An Ordinary Life, An Extraordinary Life

The structure of Chris’s company was contractor work. Just like the owner/operators at Expedited, we owned our own business but contracted exclusively to Precision. Chris gave a generous percentage but it was fully commission work. So, despite this being a prospective way to do better financially, there was no guarantee. I worked out a goal based on my budget and went about seeing if I could meet that obligation. Slowly, steadily, as I built up my week, I found that I could meet and even exceed the objective. That first year I ended up making two and a half times what I had been making at Expedited. But it wasn’t just a financial burden lifted. It could be long days and we had occasional after hours calls. But, for the most part, unlike Expedited where it seemed like the job was always with me, we could leave the job at work. The dark, heavy burden had been lifted and my soul felt alive again. Not too long after I started at Precision, another significant milestone happened in my life ...

Sufficient time had passed for me to declare bankruptcy without affecting my business partner so I went ahead and got that done. It was a relief for me to finally get that monkey off my back. At work, we had been having some issues with the owner of the office we were renting, not least the air conditioning situation. After our yearly lease was up, we moved to a much nicer office, five minutes away from where we were living. Now, not only could I take a lunch because we had enough staff, I could actually get away from the office and go home. The huge weight we had been under for the past year was finally easing up.  Not that things were perfect. There were still the multiple foibles of the trucking industry, which still created pressure for George. Although he had mellowed significantly, he could still lash out at times. It wasn’t directed at me anymore so I found myself trying to act as the peacemaker again. Because of what we had been through together, I had learned somewhat how ...

We found out from the property manager that the people who owned the house we moved into had moved to Japan with their two daughters with the military but had since separated. We noticed a house across the street that appeared to be empty with one of the gutters hanging down. But one day some people moved in. We didn’t really see them much at first. It was almost like they were trying to avoid us. We thought there was a mother and two daughters. I wanted to meet them and welcome them to the neighborhood and see if there was any way I could reach out to them. One day I was coming home from a bike ride and their garage door was open and the girls were outside playing. I went over to say hello. The mother was very friendly and we had a good conversation but a couple of times in the conversation she said,          “Let me know if there is anything we can do for you.”  I thought that was strange. That’s what I wanted to tell her. She was the new one here. Why w...

Back at work, we had a problem. Well, we had lots of problems - that’s trucking. But this problem threatened to derail us. The company was growing by leaps and bounds but we couldn’t find solid, reliable people to hire. We began to ponder an interesting move. Back in Chesapeake, we knew plenty of people at church whom we knew would be reliable and available but they couldn’t move to Charlotte. So we began to think about moving the company to Chesapeake. I didn’t say anything to my family at first. I didn’t want to get their hopes up until it was a sure thing. When it was and I did, as you can imagine, they were ecstatic. So a year after our new church friends helped move us in, they helped move us out. Before we moved, we had visited Chesapeake a couple of times to find a place to live but nothing had come of it. We had to put our stuff in storage to do the two moves thing. Our friends, the Hughes’s graciously let us stay with them until we found something. Rents were higher in Chesape...

 Although my family didn’t want to be in Charlotte, it offered a lot of great things to do that we really enjoyed together as a family. Our neighborhood community center was fantastic with the pool, gym and sports complex. The neighborhood was also still being built so there were some good spots to explore. The Charlotte area is also more hilly than the flat part of Virginia we had come from. That means they have flowing water in the creeks. One of my boyhood enjoyments was trying to build dams. So I took the opportunity to take my son, Thomas on what I called dam dates. We enjoyed the Charlotte’s area’s greenways, which are paved trails beside rivers where one can ride bikes or walk. They also have large parks to explore and a small mountain called Crowder’s Mountain nearby we hiked a few times. I have always enjoyed riding horses, which also interested my daughter, Courtney. We found a couple of opportunities. The only problem is that they were just trail rides where you had to s...

About this time, our pastor in North Carolina, Brent Detweiler began a series of messages at church on the subject of anger. We had heard this series before at our church in Virginia. The gist was that anger is not a result of circumstances in your life, it’s a response to them. Circumstances are just like the props in a play. They happen to you and whatever is inside comes out. The message came with an illustration of a cup with water. As the preacher bumped the cup, the water spilled out. But you decide what is in the cup by your attitude and decisions. Likewise, you decide what is in your heart. You either have anger in your heart or love and peace. Whatever is in there will be bumped out by the circumstances of life. Also, if we truly believe that God in sovereign, if He really controls everything, then He has allowed all of the circumstances in our lives for a purpose. If we are angry at them, then we are really angry at God Himself. The day Brent began the series, my family was b...

The group of churches that our church was a part of - People of Destiny - had changed their name to Sovereign Grace Ministries. There was a large Sovereign Grace Ministries church in Charlotte that had been started by one of the main leaders some years before. His name was Brent Detweiler. We had come to know and love Brent for his teaching over the years. Now he had started a new church-plant just north of Charlotte. George and his family and some other friends we had known previously were going there. So that’s where we decided to go. We enjoyed the more intimate, close-knit atmosphere that a church-plant offered.  We found a house to rent in the same neighborhood where George lived, also north of Charlotte. We were just going to rent for at least a year until we saw how things went. The house was in a very nice new community with a big pool, clubhouse and sports area. Our new church members helped move us in. Despite my family’s anguish at leaving Chesapeake, everything was look...

Chapter Nineteen – An Anguishing Solution One day I was at one of our car lots with one of the paint techs whom I’ll call George. I was bewailing my lack of work. I made a statement that achieved legendary ironic repetition some months later when we were both in a completely different set of circumstances. I said,          “I just want to work.” That was the day George began to tell me about a previous job he had had as a dispatcher in the trucking industry. I had some misgivings, as the job description didn’t really seem to suit my personality. It sounded like a fast-paced, high stress, quick puzzle-solving skills environment. Those weren’t my forte but I was so desperate for something to make more money, it intrigued me. I asked George to make inquiries for me. In a bizarre turn of events, a short time later, George was asked to go help run a trucking company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Expedited Direct. The owner of the company was a guy who had start...

Another distraction from my problems was volleyball at church. They run an annual league and I had signed up for that year. It was another activity that helped keep my useless worry at bay (at least temporarily). But it was also there that some very real help arrived. I ran into the guy from my accountability group who had warned me against getting into real estate in the first place. His wife was playing volleyball and he had come to watch. He had heard about my misfortunes so I was chagrined to run into him. I said,    “So I guess you owe me an I told you so.” This guy works in a very well-paying profession but he is one of the most financially disciplined, generous people I know - and I’m sure I only know an inkling of it. What he said next revealed his magnanimity of spirit and soul. “Absolutely not, Stephen. We just want help you guys in any way that we can.” I had been able to sell a few of the lots out in the country but the bulk of the properties were going to end up i...

Back in the country, the house that we were trying to jack up in the middle wasn’t cooperating. The ground was too soft and they couldn’t get a solid place to hold it. I guess that’s why it was sagging in the first place. And that issue started a trickle of things that snowballed into an avalanche of problems that ended with everything falling apart. Part of the reason I had felt the confidence to get into real estate was because I had been doing really well in my dent job. A large, nationwide used car dealership had built a branch in our town and asked us to be their dent vendor until they could train their own guys. I didn’t want to do it all five days a week because it was putting all my eggs in one basket and if the basket broke…. I knew they were eventually going to train their own dent techs and that would leave me in the lurch. But the other Integrity guy didn’t want to do it at all. So I agreed to be the guy because it was lucrative.  Well the company had started to train t...

As my holdings grew, I began to ask myself why I was doing all this. It was exciting but time-consuming added to my regular job. Laura was still home schooling but as the kids were growing older, she was getting to subjects that were getting beyond her. I was already helping with the more advanced math but I felt it would be nice to be able to help more. I decided that my goal would be to get to a point to be able to quit my dent job for the real estate so I could stay home to help with the home schooling. I met another investor/property manager in North Carolina who helped me buy another couple of cheaper places that he managed for me. I did these without my partner, which meant I had to come up with the cash. Laura had really good credit and that got her really good deals from credit card companies.  There were a lot of 0% introductory offers so I decided to start working with that money. As they were only in her name, the debt wouldn’t count against me either. This arrangement f...

One day I started talking about real estate to one of the salesmen at one of the dealerships I went to in North Carolina. The dealership was not too far from Lake Gaston. Tommy lived near the lake and had some experience working with real estate. We started talking about opportunities that I might be able to take advantage of. He found out about a woman in a single-wide trailer who was having financial trouble and was going to lose it to the bank. He asked if I wanted to make an offer to keep it in good standing, pay it off when the bank approved the sale, then sell it at a profit. I made about $15,000 on that deal. Next up, he found out about a small modular home a dealership was trying to get off their lot for a advantageous price. Tommy found a lot near the lake I could buy where we could install the modular and sell. While that was happening, he found some other lots at Lake Gaston to buy at good values. I thought it would be good to buy those now before their values rose so that i...

The housing market continued to scorch. It was rare for a house to sit for sale for very long. One day I noticed that there was one in our neighborhood that seemed to be taking a while. I decided to check it out. As there are a lot of military in our area, they have to move every few years and can get under a time crunch to sell their houses. This was one such case. For reasons I never figured out, no one had made them an offer. So I did. It certainly wasn’t top price but if time was ticking, I could get them out from under it and with the way prices had risen they would certainly still make a profit. They accepted. I didn’t use a buyer’s agent. I just had my lawyer write up the contract and the seller’s agent did the rest. My partner on the other house also went in 50/50 with me again. With the price being so high, we wouldn’t have made any profit by flipping it so it would be another rental. We wanted to hold on to it anyway to make money from the rising prices. After some basic spru...

Chapter Eighteen –Rise and Fall I went out to that fire and proceeded to engage in what became the fateful conversation with a house builder from our church. As we discussed the housing market, he encouraged me to get involved in real estate. I already had a little experience as we were renting out the town home. Now I started looking around at the wider market. I also began devouring any real estate books I could get my hands on. I talked to my accountability group about the idea. Most of them were encouraging or neutral but there was one guy who warned me against it. He had watched his father fail at real estate investing and it had soured him on the whole arena. I listened to his advice and promptly…blew it off! Laura also had misgivings. She’s not really a risk-taker so it made her nervous. But because of that conversation by the fire, I believed God had sent me in this direction and because of that, I believed I was going to succeed. There were two options – flipping or holding. T...

That first vacation in the Outer Banks began a seven-year tradition. As the kids got bigger, we moved on to a six-bedroom house in the same neighborhood so the girls could split up into two rooms. I found different adventures to break up the week each year like jet-skiing and go-carting or a trip down to the southern-most island. We also started a mini-golf night tradition for the dads and kids. The ladies were only too happy to have a night to themselves. As the kids got too big for my sand pools, I started to take them out boogie boarding, until we eventually held boogie-boarding competitions with me as the judge. I tried to not show favoritism but my kids usually won. In the later years, everyone started getting into surfing. We would play various games on the beach and made teams to compete in relay races. One year, inspired by the Summer Olympics, we set up all the boogie and skim boards to create hurdles. Back at the house, we began to teach the older girls how to play strategy g...

We finally moved into our new house and just as we were getting settled in, we went on what was to become a vacation tradition. Just south of where we live, there is a string of barrier islands in North Carolina called the Outer Banks, which is a big vacation spot. For years we had been talking about getting together with some other families to rent a big house all together for a week. Our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes told us and our other good friends, the Waskos that, despite the fact that none of us had a whole lot of money, we should finally just go for it. We all agreed and I went to work. While Eric and Brian Wasko are the more visionary types, I am good at the details. I researched finding a house to rent at a price we could all manage. Both the Hughes’s and Waskos have four children so there were 17 of us all together, with 8 girls and 3 boys. The houses have a maximum occupancy so I had to find something with the right configuration of rooms and beds to handle all of us. I f...

At the time we found the house, Suzie’s daughter, Jennifer and her family were living next door to us and Jennifer’s sister, Libby was also very much a part of my family’s life, babysitting and hanging out with them. Libby had married a guy from our church named Mike, who was also a dent tech with Integrity. Mike was pretty good at sales and had opened up a great account about four hours away, which he made into an overnight. Their first anniversary fell on his overnight so he decided to take Libby with him that week to stay with him at the hotel. She was also pregnant. We found the house on a Thursday and they were going to go out of town Sunday evening. That Sunday at church, our daughter, Courtney really wanted to tell Libby about the house. Laura was trying to get home so she was of a mind to just have Courtney wait until the next time she saw Libby. She relented and let her go ahead and run across the church lobby to tell her. She’s so glad she did. That night we were woken in the...

The housing market was really heating up. I still loved our nice little manageable townhome but other people thought that we should buy a house. I didn’t want to get into anything that would give us more financial strain but Laura was getting claustrophobic. A lot of people in our church home schooled their children. At first Laura was dead set against it but she had a change of heart before Alexis got to school age. Now that the children were getting bigger, the townhouse was feeling smaller and smaller as she spent her days home schooling and she was ready to move on. There was a neighborhood nearby that Laura really liked. It was surrounded by the golf course from the local country club, so a number of the houses backed up to the fairways. As the housing market was going crazy with houses going into bidding wars, I wanted to try to find someone who wanted to sell by owner before they signed up with a real estate agent. I decided to go door to door to every house in the neighborhood ...

All of a sudden, Go Tell Mama got accepted to the Hoboken Film Festival in New Jersey right across the river from Manhattan. This was the biggest festival that it had gotten into so far. I started thinking that maybe, after all that had happened, the opportunity had finally arrived. I decided to go to the festival to see what might come of it.  The films were shown one after the other throughout the festival in several local theaters. Mine showed in the afternoon so it wasn’t well attended. I went to some free seminars for those of us whose films were being shown and we also got passes to see all the other films and to the final awards dinner. I also took the opportunity to drive by the World Trade Center Twin Tower remains since I was so close. The final banquet was held in an amazing location on the water, at night, across from the lights of Manhattan. I was very personable and animated with the others at my table. But, once again, I didn’t know how to schmooze the big dogs in th...

One day, soon after, someone got in the cab and said something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center. There is a building in Norfolk called the World Trade Center so I thought maybe a small, private plane had lost control and crashed into it. I asked if it was our local building or the one in New York City. The person wasn’t sure. I had to pick up my next fare at a doctor’s office so I went in to get them and there on the TV was the World Trade Center in New York. At that point they didn’t know it was terrorists so it just looked like a tragic accident, which was stunning enough. I picked up my passenger and we turned on the radio to listen to the live coverage. When the second building got hit, everyone started to realize that this was no accident. It was a slow period of the day so fares were sporadic. I continued to listen to the news and heard when the first building fell. My mind was reeling. Then the second one fell. If I picked up someone who hadn’t heard yet, I told ...