Front Cover

Table of Contents

Foreward

Chapter Four

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Fourteen

Back Cover

Learning to be Good Enough

Starting over…again, I thought. It was moving day. Fortunately the bags had been packed for years waiting for me. At the time, I was excited to be going somewhere in the right direction. I was never excited to be in the large, expensive house that I bought after the divorce when I was got back on my feet. It was a roof to keep the rain off my lonely head. Wow, I really spent too much time and money pursuing the wrong things with a broken compass.

As an adult with big people responsibilities, I have learned how to look the staunch, upper class mentality right smack in the face with rebuke. In a time when my peers were building bigger houses and driving faster cars, flying by with reckless abandon, I was fine with slowing down. It amazed me to see how fast people rushed by. Getting rid of the big house was a refreshing free-spirited outlandish act for this obsessive compulsive, anally retentive bean counter.

Tumbling backwards, out-of-control anyway, I figured, “Why not? Why can’t my commitments be focused this summer on coaching youth baseball and hanging out at the cabin on the beach with the kids? Why can’t I be just another dad on the fieldtrip or take the afternoon off for a ballgame?” I wish I could explain in simple terms why I never asked myself these questions before. I now hear my own excuses through other’s voices.

Those excuses were my rationalizations. I presented every reason to not slow down and look at my life hovering over my shoulder. I cannot change the past, and I desire to make a difference in the future. It is a future that starts again every day. Each day represents a new opportunity to stop running and slow down.

I heard myself explain to a colleague that my ten-year-old son was to accompany me in the morning at a two-hour, Continuing Education Ethics seminar. We had baseball tickets for later in the day, which required one of my sons to miss a full day of school. (I would pick my other son up from school after the seminar was over.) I needed the education to satisfy the CPA annual licensing requirement. I figured “why not take my son?” I caught myself rationalizing to my colleague why it was okay, as if the other attendees would notice. Half of them were there simply for the credit hours and the majority of the other half were there to find ways to (in my opinion) “legally” conflict the interests of their clients.

Me? I needed the credit hours, my “ethics” accompanied me in the form of a ten year old, who understood ethics perfectly. “Dad, why don’t those old people smile?” he asked. In between paper airplanes and trips to the refreshment counter, I concluded that I couldn’t answer him. Even though I used to be one of them, I couldn’t recall what occupied my mind when I never smiled. I suspect all the hustle and bustle of financial commitments and parenthood would be believable excuses. Perhaps the pressures of work and rising to the top of the corporate ladder would convince any jury. Or maybe I simply wasn’t happy with my life, even though my life was full of things to be happy for.

I just wasn’t paying attention to the sources of happiness. I wondered if my fellow practitioners at the seminar, mostly all dressed to go back to work after the presentation, gave a thought to what that kid and guy in shorts were even doing there. What would be their reactions if they knew that after the seminar I was going to pick up my other son and take myself and my boys out to the ballpark?

As I shagged that fly ball over the left-field wall at Comerica Park with a twenty-five year old baseball glove, I knew the answer. Holding that ball I understood better why I’ve worked so hard all these years. I remembered telling friends when the boys were born about how much fun we were going to have going to ballgames and camping.

Sure, I sacrificed in order to take a day off and go to that ballgame. I could have made a few more dollars and the boys could have stayed in school. Many purist workers and academicians could have raised thousands of logical arguments that may have convinced me to do so, to no avail. Yet, as I relive that day, when pleasure prompted the motive behind the action, I now concede my behaviors could have been construed as irresponsible and spoiled. And so, I respect and empathize with those opinions because I, at one point, not so long ago, spewed similar refrains.

In fact, the draw to filling myself up with myself remains very strong. Overcome with desire to serve the Lord, I can tell when vanity begins to possess me. Did I expect to lead a perfect walk? To be flawless? Well…I tried and I stepped all over myself. The desire to avoid sin is like an invitation to sin itself. Daily I’m reminded of just how much a dolt I really am. It is comforting to know that in God’s eyes I am okay as is. I came into this world a sinner and I will exit the same. The sooner I check that ego and reduce my pride to the status of vermin filth, the better off I’ll be. It will be slow process, one inch at a time, crawling first, then walking. And, until I get there, I’ll recall a sunny day in May at the ballpark and . . . for a brief moment, I’ll be reminded that I really am good enough.