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Finance
for Single Mothers
The
redemption of a control freak
by Nancy Haines Challenger from Spirituality.com
I was surfing yesterday and found this fantastic
freebie online. It's for a completely free
subscription to Parents magazine. That's pretty
cool! I sign up for mine.
Get a free subscription to Parents Magazine!
I used to accept the title control
freak as a compliment. Until I got into deep trouble.
I'm a stockbroker in Los Angeles. Control worked fine when the market kept
going up. I was confident, making lots of money, so busy being busy --
controlling my business, controlling my employees, unwittingly trying to
control my husband. My life was so together that I tried to fix everyone
else's, nosing into friends' and family members' lives, offering
unsolicited advice, stepping on toes. I didn't realize what I was doing.
Then the market crashed. I was still very busy, but I made little to no
money. The phone was ringing off the hook but there were very few
compensated transactions. I had to borrow money to cover heavy-duty
overhead. My income barely covered my secretary's salary. And, I had just
hired a very expensive employee who had relocated from another city.
The night was clear & calm.
I kept waking up in the middle of the night in terror. Still trying to
control things, I'd pray briefly, but then switch to going over this plan
or that plan in my mind. Any peace I'd felt from the prayer would fade.
One night, my husband and I took off for a brief trip in a small private
plane. My husband pilots the plane and because Los Angeles airspace is
full of traffic, one of my jobs while we're flying is to watch for other
planes. The night was clear and calm. It was about 9 in the evening and we
were headed due west.
As we climbed to altitude, I saw what looked like a 747 jet at our 12
o'clock, directly in front of us. The 747's nose light seemed to get
bigger and bigger and closer and closer.
"Do you see the traffic at 12 o'clock?" I asked my husband.
He said, "Tally ho," which generally means "yes," but
he did not change our course.
"Oh, I
don't know -- a few hundred million years?"
After a few moments, I ever so gently challenged his
judgment and asked, "How long before we intersect?"
With his official pilot voice and a twinkle in his eye, he said, "Oh,
I don't know -- a few hundred million years?"
It was a planet, shining from very far away -- and not a 747.
When we stopped laughing, I thought about what had happened, how I had
been in a fit of panic and my husband had been so calm. He never felt fear
or danger because he knew the difference between a 747 and a planet. I
wanted to change the overall panic in my life to that same trusting calm.
I began praying for an answer I could understand.
Later, in a humbling prayerful moment, I saw that my problems stemmed from
thinking I had to do everything myself -- that I was on my own in life,
having to earn success and happiness. But I believe that our heavenly
Father never leaves us alone, and He keeps us always in His care. Even
when it looks like we are separated from good, we are not. We just need to
stop thinking and acting as if we are alone.
I prayed for God to show me what to do
now.
This new idea woke me up. I could see that it was
definitely time for me to yield up my will to control everything and start
knowing and trusting the might and wisdom of God.
Instead of the usual planning and scheming, I began to apply prayer more
diligently to the problems I was facing, including the lack of finances
for my business.
I prayed to know what to do about the employee I could not afford. It
turned out that unbeknownst to me, the employee was doing work for his own
business during company time. I had been blinded by talk of what he was
planning to do for me and not watching his actual day-to-day
contributions. When I got quiet enough to listen for God's direction, what
I needed to know about this employee rapidly came to the surface.
"Trust the details to me."
Rather than storm over to him, I prayed for God to show me
what to do now. The answer came clearly and swiftly, as if a professional
adviser sat across the table from me. "Adjust his compensation to be
more directly linked to his performance and production. And, trust the
details to me."
Two days after I laid out the new compensation plan to this employee, he
quit. A month later, I hired a part-time college student for the summer
who did the job at a fraction of the cost while gaining valuable
experience.
Since then, my business and personal finances have stabilized
considerably. I've become better at listening to, but not meddling with,
family and friends. I don't force events as much.
With a life under divine control, it's becoming more and more obvious that
prayer-based solutions are infinitely better than any I could have thought
of myself.
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