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Time, and Time Again

Writer's picture: Kory MerenessKory Mereness

In November 2020, I started a new career by accident. After 11 years in church ministry where I gained my ordination as a pastor, I moved from Oregon to Texas to began a career as a sales director in senior living.


I had tested well through the recruiting process but was acutely aware that I would be stepping into an office where I'd need to execute skills faster than I learned them. After a week, I felt good about my learning progress and had a good grasp of the apartments and cottages I was selling in our community. I worked with the team of other directors of nursing, assisted living, etc. as I oversaw my small department and managed my personal sales goals.


While I made adjustments at work, our housing situation in West Texas was not going well. My family of five was waiting out a closing process on our Oregon house while we inhabited the two extra bedrooms in my parents' home.


A buyer had put in a successful bid on our Oregon home in October, so as we moved to Amarillo we had a possible timeline ahead of us for that home to close and the new home we were buying to hold in escrow and allow us to seamlessly get our stuff moved in when it arrived from cross-country transit.


After our buyer's inspection, this plan fell apart.


The buyers sent back a demand that we lower the closing price by $9,000 so that they could replace the roof which had zero leaks. We negotiated some but refused that offer, then the buyer backed out.


After several weeks of fishing with no bites, we found another buyer, but for about $15,000 less than the original offer. It may sound foolish in hindsight, but there was so much circumstantial complication and internal anxiety that can't all be conveyed from this stage where our life in two states overlapped. At least we felt good that we were selling at about $20k higher than the home we were buying, so we accepted an offer for the second time.


As all of this was happening, we needed a longer-term living solution in Amarillo where we'd expected to be set up in our new house at this point.


Finally, in a moment of providence, I found out that an old friend from college had an Amarillo home he was just about to move out of, so I called him and shared our situation with him. This individual instantly agreed on arrangements for us to live there, nearly rent-free until we closed on our home. In a chapter of our lives that was full of misfortune, this provision of sanctuary was a salve to our souls, and I don't believe this man will ever know the full weight of relief this provided to us mentally and spiritually.


We are deeply indebted to this moment of incredible benevolence from this wonderfully kind family.


Cutting through the Wire

It was at this stage in the process that the new buyer of our Oregon home hit a snag in selling their home, pausing the entire train of operations for a week. My wife had scheduled a day to go see our new home which she'd never laid eyes on...or in.


24 hours before, the owner got COVID, back when this meant two weeks of hard quarantine.


We had no choice but to wait, and the opportunities to make objective assessments about decisions of great magnitude were being denied us. Every decision that was presented to us felt like we would inevitably choose the wrong path.


For instance...


Our realtor relayed a proposal from our seller that we could move into the Amarillo home early so that we could solve our family's issue of displacement. We'd already signed offers and completed inspections. The seller had now moved to her new home in the same arrangement she was offering us, and we were living in a small rental with our belongings piled in boxes in the garage. We accepted the offer to move in and pay rent by the day until closing.


What we should have done...was nothing.


Still, it got done, we got keys, and we moved the day after Christmas. As my wife had to remind me, she moved all our stuff alone, towing our three kids, hiring the help of two movers, while I worked, while my dad in town nursed a recent ankle surgery, and her parents in New Mexico were being steamrolled by COVID.


But again, it got done!


No Man's Land

While COVID numbers maintained their peak performance, my work was starting to show some concerning cracks. Not only were we in the sales trough of any standard year in the short, dark, freezing January days, but the continued protocols of the pandemic were taking a toll on my opportunities to generate warm leads, much less close sales.


I was making around 30 phone calls a day to seniors and their families, with hopes of inviting them to tour our facility where the public dining was indefinitely shut down, where residents were not allowed to congregate in public spaces, and where the few and far between faces brave enough to chance an appearance in this geriatric ghost town were concealed behind the now ubiquitous KN-95 masks that had become our society's to-go order of solitary confinement.





In my experience, people can tell when you're selling half the product at full price.


A few sales trickled in each month, but my weekly meetings with the two other sales staff were an uphill slog amidst a snowstorm of shattered morale, and emotionally I was in no better place than any of the troops I was leading into battle. I would go home each day utterly defeated, with less and less capacity to be a functional husband or father.


The Eleventh Hour

As I wandered in the wastes at work, I continued to receive hammer blows on the homefront with each piece of news that broke as we looked back on our beloved Oregon.


My old position had been filled at the church where my new boss had not so subtly pushed me out the door. Turns out, it was someone I actually knew.


It was his own wife.


Meanwhile, the home sale process had now dragged on for so many weeks that the Amarillo homeowner was going to lose her new home because of things prolonged 2,000 miles away in Oregon. This of course meant that we'd be evicted from the home we'd now moved into but did not formally own. A five-day timer was set for all the sales to default because the first one couldn't close.


5, 4, 3, 2...


Final day.


Our buyer's home closed. Then, through a flurry of paperwork and full-time phone calls to realtors, title agents, etc, we sold one home and closed on another with about two hours to spare on the deadline.


Home Away from Home

Words cannot fully emphasize the toll of stress this took on me and my wife. It was like each of us had a second job for six weeks while being displaced, as I mastered a new career. All of this transpired in a period when COVID spiked to the most extreme numbers that were ever seen, while our entire city (and nation) were shut down--no restaurants, no church, no neighbors, complete isolation.


At the moment when I felt we were surely meant to catch our breath from the realty catastrophe we'd just survived, we watched live on Zillow while the housing market in Oregon (and not Texas) exploded. We had sold on Jan 6, and by the time we reached Jan 31, that home had increased in value by roughly 30%, and every 2,000 sq ft home in that small town was listed at $450k+.


We'd owned that home for seven years, and missed the window by four weeks.


That broke me.


Once, this home had been miraculously saved for us through the radical generosity of others. Then, almost instantly, we'd had been exiled through the tragic and strange circumstances of life. Now, through a once-in-a-generation event in the housing market, we'd found yet another way to lose a life-changing windfall, and the final flickering candle of hope in the back of our minds was snuffed out.


The hope that perhaps one day, we could go back home to Oregon.


Decommissioned

The following events seem easy to predict looking back on the story, but on that day in March 2021 when my boss handed me a cardboard storage box to clean out my desk, I was stunned. I didn't defend myself or try to bargain. I knew I'd missed sales goals, and didn't expect my company to care about COVID's effect on that. I knew the words my boss had come in to speak to me were calculated and were crafted in meetings with other executives involved, not an impulsive reaction.


I just felt hurt that this was happening all over again after I had sacrificed so much to restart my family's life. It was like every game I played was unwinnable.


I packed my things, walked out to my car with the HR escort who reassured me "it's not personal" (pretty sure that's on page 1 of the HR handbook), and drove home to deliver the deja vu to my wife.


Floating in space once again, in the most familiar way.





I told her that one day I'd write a book about this year of our life and the title would be "Wrong Place at the Wrong Time, and Time Again".


Blog post.


Close enough.


But a year? Turns out I was way off.


Wounded Warriors

I like to write inductively, and bring the reader to a place of desperately needing the hopeful moment once it arrives. And in this part of the story, there's not one. It's more of a tragedy, which is a type of literature for which Americans don't have much of a palate, so it's probably hard to read.


Trust me, it was hard to live.


And it's hard to relive. I have to do that part often in my mind, whether I'm writing about it or not.


But if there is a single takeaway from all of this tragedy, for me, it is that I never knew what suffering felt like until I lived through this. I'd seen the tragedies of others and attempted to understand them. I'd never had to live in my own.


If nothing else, our traumas present obstacles that we have to find a way to overcome, and lessons we cannot help but learn. Enduring this has taught me compassion. It gave me a lens to look into other people's lives and understand what your heart feels like when suffering comes, when your circumstances are bent against you, when you absolutely cannot buy a win.


I'd always welcome the help of others in the midst of suffering, but when you're unable to help, never underestimate the impact of your compassion. It means a lot, and I've received a lot of it from loving people who have witnessed up close all that we have gone through in this season of our life.


We may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Time, and time again.


But for those who compassionately went through parts of this with us...


Thank you.

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©2022 by Kory Mereness | Copy Kory LLC

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