First, it was the news on Saturday morning that our former pastor, Tom Kyle had passed away. We said goodbye to him on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning, I had gotten an email from my sister Laurie, saying that her daughter Missy's boyfriend, Scot had died the day before. He had some kind of cancer, and was doing better lately. In fact they'd just had a benefit for him last Saturday. His funeral is today.
Thursday morning, my mother called to inform me that my cousin, Patrick had also passed away. Patrick was 51 years old. He had been diagnosed with a melanoma skin cancer on his face last Fall. They had fought it with every cancer treatment there is, but it was apparently a very aggressive cancer, and nothing was working. His wake is tomorrow, with a funeral planned for Monday.
To top it all off, Ray came home yesterday (Friday), and said that he was unemployed. Technically, he's self-employed, he owns his own construction company. However, for the past few years, he has almost exclusively worked for one guy. The problem is, this guy has consistently tried to get out of paying Ray when he should, or what he is worth. The guy ALWAYS tries to discount everything, or says "I'll pay you next week", etc. Or he'll look at a bill and say, "We need to talk about this". I wonder if he says that to the phone company or the electric company when he gets bills from them.
Ray has put up with all of this nonsense for the past few years, mostly because he hasn't had to go out and find other jobs to do. This one man owns all kinds of property, mostly rental units, that always need maintenance, and sometimes major remodeling. At the moment, he has quite a few "irons in the fire", and had Ray constantly jumping from one to another. He was even doing some remodeling at the man's own house, because his wife didn't trust anyone but Ray to do it.
Ray is VERY knowledgeable about all aspects of the construction business and is VERY good at what he does, and can do pretty much ANYTHING. In spite of that, every time he bid on anything, this man would tell him that he could get someone else to do it much cheaper. Yeah, maybe. But whenever he's actually tried that, he'd end up paying Ray to come in and RE-do it the right way. Anyway, Ray finally got fed up with all of this and walked away yesterday.
Good luck, Sohan. Yes, you can probably find other men to do the work that my husband was doing, you'll just have to find about eight of them to fill the shoes of the one you let walk away, just because you didn't think he was worth more than $10 an hour to you.
There. I feel better now. I know that the Lord will provide for us through this difficult time, as he has in the past. There are just so many people out of work right now, including some of our best friends, that it seems difficult to me to "Fully Rely On God"...but I must. Please keep us in your prayers.
