“How could you do this?” I was angry and hurt. “I left you in charge of my equipment and my truck for one week and I come back to find my tools stolen and my truck in impound. Give a good reason not to kill you!” I was looking at Lenny trying to constrain myself, but the anger was growing as he stood unresponsive. Finally, I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, then pushed him away. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to hear you and I never want you to step one foot on one of my jobsites or even in the bar if I am drinking there, you are dead to me!” With that I turned away and got into my partner’s company truck, we sped off.
Lenny had been a ‘project’ of mine. I had hired him to do labor work, basic stuff. He would be more or less my go-fer. Do this, do that, always working with or around me. In this way I was hoping by osmosis that he would learn the rebar business. I had done this before with quite a few young guys and some made it, and some did not. In the year I had been working with Lenny he was proving to be one of the brighter guys I had ever apprenticed but there was one problem, he was also a professional liar and conman.
At that time in my life I saw little problem with these two traits, after all, it was my opinion that to get ahead it took a man who could lie and as far as being a conman was concerned, I was a bit of one myself. Lenny was different. Whereas I limited my lying and conning to business and people I did not care about, he was in the habit of pulling his act on me and others he worked with. He had no respect for the code most of us lived by, ‘honor among thieves’ and it caused a lot of problems. My partner had been on my case for almost as long as Lenny had worked for us to fire him and warned me that one day I was going to pay for trusting him like I did. I would shrug and assure him that Lenny was a good guy down deep and would never do anything to mess me over, at least, not on purpose.
In fact, as time went on I had found myself trusting him more and more. He was a fast learner and had mastered reading blueprints and shop drawings to a point that I could give him a section of the job to work on in the morning and he, with the help of a few other trusted hands would get it done. Now and again he would take short cuts I did not care for but mainly he did a good job. Looking back at it, I have to admit, I saw a lot of myself in him and because of this I was willing to overlook all the flaws, trusting he would succeed.
Then came the week I needed to be in Texas consulting with a company for a week. I was sure that I could trust Lenny with the list of work that needed to get done for the week. I gave him the keys to my truck filled with thousands of dollars of work tools and now they were all gone. All I could think was, my partner had been right, and I was a fool to trust anyone like Lenny.
This ever happen to you? A friend or even a family member, you work with them, trust them, believe all that you are doing will enable them to be trustworthy. Then it happens they break that trust leaving you feeling hurt and angry. Well, I have done it more than once and even if it did not cost me like this incident with Lenny, it always cost me something. But what was that something, really? In my case I know now it was my pride.
I have been able to see during my recovery from addiction that one of my biggest problems was I wanted to ‘fix’ others even as I found it impossible to fix myself. So, I married broken people with this idea in mind and each time it led to failure. It was the same in my professional life. I would hire ‘projects’ and I would think of them as such. A broken man trying to repair broken people. Most of the time it led to pain and anger. I just couldn’t look in the mirror and see I was the one who needed ‘fixing’ or who was the fixer I could turn to.
In the gospel of Luke Jesus comes to his home synagogue and shares a prophesy from the Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4: 18-19) When I was willing to believe, by the grace of God, I found in these verses who could and would ‘fix’ me and transform my life. And when that happened I found I no longer had a need to fix others, because I was able to see my own brokenness. That instead of that I could share how Jesus fixed me and pray others could turn to Him!
I never recovered my tools, Lenny traded them to druggies for drugs. They were lost forever. I also never was able to get my truck out of impound, because it was illegally licensed. Lenny never worked for me again. I heard he did work with other companies, and I know he eventually ended up doing time. I lost track of him when I left Utah and only recently have thought about him, as the Holy Spirit leads me to review my life, I pray for him. But I could not fix him, and I cannot fix me. Today I pray that I can surrender to the One who can and will. Let us all turn our ‘projects’ over to the Lord.
Blessings John,
10/3/18
