“For all your understanding,” Ahbee said, “there is much you will never understand. Mystery is part of life; it’s in your DNA; it’s part of being human. I did not force you out into the world. There was a time when humanity knew only good, but then Adam chose to add the knowledge of evil to the human storehouse of wisdom, and it’s been confusing for all of you ever since.”
Ahbee paused for a moment so my thoughts could catch up with his, and my mind went back to Mrs. Johnson’s Sunday school class. There on the flannelgraph a naked Adam and Eve stood behind strategically placed fig leaves and were about to bite into an apple. I remember as a young boy wanting to yell, “Don’t do it!” but it was too late. Mrs. Johnson then put up a picture of Adam’s face. He looked guilty as sin, and he had apple juice running down his chin. I looked up at Ahbee as if to say, “I’m with you,” and he continued to explain.
God wants to share so much with us, if only we’d listen.
“In the beginning Rae, Joshua, and I wanted to share everything except evil with you all. Other than that there was no limit to the potential of your knowledge. But with evil came limitation. Restrictions were put in place, certain things were locked in a vault called Eden, and Michael has stood guard at the gate ever since.
“Have you ever seen someone put a drop of India ink into a pitcher of water? Immediately it pollutes and permeates every drop. Evil is like that. In an instant it swallowed knowledge in a murky cloud of uncertainty. But that does not mean that there will not be learning. Humans are always learning.
“I want to share so much with you, if only you’d take the time to listen. Things that will eliminate disease, fight poverty, and help you stand up to evil. But knowledge, in and of itself, is neutral. It can be used for good or for evil. Only the heart of the person who holds an idea can control that. My hands are tied. It’s part of the promise I made a long time ago in Eden. Of all the gifts I’ve given you, the most precious is the freedom to choose, and choose you must.”
My mind was reeling with it all. I was on information overload, so finally I said, “Right now, I choose to go to bed.”
“Sleep well,” said Ahbee. “Tomorrow we’ll talk more, but remember: each day life is full of choices. Do I have jelly on my toast or peanut butter? Do I go to work or stay home with my sick daughter? Every choice is fraught with consequences. The mystery unfolds around you like the flowers in a spring field.
“I am forever revealing mystery, but not all mysteries. The secrets of life, death, love, and the meaning of it all must be pursued like a lover. Mathematics, science, and technology are tools, but in and of themselves they will always fall short. Without a spiritual compass to guide you, you’ll always be groping in the darkness. That’s what the Bible is for—a compass for the course of life.”
12
evil
When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind.
Martin Luther King Jr.
When I came downstairs the next morning, Josh and Michael were sitting at the dining room table drinking mugs of strong, black coffee.
Knowing I’m not a coffee drinker, Josh said, “Sit down, Scout. I’ll get you a Coke.”
I watched as he did, and once again I was caught off guard by his willingness to serve.
Our conversation was light, mostly about the beauty of the day, and I waited for one of them to invite me to go with them. But an invitation never came.
I could smell biscuits baking, and Josh got up every once in a while and tended to something frying in the kitchen. “What’s for breakfast?” I asked.
“Oh, Josh set the menu this morning,” said Michael. “It may be foreign to your palate at first, but don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!”
A wide-mouthed jar of yogurt had already been set on the table, and next to it was a small ceramic bowl of granola and another with fresh blackberries.
“You’re always safe with the yogurt,” Michael said. “And the biscuits are warm and wonderful. Ahbee got up early and baked them before he left.” Just at that moment, Josh came in with a platter of biscuits the size of baseballs and a mess of golden brown fish filets that he had hand-battered and then panfried.
“Buttermilk bluegills,” said Josh. “They’re my favorite.”
“What?” I asked, perplexed.
“Oh, he’s just pulling your leg,” Michael explained. “As a boy, Josh would often have fish and flatbread for breakfast. It was that or goat cheese, sliced tomatoes, and green olives. So sometimes we have breakfast with a Mediterranean flair. He dips the bluegills in buttermilk and then breads them in buckwheat pancake flour. Josh likes them best with goat cheese and sliced green olives, but I’d recommend the biscuits and honey instead.”
I’m not a big fan of seafood, but Josh’s bluegills were remarkably good. Feeling adventurous, I tried the goat cheese and green olives with a slice of tomato on my biscuit, but I was with Michael: I preferred the honey.
I cleared the dishes after breakfast and offered to clean up. “I’d appreciate that,” Josh said. “Michael and I have some errands to run.”
Josh poured himself another cup of coffee, and the two of them went out the back door, got in Josh’s truck, and drove away.
Uncertain of what waited for me, I washed the breakfast dishes, then went out on the front porch. The sun was just coming up, and the orange and yellow streaks of color danced across the ripples of the lake. The stillness of the morning was striking. Simon and Garfunkel were right: there’s something about the sound of silence. It’s peaceful.
I looked back through the door and stared at the words that were carved in the mantel of the fireplace. “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you.” I realized that I’d let my life get so overscheduled that I hadn’t made time for God. I decided that was going to change, and peace settled over me like a warm blanket. I hadn’t felt this peaceful in a long, long time. There was no rush here, no schedules or deadlines, no sense of urgency. Perhaps that’s what’s the matter with most of us, I thought. We’re in such a hurry to get where we’re going that we don’t take the time to appreciate where we are.
Life can get so overscheduled that we don’t make time for God.
Suddenly I had a moment of clarity. It dawned on me that if we don’t know where we are, we can’t know where we’re going. It’s like when you go to the mall looking for a particular store and you come across one of those kiosks with a map. They list all the stores, and they have a big red arrow that says, “You are here.” Otherwise you wouldn’t know if you should go left or right or turn around. And life is like that too. A lot of people are on the wrong road, they’re headed in the wrong direction, but instead of turning around or stopping to ask for directions, they just try to run faster and faster. I know because I was right there with them. But somehow being here had helped me to slow down, to get my bearings, and to redirect my life toward the things that really matter.
The morning spilled into afternoon, and I was so engrossed in thought that I failed to notice a car quietly pull up the driveway—a silver Mercedes SLC with blue leather interior. The wire wheels and wide tires were aftermarket, but everything else was stock. It was a 4.5 liter, dual overhead cam, ram air V8, stealthy quiet at idle but a rumbler when you put your foot into it.
“Hey, pard!” a familiar voice called out.
“Al!” I exclaimed. “Al, it’s so good to see you!”
———
Al Roth had been my boss and then my business partner when I was in the automobile business. I started working for him at Precision Cars while I was in college, and he said I was a natural. In a matter of months I was his top salesman, and I loved it. Al had a bell on his office wall, and whenever anyone sold a car, they got to ring it. Soon I was ringing the bell more than anyone. If it was the first sale of the day, Al would say, “Every time the bell rings, an angel gets his wings,” and then he’d whip out his wallet and give you a twenty dollar bill as a bonus.
>
A true friend never holds you back.
Everybody knew that line from an old Christmas movie, but Al had adapted it. He never got tired of saying it, and I never got tired of hearing it, because we both knew it was the sound of money. Later that year, when I won Volvo’s national sales award, he was the one who talked me into taking a job with their district office in Chicago.
In his younger days, Al had followed a similar path, taking a job with Mercedes-Benz and working his way up to vice president of their American operation before buying the dealership.
“This is a real opportunity for you,” he said. “I’m going to miss you, but you can’t pass this up.” A true friend never holds you back, so Al sent me packing.
It was on his advice that I took that job, and it was on his advice that I left it to buy the local Volkswagen dealership with him. Who your friends are often determines what you do, and Al was a true friend. He was the major stockholder and the money, but he would say that I was the energy. In those days I ran full tilt, wide-open, all day long. It was a good partnership, better than most. He let me run things pretty much on my own, and being young and cocky, I made more than a few mistakes. But I made him a lot of money too, so he was always gracious and always coaching me.
When Al’s wife, Jane, learned she had cancer, we merged his Mercedes and Volvo dealership into our Volkswagen dealership so I could keep an eye on business and he could keep an eye on Jane and the kids. We kept the name Precision Cars, and for the next five years we were partners.
Then, a few months after Jane died, Al came to the office and said, “It’s just not any fun for me anymore, Sky. I always said when it stops being fun, I’ll stop doing this, and now’s as good a time as any. I want to sell out, and if you want to buy it, I’ll cosign your loan at the bank.”
For a while I tried to talk him out of it, but his mind was made up. That night I went home and announced to Carol that we were going to be rich. To my surprise, she was less enthusiastic than I thought she’d be.
“I thought eventually Al was going to come back to work and you wouldn’t have to work so many hours anymore,” Carol said.
Who your friends are often determines what you do.
Then Carol asked me the question that changed our lives forever. “Come here,” she said, walking down the hall to our daughter Kate’s room. “When’s the last time you held her in your arms during the day, other than on a Sunday?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s been a while, I guess.”
Kate was just over a year old, and Carol was pregnant with Kelly, and I don’t know if it was God or the hormones talking, but her question stopped me cold. “Don’t you think we ought to at least pray about it?” she asked.
“Sure,” I replied. “We can pray, but I can’t think of one good reason that God wouldn’t want us to do this. Besides, my brother Ben, your brother Gary, and my cousin Dave all work for us. What’s going to happen to them if we leave?”
“They’ll be okay,” Carol said. “Gary’s the sales manager and Ben’s the top salesman. Anyone who buys that place would be a fool to let them go. And Dave’s an A mechanic. He can get a job anywhere he wants. You opened the door for them, but they walked through it. Each of them has earned everything they’ve got.”
Inside, I knew she was right. Gary was the new car sales manager not because he was my brother-in-law but because he was good at it. He was detail oriented with a head for business, and he was great with people. The employees and the customers all liked him and respected him. If something came up and I wasn’t there, they’d ask Gary.
As for Ben, he’d found a home in the car business. He knew cars, he knew people, and he was smooth as whipped cream. If he wasn’t selling cars for me, he’d be selling cars somewhere.
Dave was young. I hired him right out of high school, but he was as good a wrench as we had. The kid had a future in the car business with me or without me, and that was simply a fact. Carol was right: they’d all be fine. I wasn’t thinking about them as much as the money and the perks.
“I don’t know if this is the way I want to live the rest of my life,” Carol said.
“I don’t know what to say to that, Carol,” I said. “I think the way we’re living is just fine.” At the time we were living in a house we designed and built in the woods on a hill overlooking the Thornapple River. Carol was driving a Porsche convertible. We were living the dream—at least, we were living my dream. It was a life of big cigars and motor cars, and I thought it was about perfect, but I said okay, if she wanted me to, I’d pray about it.
When you discover that everything you always wanted isn’t enough, it’s time to check your priorities.
The problem is that when you ask God what he really wants you to do with your life, he usually tells you, and a couple years later we were living in a small two-bedroom house in Grandville, eating government cheese, and I was going to grad school. Like my momma always said, “Be careful what you ask for—you’re liable to get it.” This wasn’t exactly what Carol had in mind that night when she quizzed me about Kate, but over the years, we’ve come to believe that it was what God had in mind. Still, there are days when memories of the car business still call to me, and seeing Al brought it all back.
Al was short—five foot six—freckled, bald, and leathery from years of smoking. When we started in business together, he was about the most honest man I knew, a real straight arrow. If he said it was so, trust me, it was so. You’d have thought he was a devout Christian, but he wasn’t. He had a bad taste in his mouth for Christians, particularly my tribe of Dutch Reformers. Before I came along, he had been in business for a while with a guy who kept a big King James Bible on his desk. The problem was that he was as crooked as a stick, and eventually Al decided that “you Dutchers” must be reading a different Bible than the one his momma read to him. “God’s okay with me,” he’d say, “but I don’t have much use for churches or preachers.” If there was a Christian conspiracy, he wasn’t going to be a part of it, so for a time he opted out of organized religion.
If you don’t feel very close to God, maybe you need to ask yourself, “Who moved?”
When Jane died, Al suddenly had a need for a preacher, but he didn’t know where to find one. I called Howard Schipper, and he came with words and compassion that looked to Al like Jesus, and after that, little by little Al started to reconnect with God. He even went to church once in a while. But he never had much use for the institutions of religion. When he heard that I had decided to become a psychologist and go into Christian counseling, he sent away to some diploma mill for a mail-order clergy card, and he’d tease me with it. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time going to school,” he’d say. “For two hundred dollars I can get you hooked up in ten days. Besides, most people don’t need counseling as much as they need a swift kick in the pants!”
He was just trying to get under my skin, but now that I’ve done this for twenty-five years, I’d say he was more right than wrong.
A couple years after Jane died, Al ended up back in the car business again. He put Ben in the building we owned on South Division, and whenever I’d see him, he’d always say, “There’ll be a spot for you here whenever you come back to your senses.” I didn’t, but I came close a few times.
He and Ben would go to the dealer auction a couple times a week and buy late-model European stuff. They liked VWs and Audis, but once in a while they’d pick up a Volvo or a Benz. They liked to buy cars that were a few years old with high mileage so they could keep the price point down. Often they were able to buy three-year-old cars with 75 or 80 thousand miles for about half the price of a new one. Then Ben would touch up the scratches and spoon out the minor dents, and after a good cleanup they were ready to go on the lot. Ben had an eye for color too. A lot of reds and blacks and silvers, but never telephone green or Baptist-preacher blue. Their clientele was mostly yuppies and housewives, and Ben knew what they liked.
Al got back in the
car business for two reasons. First he was bored, and second he knew Ben was struggling. He and the new owners of Precision didn’t get along. The Barton brothers came from a strict family. They were dress right, cover down kind of businessmen who always had an eye on the bottom line, and Ben was more laid back like Al.
Al thought the car business ought to be fun, and he was forever horsing around. When we were partners he watched over the service and parts department and pretty much left the front end to me, but he always liked hanging around with the salesmen. He had an easy way about him, and they all liked and respected him. He expected a lot from people, and when he got it the man was generous to a fault. He loved to reward performance and always had a contest of some sort going on.
One month he’d decide that if parts and service out-grossed sales, the managers would each win a week at his cottage. The next month he’d do the same thing with the mechanics, and he was forever putting little cash spiffs on cars that had been on the lot too long. One night after we’d had a particularly good month, he had four-by-eight sheets of plywood put on top of the hoists, covered them with white tablecloths and candelabras, and treated all fifty-two employees and their families to a steak fry. Three months later he bought a set of stainless steel cookware for everyone and sent a note home with it thanking the wives for letting their husbands put in a few extra hours. Like I said, he made it fun.
One day Al came in with one of those “take a number” dispensers like in a bakery and mounted it on the wall of the showroom. Then every once in a while he’d walk out of his office in the back, grab a number, and yell, “Number twenty-eight! Does anyone have number twenty-eight?” Customers didn’t know how to react to that. Some of them would give him a puzzled look, others tried to ignore him, but some would sheepishly go over and take a number.
Ben loved that sort of thing, but the Bartons were all business, and after a while they started to clash.
For example, Ben sold a green Volvo wagon on European delivery to a family named the Hansons. In those days people could save a couple thousand dollars off the list price if they ordered a car in the States and then flew over and picked it up at the factory in Europe. They could drive around Europe on vacation and then drop it back off at the factory, and they in turn would ship it to the dealer that sold it.
Gate (9781441240569) Page 16