Bank Robbery

There is one verse of Scripture that I consistently live by more than any other.

It is Matthew 6:3 where Jesus talked about the right hand not knowing what the right hand is doing – or something like that.

For several months now thoughts of a costly project have bugged me off and on. Ginny & I have talked about this several times but felt we could not afford it and she has not had strong feelings about doing it.

We have often prayed about this endeavor and get zilch for an answer. I told Ginny that I can’t tell if I’m being prompted by the Holy Spirit or if it’s just that I have a bug in my ass to get this project done.

Ginny, ever the practical Christian, replied, “Love, sometimes a bug in your ass IS the prompting of the Holy Spirit”.

Well, yesterday we realized that now we have both the ability and the opportunity for this project so we decided to transfer a little money into an overseas account.

Since I would not have the car today, last night I called my friend Wes to bum a ride to the bank and this morning he abandoned working on his roof to take me to breakfast, to The Lord’s Store Mission, and to the bank.

For an inexperienced person like me making an international funds transfer is a daunting affair. When Gin & I tried it once before, both our credit union and Western Union refused to do it, we were unable to do it online, and our bank insisted that I personally come in to their office, hand them cash and sign all the papers – and our bank took ¼ of the money as a transfer fee! This is one of the same great banks that lost the credit records of 300,000 customers last week, but boy were they minding security with my request today!

The financial institution overseas takes another ¼ of our money as their fee for allowing us to deposit money in their bank!!!

So between them the two banks stole one half of the money we transferred – and the transaction will take Five business days to complete --- Haven’t these banks ever heard of computers?

Bank robbers and robber banks have a lot in common.

But anyhow, for good or ill, I got it done.

Wes & I talked for a couple of hours (everything from abortion rights to cooking on a wood stove to roof repairs) so again the middle of my day was gone and I did not edit a single page of the Stacy Letters.

By definition a writer is a person who writes; by definition an unemployed, sorry bum is a guy who says he’s a writer but is not actually writing….

I think I’ll take a nap.