Another Day in the Country
Living your principles
© Another Day in the Country
I was thinking this morning about my friend Martin, who was a very successful and wealthy businessman.
I got acquainted with him because he was looking for someone to do some writing and research for him, and I was, at that time, a graduate student in need of a part-time job.
We agreed to meet at the Nut Tree, a very widely known restaurant in the Sacramento Valley, because it was halfway between his house and mine.
We were strangers, interrogating each other to see whether we would be able to work together on a sensitive subject.
He was in his 60s, going in for what at the time was risky, experimental heart surgery.
Martin was concerned that he wouldn’t live through the procedure, so he was getting his affairs in order.
He wanted me to write a book chronicling his family history and recording advice for his 11 children — some of whom he was estranged from because he’d made their mothers mad.
So, here I am, a newly divorced minister’s wife, needing a job but extremely wary of this man’s integrity since he obviously had children with several women.
In my circle of experience, one was taught to steer clear of people with his credentials, but there was something that drew me to this project. Partly, I needed a job. I also was studying to become a family counselor. This family sounded fascinating, and I’m curious about what makes people tick.
I said, “Yes, on one condition: You tell me the truth, and I’ll write as truthfully and be as kind as I can.”
I discovered there’d been quite a bit of anger, hostility, secretiveness, and lying in his family circle for generations. Now, this man said, he was wanting to set the record straight.
The goal was to have all the interviewing of Martin completed before he went under the surgeon’s knife.
His parents were dead, but he had seven brothers and sisters he wanted me to interview as well as his 11 children and their mothers, if possible.
We had accomplished most of his side of the story when he informed me his surgery had been scheduled, and he wanted to dictate a letter to each of his children — a letter that would be sent to them if he died.
He was doing a commendable job of covering his bases, I thought. I admired his tenacity.
No one in his family knew he had a serious heart problem. No one had any inkling he was going to have this procedure done. Nor did they know when it finally happened. In that way, I guess, the secrecy continued, but he justified it — as we often do.
“Most of them would just worry,” he rationalized, “and there’s nothing they can do. So actually, I’m sparing them. It’s a loving thing. I’ll just tell them when it’s all over.”
As far as his family members knew, he was just out of the office for a couple of weeks, which was not uncommon since he traveled all over the world.
He was, in his era, an “influencer,” using his wealth to encourage various political candidates — including presidents.
In the hours and hours I spent with him, listening to stories about his life —a classic rags-to-riches tale — he divulged to me that one of the prerequisites, especially if he was going to put a person he hired into a place of trust, was that he wanted to know whether the person was a Christian.
Even though he wasn’t a religious man himself, he thought that a Christian would have a higher standard of ethics and would be more trustworthy than the average person with no religious ideology.
I chuckled when he told me this because I’d lived within the circle of Christianity all of my life up to that point, and I’d come to know some rather shady characters, including preachers, who were decidedly untrustworthy.
This left me a little more cynical about the struggle between profession and practice among believers.
“That’s a pretty high compliment,” I told him.
“In my experience — though a couple of times I’ve been disappointed — I found that in the majority of cases the odds were in my favor,” he smiled.
I’ve always hoped that Martin’s claim was true, but I’ve seriously begun to wonder in the last few years as the “Christian community” has become more and more involved in politics.
I was taught that believers are admonished to spend their time in the closet praying in private rather than voicing their favorite subjects in public while clamoring for political power.
Religious folks may believe that they are right and that their heart is in the right place as they dabble with our freedoms, but last I knew, Christianity’s principals were to be lived, not litigated, on another day in our country.