So all I got to do is figure out what to say in the card.
Chapter Seven
Between Jobs
I didn’t see it coming.
I usually got to work at seven-thirty to help me get prepared for the day. The others generally showed up at eight.
One day in June, when our baby girl was six months old, my boss, Dave, called me into his office and told me, because of the downturn in the economy, he was going to have to let me go. He told me to clean out my desk, turn in my keys, pick up a check, and leave.
“You don’t want me to even finish out the week?” I ask.
“No. It’s better if you just go now. In terms of company morale. I don’t want the others wondering if they’re next.”
“Are they?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. We’ll just have to see what happens in the next few weeks.”
He tried to ease the blow by telling me that there was a severance package that would give me a little time to get another job. He also provided me a cardboard box to pack up all my things. After I was finished, he walked me to the door, shook my hand, and wished me good luck. “If you need a reference, I’d be happy to give you one.”
It was quarter to eight. The others hadn’t come in yet.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t face going home and telling Heather I’d been fired.
I felt ashamed. Why was I the one who got fired? What were people going to say behind my back? What would people in our ward think? That I was a slacker? That I was incompetent? That I couldn’t even hold down a job?
And what would Heather’s folks say when they found out? I could imagine her dad saying, “I’m not surprised. I’m just amazed he managed to hold down that job this long.”
What about our mortgage? Were we going to lose our house? What was Heather going to think about me? Was she going to wish she’d married someone else who could provide for her?
And what about our insurance? Without a job, how long would my health insurance continue?
I thought back to all the times I’d put in extra work for my boss. What good had it done?
I didn’t know what to do except I knew I wanted to be alone.
I decided to go fishing. The only problem was I’d have to go home and get my fishing stuff in the garage. Heather would want to know why I’d come home from work early and why I was going fishing on a work day.
I couldn’t face that so I went to a store and bought all new equipment and then drove about thirty miles to a river where I liked to fish.
The fishing was great. I caught five fish within an hour. But I didn’t keep any of them because Heather would ask too many questions.
At six o’clock I pulled into the driveway as if I’d come home from work.
When I entered the kitchen, Heather came over to me. “How was work?” she asked.
“Good.”
She made no response but just looked at me. “Your secretary called,” she said.
“Oh, what did she want?”
“She said you forgot your Employee of the Month award when you cleared out all your things this morning.”
“Oh.”
“So . . . did you lose your job?”
I couldn’t look at her.
“Jason, did you lose your job?”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“Where have you been all day?”
“Fishing.”
“Why didn’t you come home and tell me you’d lost your job?”
“Because . . . I just couldn’t, that’s all.”
“We’ll get through this.”
I snapped. “No, see, that’s where you’re wrong! We won’t get through this! We’re probably going to lose our home! And then where will we live? With your folks? I couldn’t stand that! And it’s not only that. I have no idea how to provide for my family! I let you and the kids down! I’m supposed to be the one who provides for my family, and I can’t even do that! Why did you ever marry me in the first place?”
“I married you because I love you. And I still love you whether you have a job or not!”
She came to give me a hug.
I backed away. “No, don’t! I don’t deserve that from you.”
“Shut up and let me hug you!”
I stood like a statue while she held me close.
“I’m so sorry,” I said quietly.
“It’s not your fault. It’s just the economy. It’s happened to a lot of people. You’ll bounce back. You always do.”
“Could you do me a favor?” I asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Would you come with me to the driving range?”
“I will. Let me ask Amanda if she’ll watch the kids while we’re gone.”
“Don’t tell her about . . . you know . . . what happened to me today.”
“I won’t.”
Heather had never been to the driving range. I did a bucket of balls before I said much of anything to her.
“You want to try it?” I asked.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t be any good.”
“Give it a try. Please, for me.”
“Well, okay.”
She’d never done it before so I didn’t expect much.
But then she hit a ball straight for fifty yards.
I felt even more depressed.
“Was that good?” she asked.
“Yeah, it was, actually.”
“Beginner’s luck, I guess.”
“Yeah, or else, I’m no good at golf too . . . besides everything else.”
She handed me the club. “I’m done with golf. You go do some more.”
I did another bucket of balls.
“I’m not discouraged one bit,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“Tell me the truth. You were kind of bored with your job anyway, right?”
“Maybe a little.”
“So this will give you a chance to do something different . . . something more challenging. Like, what have you always wanted to do?”
“I don’t know. It’s been so long since I’ve even thought about that.”
“Well, you can think about it now.”
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be fireman,” I said.
“That’s still a possibility, right?”
“Actually all I wanted to do was drive the big red fire engine.”
She smiled. “I see. What else you got?”
“I don’t know. Right now I’d be happy just providing for my family. I don’t want a job that involves a lot of travel. But mostly I don’t want someone micromanaging me all the time.”
“That all sounds doable.”
“And a job where I don’t have to go in once a year and beg for a raise.”
“That’s perfectly understandable.”
After watching me hit another bucket of balls, she came up beside me and asked, “Can I help you with your swing?”
“What?”
“Just relax.” She came behind me and put her arms around my waist and rested her head on my back.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I just want you to know that, whatever happens, I’m on your side. We’re a team. We’ll get through this together. I love you so much. You’re my knight in shining armor.”
I turned around, dropped my club, and held her in my arms. “I’m a little worried my suit of armor is about to be repossessed.”
“We’ll get another one, even shinier.”
“Thank you for being so good to me,” I said.
“It’s what I live for,” she said.
We went home and had dinner.
Over the next week, I spent from eight a.m. to 5 p.m. looking for a job.
By the time two weeks had gone by, I had done everything I could think of.
After that I mostly just waited to hear back from someone.
To pass the time, I started spending hours playing video games on my laptop.
One day Heather came into my office and saw me
playing my favorite video game and said, “Don’t you have anything more important than that to do?”
“Not really.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’ve applied everywhere. What else do you want me to do?”
“I want you to get a job! Any job! I don’t care how much you make. I don’t care how much below your education or experience it is. Just do something! If you can’t get a job today, how about taking down that dead tree in the backyard like you always say you’re going to do! Get off your duff and get busy.”
I muttered something, hurried to the garage, grabbed my chain saw and went in the backyard and attacked the tree.
In two hours I had it cut up into manageable pieces. I hauled it out in front for the garbage men to take it away.
The next day our garbage was emptied but the tree branches were still there.
I called the city garbage department and they said they needed it cut into two foot lengths and tied up into bundles.
The next day I did that. I called for them to pick it up. They said they’d put me on their waiting list.
Two days later the truck came picking up yard waste. I stood in my front yard waiting for them to take away my tree.
The driver stopped. “I can’t get that,” he said.
“Why not? It’s cut into two foot sections and it’s bundled and tied.”
“Some of the bundles are too heavy.” He started to drive off.
“You people didn’t say anything about weight.”
“Well, now you know.”
“What’s the weight limit?”
“It depends.”
“What does it depend on?”
“Who I’ve got picking the stuff up.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Make lighter bundles.”
“Can you come back in like an hour?” I asked.
“No, if I did that for you, I’d be doing it for everyone.”
He drove off.
I spent two hours redoing the bundles so none of them weighed over twenty pounds. I weighed each one.
The next morning the truck stopped. The driver looked over my bundles. “That’s more like it.”
“Good.”
“But I can’t take it today. I’m full up.”
“So you’re going to dump your load and come back, right?” I asked.
“No, we just make one run a day. Try it again tomorrow. Although, I probably won’t be able to take everything you have there tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve got too many bundles. There’s other people in town too, you know.”
He drove off.
I was so mad I had to walk off my frustration. Almost on every block, there were branches set near the curb. I knocked on the door of one house and asked what their strategy was to get their branches taken away. The man who owned the home said confidentially, “We hide some in our regular garbage . . . a little each week.”
He took me to his backyard. There was a pile of branches, bags of dead leaves, neatly piled, waiting for the day they could sneak some of it in with their regular garbage.
“I wish there was somebody we could pay to take it all in one load,” he said.
“How much would you pay for that?” I asked.
He thought about it. “I’d say twenty to twenty-five dollars.”
“I could do that for you.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“It’s a deal then. I’m getting tired of having my backyard look like a garbage dump.”
“If I do it for you, will you tell some of your friends and neighbors?”
“Absolutely.”
I hurried home, called my uncle to see if I could borrow the beat-up pickup he stored in his barn. He said for a hundred dollars he’d sell it to me. I asked him if it still ran. He said it did.
It got a little more complicated after that. When Heather took me out to get the pickup, I noticed it didn’t have current license plates, so I had to write my uncle a check, get the title to the pickup, have Heather take me to get new plates.
But three hours later I was on my way to the dump with my first load.
I was so happy! I’d made twenty-five dollars.
And it was only the beginning!
Sometimes I take my boys with me as we go through the neighborhoods picking up tree limbs and garden waste. They love it at the dump when they get to throw stuff out of the truck and see how far it will go down the hill. They also love the seagulls that sit around and wait for the next load of garbage, hoping there’s something they can eat.
Now I have a website and also fliers that my boys and I take to homes and a sign on the side of the pickup that advertises our little business.
No more progress reports. No more evaluations of performance. No more contingency plans.
Just garbage. Garbage is predictable. Garbage requires no working at night. No business trips. No lost sales. No disappointed stockholders.
Just garbage. It’s at one place and it needs to go someplace else.
Life is good for a man who works with garbage.
I’m grateful that Heather threw me out of the house and told me to just go and do something.
Now look at me—I’ve got my own business!
Chapter Eight
Didn’t See That Coming
Two years later life was still good.
Heather and I were enjoying our fourth child, a beautiful girl named Kaylie. My business had expanded and grown to include landscaping and installation of sprinkler systems.
I was serving as a Boy Scout leader in the ward. It gave me a chance to work with Kevin and his friends once a week after school.
I was happy and content with my life.
It was a Saturday in June. My boys and I had picked up some tree limbs from a recent storm and taken them out to the city dump. And then I took my boys fishing on a nearby lake. By then I’d bought a small boat for the purpose.
While we were fishing, I got a call on my cell phone.
It was our stake president asking me if I could drop by and see him at four that afternoon.
“What for?”
“We just need to talk to you. That’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
Which of course led me to worry.
But I didn’t let that get in the way of my time with the boys. We fished a little longer, got the boat on our trailer and then headed for our favorite café, the one we’d stopped to the time we went to get a Christmas tree. They loved to play pinball on that old machine.
We got home at two. The boys ran in and excitedly showed Heather the fish we’d caught and, with each boy putting in the details they most remembered, they described to her everything about our great adventure.
“I’m going to take a shower now,” I said. “President Johnson wants to visit with me.”
“What for?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure, except he did say for me not to worry.”
When I got out of the shower, Heather knocked on the bathroom door. “President Johnson called and said he doesn’t need to see you until six o’clock.”
“Okay.”
“He also asked if I’d come with you.”
I stopped drying.
“Jason, did you hear that?”
“Yes.”
“Any ideas what this is about?” she asked.
“Maybe they just want me to be a stake clerk or something.”
“You’re probably right.”
At a quarter to six we sat just outside the stake president’s office.
When the door opened, he and his two counselors shook our hands. President Johnson invited us in.
Two minutes of chatter and then he said to me, “I suppose you’re willing to accept any calling you receive from the Lord. Is that right?”
“Yes,” we both said softly.
“Great, because, Jason, the Lord has called you to be the next bishop of your ward. Now I don’t need to ask y
ou if you’ll accept because you already said you’d accept any calling, but I need to know who you want to be your counselors.”
My mouth dropped open. I looked at Heather who was as shocked as I was. I shook my head. “This can’t be happening.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m not the kind of person who should be called to be a bishop.”
“My counselors and I have both prayed about this, and this is the answer we received.”
“Can I pray about it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I just need a little time.”
“Give me a call when you’d like us to meet again. Oh, and I’ll need to know who you want as your counselors.”
I nodded and shook his hand and we left.
When we got to the car, I said, “Would you mind driving us home?”
At home we changed out of our Sunday clothes, told the boys we were going to weed the garden and asked who wanted to help. Nobody did.
I was so stressed out I couldn’t tell what was a weed and what was a flower.
“This is a mistake,” I said softly.
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m not the bishop type. Financial clerk, maybe. Executive secretary, yes. In charge of getting people to clean up the building, maybe. But not this.”
She came closer to me. “What you just pulled out of the ground is not a weed. It’s a flower,” she said softly.
I nodded. “There you go. That proves my point. I can’t even weed right.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She reached for my hand. “Jason, listen to me. I do not for one minute think this is a mistake.”
“How can you say that? You know me better than anyone.”
“Yes, I do. And you know what? I don’t know anyone that I respect more than you.”
I sighed. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“You just begin, that’s all.”
I sighed. “What am I going to tell President Johnson?”
“It’s not that complicated. You do what the Lord wants you to do, and you trust Him to help you do it.”
I turned my attention to the garden again. “Is this a weed or a flower?”
“Can’t you tell?”
“Not really. Not today.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing for a bishop,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“If I had a single-adult son or daughter who’d left home and was inactive, I’d want his or her bishop to never give up. Like you treating a weed like a flower.”