Well-Intentioned Misleading

In case you didn’t figure it out from yesterday’s entry, it was a
wonderful service yesterday. I guess it’s really not so much the
service as it is the Savior. In the old church, the services really
WERE wonderful. They were explosive displays of joy and worship that
would move a rock to tears! But, in a way, that IS a problem. The
service was more important than He whom we served in some ways. The
service was almost like a drug in itself… it made us high.

In
the Lutheran church the emotionality of the service will certainly not
make one high but, for me, when I think about God and all He’s done for
me and who He is, and when I think about Jesus and how He walked the
earth – well, THAT makes me high. And so that’s how the service was
wonderful… it was wonderful because of the one whom we worship.

After
the service my daughters and granddaughter came back to the house for a
couple of hours which was nice, but as we sat and clowned around
(looking at my husband’s Amsterdam pictures) my son progressively got
sicker and sicker until he ended up barfing his brains out in the
bathroom. Poor kid spent his Easter afternoon/evening sicker than a dog
(as they say). His blood sugar got dangerously low for awhile but
finally he was able to keep some sugar 7-Up down plus I had him lower
his insulin pump ratio by 50%. Fortunately we didn’t have to take him
to the emergency room which is often the case when he has had stomach
issues in the past.

I think his problem may have been food
poisoning. He had eaten a bunch of deviled eggs I bought at the local
Jewel (food store) on Saturday night. I had eaten two of those but they
had hit my stomach sort of hard. Since I have a prima dona tummy, I
figured it was just me. Being a teenage boy, he put away about 10 of
those deviled eggs. Food poisoning takes about 12 hours to develop so
the timing would have been about right. Anyway, I stayed up with him
most of the night as he suffered through his barfing and then the runs…
but I’m sure you don’t really want to hear about all this. Suffice it
to say he was miserable.

By morning, however, he seemed to feel
much better. He was able to keep water down, then pop and by later in
the day, saltines and matzos. I went to work although I was a little
drained. It was good I did because the other assistant was super-duper
late (I called in to be about an hour late but she was about three
hours late having to drive some family to the airport unexpectedly) and
there was a fair amount of stuff to be done.

I had some minor
trauma at work today too. My boss had an amendment and a trust that our
clients had signed in a different office. Apparently the secretary
hadn’t been there so he just brought the documents back to us and left
a note on them to witness them and mail them. I got really stressed out
about that because I felt like I couldn’t sign the witness statements
since I didn’t really witness these people signing the documents. To be
honest, I felt certain that the actual people DID sign the documents,
that wasn’t the issue, I just didn’t want to lie and say that I saw
them do it. Also, if someone ever did contest these documents and I got
called up to verify that I witnessed it, I’d have to say I didn’t and
that I’d lied about it.

I got very stressed out about the whole
thing wondering what to do. I knew he wouldn’t fire me or anything if I
refused and he knows already that I won’t lie. He knows very well that
I am a Christian, I’ve even gone in to his office, anointed him and
prayed with him once when he was going through some very terrible
times. I just hated to make things difficult for him because I don’t
like the cause strife for anyone. I prayed for awhile and asked God to
be with me and to give me the courage to bring this up with my boss
because even though I want to serve well, I knew I could no more sign
the witness sheet and lie than I could jump out the window and plunge
to my death. Simple as that.

So I went in to my boss and told
him he was stressing me out. He asked me how and I explained that I
just couldn’t sign the witness thing not having been a witness. He said
that he was the representative of their signatures and was the witness
not me. Thinking about this, I hope I wasn’t being duped, at the time
that didn’t occur to me. But he said that he represented their
signatures and so it wasn’t lying because he was good for them.

He
said all this completely up front and candidly, the same way he has
explained other legal formalities that I don’t understand, so I
breathed a sigh of relief and said, “So it’s not like I’m lying on
these sheets then?” And he said, “No, absolutely not.” I was okay with
it then.

Of course now, as I recount this whole thing, I’m
wondering if I was duped. Legally I doubt it will make much difference
because there is no doubt that the actual people signed these documents
and that they wanted these documents the way they were typed (after
all, we’re the ones who typed them). I just wanted this to be right
with God. Since I prayed before hand and asked God to guide me in this
situation, I have to believe it’s all okay. I trusted my boss and hope
he didn’t mislead me. Only now I’m wondering. The other assistant
signed too as two witnesses are needed to sign the documents. She was
concerned too but I told her what the boss had told me, so she signed.

There
are things I love about working in law but there are things I hate
about it too. It’s never clear what is formality and what is not
formality and there are special things that are allowed when you’re a
lawyer that you can’t do when you’re just a regular civilian. At the
same time, lawyers seem to really push the envelope and I’m not always
certain of their honesty. That makes it so difficult. I’m not sure who
I can trust over there… I’m only sure that I can’t trust everybody and
probably not even my own boss because his views of what’s okay to do
and what’s not okay to do are somewhat different than my own. I know
that he thinks that he’s a good guy and, by many standards, he is, but
he is really not a terribly upstanding man. He’s not a Christian and
doesn’t adhere to a strict standard of morality from what I can tell.
He’s a great boss and very endearing in many ways, but not a role model
for standards of living. I just have to stay in prayer because I don’t
want to be misled, however well-intentioned it may be.