I could hardly believe they came from my mouth, yet I heard them as they slid out. "I don't think you are taking this project seriously," I said to the recently assigned project manager of a subcontractor at our Washington DC branch. She cringed and averred differently. I only shook my head unkindly and walked off to begin the presentation I had come to deliver.

I can explain how I got to the point of saying those words. In preparing for an all-day briefing to be conducted in DC together with a specialist from one of our subdivisions, I discovered that the concept papers we were to use were so poorly done that we could not use them. So, I had to re-do the work of several employees, whose supervisor had assumed that the work was fine. To worsen matters, the computers had been down (server outage) for the two days prior to my departure for DC. I had only one day to get everything done once the computers were back on line. That day I had several meetings, and during the time available in and around the meetings, one after another employee came into my office on small issues (well, important issues to them but ones I considered minor at the moment). Although I had closed my door, no one had seemed to notice. My open-door policy had been turned into an open-the-door policy. Too much to re-do, too little time to re-do it, and too many distractions from doing it! I was annoyed.

Add to that annoyance the fact that everyone around me seemed to be falling apart. I had one senior manager undergoing emergency surgery and another in the hospital with internal bleeding, cause undetermined. An employee had gone into the hospital for routine knee surgery and ended up comatose and packed in ice (we were waiting to here whether and when heroic measures would cease), and a junior manager had been diagnosed with a tumor and had to be brought back from his field assignment. This was all in the space of two days. Our senior leadership at the annual BBQ the day before I left for DC was decimated. I was stressed.

I did not escape any drama by leaving. As the plane was taxiing into Dulles International Airport, I quickly checked my Blackberry and learned two disturbing pieces of information. First, a project that I was to have been involved in had been downsized; much of the physical risk had been removed from it (that part was good -- while I was unconcerned for my own safety, my prayer group had been praying that something like this would happen), and the performance date had been moved to September, interfering with my need to be in Korea at that time. Second, my supervisor had overturned my appointment on an assignment I had promised to an employee. (She deserved it, and later in the day he recanted.) However these things work out and worked out, I arrived disappointed.

Following a night of only five hours of sleep after cleaning up from the BBQ, which had been at my house, and having had to go to work earlier than normal to begin that day of meetings and interrupted work, I had to jump onto a redeye from San Franciso to DC. Of all times, the pilot raced across the continental skies, arriving 30 minutes ahead of schedule, leaving me with a mere four hours of sleep. I was tired.

When I arrived at ground transportation, I blackberried the supervisor of our DC branch for an address to give to the taxi driver. She gave me the office address. I showed up there only to find out that the briefing was taking place at the premises of the subcontractor in another part of town. Now I would be late. I learned that the mistaken address was deliberate: the supervisor wanted to discuss the project with me alone. That meant that the specialist, who did not have the briefing powerpoints (I had them) would have to do with the first presentation without them and without me. I was angry.

Annoyance, stress, fatigue, disappointment, and anger combined to evoke my caustic remark when, having finally arrived at the subcontractor's location in time for the second presentation, I was informed by the project manager that two key personnel would come only after lunch. Any one of those conditions would have served as an excuse for my remarks, I initially tried to justify to myself. However, no justification exists for arrogance, and it was certainly arrogance that lay behind my words: whatever I had to say was more important than anything they had to do, and obviously that was not true.

I apologized to the project manager later. However, words don't dissolve; they don't run away; taking them back is nothing more than a vacuous expression.

While I know that I have not lost God's love, I was not thinking of God's presence when I made my unkind remark, and so I did not feel God's presence. The worst part? I lost an entire morning with God. That time will never be regained.

Clearly, I needed some time with God alone. After finishing the day of presentations, I ran to the nearby metro station where I knew there would be a line of cabs to assist me in my cab-plane-car dash to our Georgia branch. I grabbed a cab, driven by a courteous and calm middle-aged man from Pakistan. We chatted casually, and while the conversation was calming, it permitted no opportunity for time alone with God, as there had been none all day. I missed San Ignatio with its quiet spirituality.

Having swiftly picked up my ticket and passed through security without incident except for my typical random search, I took the airport train to the Delta terminal and made my way to Gate 76, keeping my eye out for any place at all for quiet prayer. There was none at all, just masses of people moving in cohorts to and from gates, into and out of restrooms and restaurants, and along the corridors. I missed even more San Ignatio's quiet spirituality where nearly every nook and cranny provides an opportunity for prayer.

I had more than an hour to wait for a now-delayed plane. I opted for a yogurt cone and seated myself at a table near a large potted plant, surrounded, of course, by other travelers.

My thoughts turned to my increasing unease. From whence these feelings? A change in the equilibrium of my life! I realized that I spend most of my time helping others, sometimes because I have been given a divine task, sometimes just because I stumble across someone in need (which may not always be accidental), and most often because those in need are people who work for me. My last few days, however, had been focused on me: the just-completed presentations in DC and the upcoming one in Georgia. I had moved away from helping others for lack of time (the employees to whom I had shut my door), lack of authority (the overturning of my decision by my supervisor), and lack of ability (the sick folk). I missed helping others, being God's helper. I missed time with God. It would be two more days before I would return to San Ignatio.

Even though I had no sense of God's presence while I waited for the plane, I wailed a silent prayer, spilling out those emotions and desires. I knew God would hear, understand, and forgive.

And then everything changed. Delta cancelled the flight. There were no other flights on Delta that night. I would miss the Georgia presentation, scheduled for early in the morning the next day. I called my admin assistant to inform the folks in Georgia, as Delta set about rescheduling all its passengers.

"Does anyone speak Russian?" one of the gate agents called out loudly, then a few seconds later, appealed "we really need someone who speaks Russian."

"I'll call you back," I told my admin assistant. Then I stood up and raised my hand, "I speak Russian."

The gate agent was visibly relieved. So were the mother and daughter who were trying to get back to Moscow via Atlanta. We very easily settled everything for them, and as their stress level eased, so did mine. (I find that happens a lot -- if you help someone who is stressed out, it eases your own feeling of stress.)

The grateful Delta agent offered to take me out of turn, but I waved off the offer, telling her that my office could handle my situation. It did. I ended up coming back to San Ignatio early! On a United non-stop flight direct to San Francisco. What could be better? How about a surprise complimentary upgrade to first class? Another redeye, but one on which I could sleep very comfortably.

All was right with the world. I was on my way back to San Ignatio. I wondered how much of this occurred because of my plaintive prayer about missing my quiet time with God. Ah, for any part of it -- and every part of it -- I am grateful.

All the way back home I could not sleep in spite of two short-sleep nights. The excitement of nearing San Ignatio overpowered every thought and emotion. God no longer has any need to look for this lost lamb. This lamb knows where to find the rest of her flock and her Shepherd!

(What happened next? Follow-up coming soon!)