Author: C. L. Harmon

 

Unlike being a writer cramped up for hours in a room meshing ideas to create a novel with characters made up in their heads, a journalist gets to be a bit closer to reality. In this blog, I thought I might tell a story about one of the hundreds of interesting people I have met throughout my career.

It all began with a phone call at my office when I was working for a small newspaper. I answered my desk phone to a voice that informed me of a man on a bridge riding a mule while leading another one trailing behind him. The person said that the man might make a good story. I was intrigued.

I jumped in my car and headed for the location of where the caller said the man was located. I ran into the mule man approximately a mile from where the caller said he had been riding. My initial thought as I approached him was more of curiosity than interest. Why would anyone be riding a mule anyway in this modern age, I thought and then asked him. A few words of small talk and I became very intrigued as he began answering that question.

It turns out that the man was on a journey of faith after finding his world shattered. After his wife left him, he loses his job only days later. He comes home to find her and many of his belongings gone. It was a wake-up call that it was time to find out what his life was really all about. Looking around his aging home in need of repairs in south Texas, he felt an emptiness which prompted him to act. It was an idea I think many of us have at times in our lives…to just walk away from everything and start fresh. He acted on it though.

He gathered up what few items of value he still had left, including his work truck and sold them. He then contacted a man who had mules to sell and purchased one to ride and one to haul the few items he would need to survive on his journey. The only modern convenience he took was a cell phone in case of an emergency. He left his home in early spring with very little money and as much food for him and the mules that the mules could carry.

When I asked him how he planned to survive. He simply said, “God will provide all my needs”. Indeed God had! When I met him it was mid-summer he had already been traveling a few months. He had never gone hungry or grown ill, but the miracle is what he told me next.

Motorists everywhere along his journey were always stopping him and asking about his journey. To the modern world looking at him, he must have seemed to step out of the Twilight Zone from another period in history. Once he explained that it was a journey of faith, they were all eager to help. Many would give him money, though he never asked for it. If they were to ask what he needed, his reply was always a prayer.

The incredible outpouring of roadside assistance, if you will, overwhelmed him. People would open up their homes to him for a good meal and a hot shower. Others would see him on the road and then wait in town for him to pass through where they would give him supplies, food, and even clothes. Some would even charge his cell phone and then return it to him. He was not a beggar as he did not ask for anything. He simply allowed God to work in the hearts of others for his benefit. Everything that was done for him without him asking was another example as to why God should be glorified. He was learning day by day that God never forsakes His children. Even when our current world falls apart, He is there to help us build a new and better one for ourselves.

He was trekking it up to one of the states around the Great Lakes area (I forget which one) to visit his mother. He was hoping to make it by Thanksgiving to surprise her. I would find out later that he did make it but not before the holiday deadline. He called me after reaching his destination. He gave me his mother’s address and asked me to mail him a copy of the paper since he had to be moving on before it published. He relayed to me that he had a feeling to call me upon his arrival and let me know he had made it. I had wondered often over the following several months after meeting him if he had completed his journey. Tired and sore, he had made it. Only now he had a much brighter perspective on people and a great found respect for the Creator.

I chose to tell this story in my blog because I too feel that writing this blog is a journey of faith. Like the man on the mule, I am also searching for answers to questions that are elusive to me. And like him, I have found that there are people inspired by God’s grace to interact with what I write. Although I am still on this writing journey, the destination becomes ever so clear as I now know that I am guided by faith. Sometimes God speaks to us from a mountain and sometimes from atop an ass.

 

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Success in writing or anything else for that matter is a relative term. We all define success our own way. We set goals and criteria which we believe when met will make us successful.

As such, we give ourselves achievements to work toward. When those goals are not met in the time frame we want then the success is still a dangling hook in the water waiting for a nibble.

This is how I interpret the definition. Yours may be different.

It was recently pointed out to me that what I perceive in my head as to that interpretation may be very different than the perceptions others possess about the same subject. Oddly enough that never occurred to me. It intrigued me as I pondered on that revelation. The conversation in which this was made known to me was about the negativity of my previous blogs.

A friend asked me what it was that I needed to consider myself successful. It was at that point that I realized where he was going with his question.

In other words, why did I not consider myself successful at the times in my career when I had achieved great accomplishments. There has always been an ultimate goal for me I told him.  I then realized that it has been that one goal that has been elusive to me, not the dream. Some can be knocked over with a feather, others it takes a sledgehammer. I felt a headache coming on.

Having written this revelation now, I suppose the theme of this blog could be called ‘Know Thy Self’. I have written several times during the course of this blog series that writing for me has been a journey. It is that because I never know where it’s going to take me or what comes from it until I have moved on from one destination and onto another. It is only when I look back that I know where I have been.  That sounds like a line from an old country song, doesn’t it? But you catch my drift.

My point is simply this; there have been many successes in my career and many more downturns, but to forget about the mini successes is to lose the beautiful scenery along the road on the journey. My friend explained something else to me as well. He said that regardless of where I am on my journey to success, I am one step ahead of those who have not experienced what I have. That, he said, is how your blog helps others. He is right!

Nevertheless, this blog will not always be rainbows and unicorns because that is not how life works. However, it is not my intent to discourage others from pursuing writing. It is an opportunity to help those who are one step behind me. It should also be said that every disappointment in my career has made me a better steward of words and made me work harder to achieve the ultimate goal.

As I move into the next phase of this series, I will begin writing about some of the wonderful experiences that writing has provided me. This series is just another adventure in writing. I had never done it and thought it might be interesting to see where this path leads. And like any good story, this story of my journey will have a happy ending.  Thanks to my friend who reminded me that success has always been there, I just needed to allow myself to see it.

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Part 1

I have never found the expression, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways’ all that comforting. Basically, this is the person saying it telling me that they don’t know why the hell things are the way they are.

See…not that comforting. This is not to say that He doesn’t work that way. It’s just really not an answer when people are seeking them.

This, I think, has been my greatest struggle on my journey to writing as a career. Every single time in my adult life when something didn’t work out, I was always reassured by friends and family that it was because God had something better in mind.

Hearing that is a big pill to swallow after graduating from TCC plus having two years of journalism experience and cleaning up puke in the K-Mart bathroom as a stocker while in my mid-thirties.

This was the exact same thing I had heard in the past when things didn’t turn out the way I wanted or felt they should. This would become a pattern in my life. Let me give an example; Before the K-Mart days when I was in my early twenties, I worked with a group of guys in a manufacturing plant.

I liked the job and the people I worked with.

We worked very well together and had a great working rhythm. We were night shift and also had a competition for tonnage with the day shift. We consistently beat them and even set new plant records. This went on for quite some time.

Like most of those types of job situations, there are several different areas to work within the plant. Some of those jobs paid better than mine and well money is the name of the game.

I certainly didn’t go for the atmosphere.

When an opportunity arose for one of those jobs I applied.  I come into work a couple of weeks later and there is a new employee in that job.

I was young and nervous about finding out what happened, but I was also angry and I wanted an explanation. So when the big boss over our shift walked by my work area, I seized the moment and asked why I hadn’t gotten the job.

He blatantly replied, “I am not going to break up a team as good as this one!”

I replied by asking him why a new person was hired over me for a higher paying job when I had been there longer and proven myself to be a good and reliable employee.  He simply reiterated what he had already said and walked away.

Obviously, this did not sit well with me.

Being in the throes of depression and fighting that constant feeling that I should be somewhere else doing something else, only exacerbated the battle already raging inside me.

Little did I know that the small battle inside would become an all-out war in which I am still engaged.

Again, I was told that the Lord works in mysterious ways and that He had something better for me.

Perhaps cleaning puke off the floor at K-Mart for less money ten years later was better. But it sure as hell didn’t feel like it!

The fact that I had gone into debt for school and could not find a job that I could easily have gotten without that piece of paper showing that I had achieved a higher level of education, made me feel as though I had been robbed.

Now, this is where it gets deep, so hang on. As parents, we do our very best to teach our children to have hopes and dreams, but to achieve them, they must sacrifice and earn those dreams. We want them to aspire to whatever it is that makes them happy while also teaching them that faith, integrity, work ethic and determination are the key elements in reaching their goals. It’s at this point in the blog that we must ask, just how does the Lord work?

how does the Lord work?

How does He work when the world is such an unfair place? I felt as though I deserved that job at the plant as did my immediate boss and co-workers.

I had done the right things by working hard and paying my dues, but I didn’t get it.

Did the Lord block that from happening or did man?

And if it was man, then why didn’t God step up and make it happen anyway?

I believed at the time it was because God had something better…or maybe He didn’t.

Ten years later and after a very toxic working relationship with my father, I was working at K-Mart and making less money than I had since I was a teenager.

It would be another ten years before I began to realize that it wasn’t that He works in mysterious ways as much as it is that He and I have different goals.

The second part of this blog will publish in my next post.

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The first few posts of this blog series have contained a lot of negative such as depression, feeling of failure and the chasing of an elusive goal. But this is a journey as I mentioned in my last blog. This means there are good and bad things which occur as in any journey.

In this post, I would like to share something profound which obviously had a great impact on my career.

By my mid-twenties, the bulk of the bad depression had subsided and the depressed moods would come and go but it was no longer a constant darkness as it had been.  As a result, my writing habits had also changed. Instead of the bleak and dark poetry, there was something new that had magically evolved out of misery into something much lighter and optimistic. These would later become the foundation for my columns Mindset which has been published multiple times in several different formats over the last 16 years.

Since I had chosen faith as my drug of choice to help me through the dismal times, it allowed God to work inside of me and alter my perceptions from the inside out. What I mean by this is that I believe by using drugs, alcohol, gambling or some other sort of negative outlet for escape, we, in essence, tie God’s hands by choosing something else over Him to get us through the bad times. In turn, He can’t or won’t guide us to enlightenment until we choose him first.

This is not a Sunday school lesson but simply how I choose to see how faith works. Each person must find their own peace and understanding with God.  At any rate, early in my career, I was writing for a small newspaper in Tulsa. I wasn’t making much money, but it did allow me to gain exposure. This, as any writer knows, is critical in building a career.

The publisher allowed me to publish my Mindsets. It was a great opportunity and I was grateful for it. A few months after I began running them in the paper, I get a call from the lady who did the layout and design for the paper. She was my contact for submissions, though I had not met her. She relayed to me that she had just received a phone call from a lady who had asked to speak to me.

She told the caller that she was not comfortable giving out my number, but would take a message and pass it along to me. It did not take her long to realize that this was not the type of message that one could write on a sticky note. She later told me that she rested the pen on her desk only seconds after the caller began speaking.

The caller conveyed how she had recently lost her son in a tragic accident. Although she was a Christian woman, her faith had not comforted her that much. This poor woman had fallen into an abyss of despair and was desperately searching for any light to help her see a way out.

While out one day she noticed the free paper and something told her to take a copy even though she did not normally read it. She said that the Mindset I had published in it had made her cry because, for the first time since the loss of her son, she felt a sense of peace. The words I wrote, she said, somehow reassured her that God was with her and that He was with her son.

She felt compelled to tell me that.

Two things happened because of that Mindset. One was that a suffering woman was given a sense of peace because I had written something. The second was that I had been given a new sense of inspiration to keep writing. I don’t remember what I wrote or even what I was thinking about when I wrote that particular Mindset.  I do remember that phone call though. And I remember that I made someone’s life a little better that day.

 

There have been many great experiences over the years. Some were great ego boosters and some were invaluable learning opportunities. But when I think back on my career as a writer, that memory is the one incident that sticks out above all.  I earned no money from that Mindset nor did I receive any awards for it.  I simply helped a very sad person feel a little bit better because God wanted me to help me become a little bit wiser.

 

I have always believed that one person can change the world. What I hadn’t realized until that moment was that each person lives in their own world. Each time we speak or write words with hope, love or compassion, we change someone’s world. We give them a new mindset and with that they change someone else’s world.

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