JESUS LOVES YOU!

                                              River Organization: The Alpha

                                              Chapter I

                                              The Beginning of a Personal Crisis: Part I

I am going to fast forward here in my journal in order to express a solution for a change. My readers will temporarily miss much of the nuts & bolts descriptions of the events which brought me to the conclusion of the need for the River Organization; however I’ll revert back to those experiences in future postings.

I’ll pause here (or rewind) only long enough to give my readers a picture or glimpse of what I was doing before and during the downward spiral of my own financial annihilation. It will take at least a couple of entries in order to complete this. It is something I had desired to have remained private, yet with time to contemplate I felt that if my readers did not know where I was coming from, then they could not know where I was going.

Most financial advisors recommend that for personal financial security, a person has from three to six months worth of salary in liquid assets in order to offset a personal crisis such as a loss of employment. I had over three times that amount. If the events which follows had not occurred I would have been able to sustain myself, unemployed, for up to three years without any outside income before my personal finances were totally evaporated.

I did not simply just jump off the hobo train and join the Bums “R” Us club of being homeless.

I was working for a large Nevada automobile dealership; I’ll call “A Company”, in which I was a manager supervising in five different departments at the same time. The positions I held in those departments were lease manager, assistant used-car manager, recon manager (Reconditioning), New-car operations manager, and porter supervisor. I also assisted security personnel when problems needed addressing when security supervisors were not available; although security was not part of my job description within the five departments I actively supervised simultaneously.

My job duties required me to provide my attention over a massive new & used car lot consisting of several acres in size. I would decide which trade-in vehicles would be wholesaled or reconditioned for retail.  I would work with numerous vendors and decide which reconditioning repairs would be made on each retail unit. I would write Repair Orders (RO) and approve or reject mechanical repairs recommended by technicians. There were many other duties I performed simultaneously; these are a just a brief few. However, from A-Z, I touched each and every vehicle, new & used which came onto the lot for resale and prepared its destination in the dealership. The entire dealership inventory, consisting of thousands of vehicles, was my responsibility and under my supervision.

The privately-owned family of dealerships was a multi-line auto group. To give an indication of the volume of business, the GMC-Pontiac-Buick store alone shattered sales records across the country. The Pontiac store was the number one selling Trans Am dealership in the world seven years in a row. At the time, three of the six Nevada (West Region) General Motors World-Class Technicians worked for the dealership. One was one of my four used-car technicians, the other two worked as service technicians in our service department. Another was based in Northern Nevada and the remaining two were instructors who taught the courses at local universities and colleges. World-Class Technician status is only achieved after completing 8 of 9 Master Technicians Certifications along with other requirements. It is the elite of the elite. Today only 10 such World-Class Technicians exist in the state of Nevada. The achievement of a single Master Technician Certification is of itself a Mark of Excellence in achievements. I illustrate this simply to show, as a team, we were second to none and together we worked like a machine. If there was a problem needing solving, our team could solve it, bar none.

In the three years preceding unemployment and eventually homelessness I had paid approximately $15,000 per year in taxes.

It was common for me to work an eighty, ninety or more hour work week. A 16-hour or more work day was typical for me. Yet I had a fringe benefit uncommon for managers in the car business. I had Saturdays and Sundays off. Occasionally I would work on my days off when I needed to catch up on my workload. Many times I had stayed all night on Friday nights, with the business closed, in order to clean off the work on my desk and finish it so that on Monday mornings I could get a fresh start with nothing buried or forgotten in some messy pile of papers. That meant I had often worked twenty-four hours straight, going into my weekend.

On weekends, after resting, I would continue my religious studies and I would often write documents into my computer files of my intentions of helping the poor once I retired and how I was going to help them.  I have volumes of those ideas stored. Those volumes have grown since then, of course. At that time I had planned on retiring in three to four years. When I say “retire” I mean to withdraw from the over forty-hour work week and do something less stressful and more meaningful for the needy. My plans were to serve God and do the things He tells us in the Bible to do. During this time I wasn’t thinking about the homeless per say, or at least exclusively. Although helping the homeless was part of my future agenda, my focus was on hunger. World hunger particularly, was on my mind. Hunger is an evil thing. Since I was a child, I could never understand why a single person should ever experience hunger, here in the United States or anywhere in the world. There is simply no excuse for hunger.

I had no clue that I myself would ever become homeless. I can only attribute the things I wrote down in my files, without having a real inside knowledge of the actual situation occurring in the lives and on the streets of the needy, to the Holy Spirit. The ideas came from Him through me. I listened and I responded. That is the only way I can explain it.

A death in my family in New York, in which I was the executor of the estate, interrupted my career as a manager in the automobile business.  

I flew to New York, after receiving the call while I was at work, that the veteran U.S. Army combat soldier who had served with the First Team, Black Horse Unit, was in grave condition in the ICU. Southwest Airlines had done an extraordinary job and worked diligently in order to secure me an emergency flight out of Las Vegas as quickly as possible. It was Christmas season, so that compounded the situation for finding an available seat. I was hopeful I could make it to New York in time to be at his bedside before the Lord took him. But the call came in just before I boarded the plane that he had passed. There were a number of questions the family members needed to know, until I arrived in New York, in handling the arrangements of the war veteran, and I directed them with the answers they needed before boarding the plane. Moments later, the plane lifted off from McCarran International Airport on a flight path toward New York. 

Thank You For Joining Me and God Bless You.

And Always Remember, JESUS LOVES YOU!

River

Las Vegas, Nevada

Sunday, 11 May 2008

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