Fate and Destiny Pt. 01

This novella is in ten chapters with a short epilogue; it has been split into two submissions to Literotica. Specific dialogue and scenes in this work are fiction; however, the general plot happened almost as written here. Names, locations, and characters have been fictionalized to protect what remains of the reputations of those that survive. Many have forgotten these events, but I remember, although I was only a minor character I was close enough to see first-hand how the affair unfolded and how it ended. There are lessons in this story for everyone."

Prelude to The Future

"We all need to look at the dark side of our nature –
that's where the energy is, the passion. People
are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us
we're busy denying." Sue Grafton

The arc of our relationship, even my life, appeared to me for a few moments. I didn't like what I saw, and I suppressed the vision, blinking it away and shaking my head. Much later I'd remember how I'd allowed the coarser elements of my ego to rule, to actually take over my life from that instant forward – lust and greed, selfish desire, hubris, and certainly not a finger raised to commitments or values I'd espoused for so many decades.

Laura Wayne and her husband Gary were in my waiting room. I greeted them for the first time realizing I didn't recognize either of them, certainly not from the church where I was the senior minister and where so many of my private clients came from, or from my board and consulting work in the corporate world. My secretary had scheduled the couple for 9:30 a.m., ensuring no overlap with my earlier appointment of the day. Patients undergoing private therapy had a right to privacy and not being seen waiting or departing by other patients was part of how I protected that right.

After brief greetings I led the couple into my cluttered office. Patients often used psychological counseling as marriage counseling, and often the distinction was hard to differentiate since the two were so intertwined. I had no history on this couple or why they were on my calendar except for a Post-It note my secretary had written that said 'Referred by David Yarlett' – David being one of the most generous donors to my church.

Laura opened the discussion after our basic introductions, "Dr. Craig, thank you for seeing us this morning. We ..."

Before she could go any further, I interrupted with a warm smile and said, "Please call me Jon; I prefer first names in this right from the start." As I spoke I couldn't help but notice how attractive the young woman was. Her husband was also good-looking. I wondered what would bring such a nice, young couple to my doorstep. In one sense they made me feel old.

Laura nodded and continued her rehearsed introduction for the two of them: "After several years of concern over our marriage, I finally convinced Gary to see a counselor. David Yarlett and Deb Bauer recommended you ..." Laura Wayne talked on for a few minutes about her friend Deb, as I became lost in thought.

I recalled the counseling sessions Deb and her husband, David Yarlett, had gone through with me two years earlier. I guessed they had been a success for the couple remained together, and once told me enthusiastically they were the closest and most intimate they had been since they first met. They were one of my success stories.

My psychological counseling practice was only part of how I earned my living and enjoyed the good life. Two days a week I saw patients looking for relief from some problem in their life. Sometimes the problems were with other people: a spouse; a parent or child; in-laws; or a girlfriend or boyfriend. Sometimes the problems were with situations in life: the death of a parent or loved one; a nearly intolerable situation at work; or ungrounded phobias that arose at awkward and unwanted times.

I went into counseling because I wanted to help people. Even in high school I'd been the friend and confidant to many in my class that wanted a friendly ear that could keep a confidence. I thrived on how my reputation grew. I did a school project on psychological counseling, setting the tone for my college career and now my actual practice after all these years. It took me ten years to get the Ph.D. and credentials to move forward in the counseling arena. I apprenticed under a mentor from Harvard, my alma mater, and five years after that went independent. I'd been that way for over twenty-five years. Even in my early sixties I found satisfaction in helping an individual or couple improve their lives in some way.

Of course, being independent in the counseling work also allowed me to work part time on a doctorate of divinity at the Andover Theological Seminary. I'd been raised a Methodist, and I'd also carried the secret desire to also be a minister in addition to my counseling work since I'd been a teenager. I saw the church work as a second avenue to work with people in need, as well as to communicate with people in need. I had a vision of what my ministry would be like – not pious and theoretical, not full of irrelevant readings from a two thousand year old book, but rather contemporary, action oriented, problem specific, and experiential. It would take me another ten years to begin to bring that vision to fruition.

Coming out of seminary I obtained a part-time minister's post running the youth program in Dillon, Massachusetts, only ten miles away from home. The pay was miniscule, something I intended to rectify as time went by. In the mean time I had some income from my counseling work as well as the occasional wedding or funeral that got passed to me.

I'd met and wooed Margaret Millbury late in my undergraduate days at Harvard. She was the same age, smart – an 'A' student at Radcliffe, and wanted to make a difference in the world in some way and also have our family. I married her after my first year in graduate school. She got a job doing legal research for a law firm that specialized in environmental activism, this at a time when the world was just waking up to the deleterious impact that over three billion people were having on the planet. I got her pregnant with our first child within the year. We were a happy couple – then a happy family – and somehow she was able to help keep us afloat as I did my graduate school and seminary work.

Margaret humored my divinity degree, confessing one time her willingness to be a minister's wife providing we were making an impact on our congregation and the local community. As I got into the Dillon Free Church's youth program, Margaret was at my side, eager and well liked as we built an enviable program that attracted children and teens from across the valley. We became the cool place to be on Saturdays for the teens.

While Margaret could put up a good front, when I met her she was an introvert. She worshipped my gregarious personality, and allowed me to take the social lead for the two of us. One result of this is that early in our relationship as a couple we had 'my' friends and 'our' friends. After she'd been out of college a couple of years, she seemed to lose touch with the classmates she'd been friends with.

One of the side benefits of the part-time minister's post was that I often got to work with the parents of the teens in the program. We did parent-teen retreats as part of the program, and the events were heralded as winning ways to bridge between teens in the midst of tumultuous change in their lives and in the world, and their more staid and conservative parents.

Dean Meyers, a classmate of mine from Harvard and a member of the congregation, had a child in the youth program. Dean hadn't gone to graduate school, instead going to work for his father in an entrepreneurial start-up writing custom software. We started having coffee together once a week, a ritual that we managed to maintain for the next thirty years whenever we were both in town. Sometimes Dean sought input on the ethics of business in the cutthroat high tech world, and I found myself increasingly drawn in to the issues and complexities of corporate life.

I knew I needed stellar public speaking skills if I was to deliver the kind of sermons and have the kind of impact on the church's congregation that I hoped to achieve. Moreover, I knew that public speaking was a hallmark of the high earners in both the ministerial and business world. You couldn't be shy and retiring or get easily flapped on the podium in the corporate world. I had little opportunity to speak in the business world early in my career, but I did speak occasionally in connection with my job as Assistant Minister. At least once a quarter I delivered the Sunday sermon. Remarkably I was good – actually better than good, I was great. I studied public speaking when I knew I'd have to preach, particularly finding opportunities to go and watch great religious leaders speak at various gatherings: Billy Graham, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Oral Roberts, and Joel Goldsmith, to name a few. I was a fast study, and translated their gestures, pace of delivery, speaking style, and appeal to be my own. Moreover, I'd name drop during my modest sermons. I loved saying things like, "Billy Graham told me only a week ago," or "Norman, er that's Dr. Normal Vincent Peale recently recommended to me that I ..." The congregation loved it and felt they'd tapped into someone connected with greatness.

Soon I had my own following in the Dillon church. When the full-time minister retired, the post was ultimately offered to me. I took the job contingent that I could continue my counseling work a minimum of two days a week and also get paid a percentage of any increase in church revenues. I expected to improve attendance at our modest church and wanted a cut of the action. Dean had coached me through the salary and terms negotiation process with the church trustees. A week after I signed the agreement, Margaret, our three children by that time, and I moved into the large parsonage adjacent to the church.

A few years into my tenure as the senior minister Dean Meyers offered me a position on the board of his fledgling company. He planned on taking the firm public in a few years. His sales skills were superb and he got me to agree to serve for no salary; my pay would be in stock and deferred options that would increase in value dramatically if the firm succeeded as he hoped. I had to work for free until that time, but by then I knew Dean well and his company and trusted in the future success he was driven to make happen. The trustees of the church had no issue with my accepting the post. They loved me, and one of the trustees, a member of the search committee that had eventually offered me the minister's job, had confided in me that I was a bright light in an otherwise drab world of boring people they'd briefly considered for the minister's post.

Dean involved me deeply in his corporate activities, insisting that I be an active director and not someone that only showed up for the quarterly board meetings. The company, Triax Systems, moved aggressively in the software and custom system applications area in the U.S., South America, Europe, and Africa – wherever there were sophisticated software users or development firms. The firm was growing and Dean was putting every penny he made back into the business.

My family and Dean's socialized together on a regular basis, even spending time at the Meyer's family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. Our lives became entwined together for business, play, and our spiritual needs. Margaret got along well with Patty Meyers, Dean's wife, and I was personally glad to see her have a friendship relatively independent of me.

Initially, I was embarrassed by the board position in Dean's company because I knew so little about the high tech business he was in. Dean would wave his hand dismissively in the air: "You don't need to know how to program; I've got hundreds of kids that do that. What I want you to do is help run the company, to make sure we're positioned strategically in our markets, to ask us all hard questions and help us answer them, and to make sure we do what we do ethically – that's where your minister stuff comes into play."

So early in my career I found I had three part-time jobs: minister, individual and family therapy, and board member of Triax. While I pursued these three careers I also found time to take flying lessons. I liked the sense of risk it engendered, plus Dean encouraged me in this pursuit so that I could fly one of his company planes around the world when need be. Of course, at the time there were no company planes. Nonetheless, Dean had a vision, and he had Triax pay for my lessons. I felt blessed.

A few years after I'd gotten my sea legs as a board member at Triax, Ray Gibbons, another member of the Dillon church, asked me to be on the board of his company. The church trustees also blessed that chunk of outside work, praising my efforts in the corporate world at the same time. Thus, I also became a paid director of Menthen Oil Supply Company, or MOSC as Ray called it.

Six months after I went on his board, OPEC proclaimed an oil embargo in response to the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military during the Yom Kippur war. MOSC's stock initially took a nosedive about the time I became eligible for my first round of stock options. I put every cent I could into buying the options and also buying other stock; I had faith the embargo would end within a year. I was right. Ultimately, my stock went through the roof, rising more than a hundredfold within two years.

The combination of jobs – minister, therapist, and director – put me in a rare position to drive the value of each job upwards in some virtuous synergistic whirlwind. My Sunday sermons raised some of the tough situations I was seeing in the corporate world, not only for the companies I worked with, but for any business facing dramatic change in the high speed business world. My business contacts widened too, and I started to bring in some of the people I was meeting both as part of my Sunday talks as well as for special 'seminars' that had a spiritual tilt to them.

As the senior minister I could now call the shots on the tenor of the Sunday sermons. I gradually shifted them towards what one member of my congregation called 'The Harvard Business School on God.' He also told me I was reaching more people, and changing their lives for the better with my experiential spirituality approach to Christianity. I didn't dismiss traditions or the Bible, but I did put them in a much more modern context that even the old timers in the church seemed to like and comment favorably on.

Over the first fifteen years I was the senior minister, the congregation of the church exploded from a little over a hundred souls to a couple of thousand. So did the contributions to the church coffers. I had a knack at fund raising, boosting per capital giving by about five hundred percent. I renegotiated my contract with the church getting a hefty pay raise, and I got Margaret put on the payroll as well for her contributions to the growth of the church. The trustees loved us. As membership grew, we rapidly outgrew our ability to seat everyone at a typical service, let alone the Christmas or Easter services. I led a capital drive for a huge extension to the sanctuary to accommodate the rising membership. We broke ground for the addition within six months of when I raised the idea to the church trustees.

The growing church provided my counseling business a steady flow of needy souls. What I learned from my patients were the events and things in their lives that were bothering them. This knowledge enabled me to target some of my sermons on the issues many in the congregation were facing. Coping with stress, job problems, depression, addictions, relationships, and their own humanness became major themes I talked about. This same knowledge carried over to the corporate world too, as I became expert at spotting some of the same problem symptoms in the people working in the companies where I was a board member and executive.

Each day I literally got on my knees and thanked God for the blessings he bestowed upon me. I could see the positive impact I was having on people in each part of my life. I felt that my life plan, parts of it forged when I'd been in high school and in my idealist college years, had been vindicated. I could help people. I could change their lives for the better, and do it consistently and better as each day went by and I gained experience, wisdom, and perspective.

Gray Areas

"Fate delivers us choices. Our character decides the path.

Laura and Gary Wayne and I sat in a triangle in the plush leather chairs of my Dillon office. I'd rented a separate office just for my counseling work, turning one room into a posh library setting that promoted intimate discussions and removed distractions from the job at hand.

I asked about their professions and background, explaining that the first meeting was to get to know each other, get an overview of what the therapy would be like, understand their issues at least at a high level, and agree to a course of action.

Laura again jumped to answer, "I work as a private duty physical therapist. I studied at Simmons in Boston, and have a lot of good contacts in the medical community in the area."

She nudged her husband, and Gary glared at her but answered on his own, "I was a journalism major at Duke. I came back here and started the Chashin River Weekly – that was twenty years ago.

Everyone in town knew the weekly newspaper. It was how people kept in touch, sold their unwanted items, searched for love, and learned about what was on the police blotter and the school lunch and sports schedules for everywhere within a twenty mile radius. The paper was a success and had impressive local offices in the new Chashin Plaza. The fact that Gary had started the paper and turned it into the obvious success that it was spoke well for his business skills, not to mention his writing and editorial skills. I'd seen him address some ticklish local issues in the paper, for instance the need to rezone part of the town, and come out of the fray a winner.

I spoke, "The two of you are an outstanding couple, yet you speak of problems in your relationship. Could each of you take a minute or two and tell me – without interruption by the other – why you're here?" I turned and gestured for Laura to start since she seemed to be the complainant.

Laura took a deep breath. "We got married the same year Gary started the newspaper. At the time we made a pledge that our careers would never jeopardize our marriage, but now, I don't know, he seems to spend every waking hour wrapped up the newspaper. It's like he's escaping from the marriage through work. He brushes off my concerns ..." Laura continued talking and as she did I reflected more on my own life leading up to today.

Being in the bedroom community of Dillon, so close to Boston, and getting confidential looks at some of the more competent members of my congregation and therapy enabled me to introduce some men and women into one of the companies I worked for. Informally, I saw my role as headhunter, cautiously not wanting to violate any trust with the church or its members, yet also wanting to see Triax or MOSC succeed with good talent – and most often the people I introduced had informed or hinted to me their dissatisfaction with their current jobs. There was certainly nothing wrong with an introduction, and I felt I was performing a valuable service matching the disenchanted with great new jobs.

Triax went public about five years after I joined the board. By that time I had several thousand shares of stock, as well as options on many more. Had I not been an insider, I might have thought they were all worthless, however, the recently formed NASDAQ trading market that took the shares public, made the price soar into the stratosphere. Tech stocks were 'in.' All my shares and options were instantly exercisable as part of the initial public offering or IPO. Suddenly and literally overnight, my net worth soared from negative numbers into the millions. Taking Triax public made about thirty of the company leaders multi-millionaires over night.