So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XIV

In early 1980 I moved the few miles from Queens Village to Richmond Hill to a new Way Home. There were four other residents: Nicole, a native of Haiti; Rafael, a bassist in several bands; Eric, who was from Iowa and spoke five or six different languages; and Eddie, who was designated as the leader/coordinator of the local Twig Fellowship, the Spanish language fellowship that met in our home, as well as the Branch Coordinator of one of the Queens branches. (At the time a "branch" was a grouping of around seven twig fellowship in an area) There was an established fellowship centered on our home and there seemed to be a camaraderie that I found lacking at my last place. We ate our meals together, did things together and things seemed like they were going well and that the antics at the previous Way Home were an aberration.  At least it seemed that way.

Shortly after I moved in the area leadership decided to make some changes. First, they decided to consolidate the three Queens branches into two. The Branch Coordinator that was "demoted" was our Way Home Coordinator, Eddie. At the same time they asked me to take over coordination of the Twig Fellowship that met in our home. This was ostensibly to allow Eddie to devote more time to the Spanish language twig and to assist with the other two Spanish twigs in Queens. Eddie did not see things this way. Previous to these changes he was very proud of rattling off his titles: Way Home Coordinator, Twig Coordinator of two twigs, Spanish language Twig Area Coordinator, North Queens Branch Coordinator. He was especially proud that he had achieved this level of responsibility without being a Way Corps grad, or even an Advanced Class grad. Let's take a minute to look at the Advanced Class and the perceived hierarchy in The Way. 

Chapter 12 of First Corinthians states that "the manifestation (singular) of the spirit" consisted of speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues, prophesy, word of knowledge, word of wisdom, discerning of spirits, faith, miracles, and gifts of healing. Wierwille had a take on "the manifestations" (plural) that weren't necessarily supported by scripture, but were an essentially part of life in The Way. 

The Power for Abundant Living Class (PFAL) was in reality a series of classes. The Foundational Class, contained, as it name implies, the foundational teachings and principles taught in The Way. It culminated in the students being instructed and led into speaking in tongues. No one stuck around for long without taking the Foundational PFAL Class. 

The Intermediate Class focused on two of what was called "manifestations of the spirit", interpretation of tongues and prophecy. In order to be viewed as having moved past the newbie stage and to participate actively in Way International Twig Fellowship meetings, it was essential that one be able to speak in tongues, interpret tongues and prophesy.

There were also what were called "advanced study classes" - "Witnessing and Undershepherding", "Dealing With the Adversary", "Christian Family and Sex" and a few others, that dealt with specific topics, but the Advanced Class was considered the pinnacle of learning for anyone not in the Way Corps. 

The Advanced Class was advertised as focusing on the remaining six manifestations: word of knowledge, word of wisdom, discerning of spirits, faith, miracles, gifts of healing. In reality it talked a lot about devil spirits (demons) and devil possession. A graduate of the Advanced Class supposedly had been fully instructed on how to receive revelation from God, including detecting the presence of malign spirits. 

In theory, someone who was an Advanced Class graduate was better qualified to lead than a non-grad, and a Way Corps grad, someone who had been through the Way's multi-year leadership training program, was most qualified of all. Practically, The Way had grown so quickly throughout the mid-seventies that it was not always possible for these requirements to be met. In the Way's early days, leaders rose up and those with charisma or other natural leadership ability took on responsibility without any outside input. Eventually Twig Leaders were appointed by the next higher level of leadership—they were usually someone who at least seemed to have some ability. This was both good and bad. Good, in that there was no requirement for attaining arbitrary benchmarks before leading, bad in that totally unqualified people were often put in charge. During this time in Queens, Brooklyn and the areas of Long Island outside New York City, very few Twig Coordinators were Advanced Class grads and no Branch Coordinators were Way Corps grads. The Area Leader, who oversaw all the branches on Long Island, was only about halfway through his Way Corps training. 

Eddie was someone who, likely because he was in the right place at the right time, had risen quickly through the ranks despite a lack of the accepted leadership signifiers. Just as quickly he had been stripped of most of his titles. Eddie was a proud man, every ounce a "macho" guy with strong opinions. His anger and disappointment and losing his status within the organization would ripple through the rest of the year. Despite not having received any "official" teaching regarding "discerning of spirits", Eddie fancied himself an expert on devil spirits. In fact he was obsessed with the subject and acted as if he saw them everywhere. I sometimes talk in my sleep. Shortly after I moved in, Eddie, from his bedroom down the hall from mine, heard some talking and came into the room to find me talking while apparently asleep. The next morning he told me and the other roommates about this, describing how he "just started to cast out devil sprits". 

I think you can imagine how this would lead to problems.

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XV

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XV

Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. He was so proud of his titles and the associated ability to lord it over people. But now, he had been stripped of almost all of his titles. He still held the position of Way Home Coordinator, which was supposed to mean that he was the leader of the little group who lived in our house on Metropolitan Avenue, yet this was in tension with my position as the Twig Fellowship Coordinator based at the same house. There was no way that there wouldn't be fireworks. 

There were two parallel paths that I would take through the rest of the Way year. One was paved with red flags that in hindsight I should have heeded and got the hell out, the other path was crowded with what at the time looked like what the Bible calls signs, miracles and wonders. The problem was that I didn't see the red flags as red flags. We had been indoctrinated with the view that when bad things happened it was "the Adversary" (i.e. The Devil) attacking us due to our "stand on The Word of God". So both side-by-side paths were convincing me that I was on the right path. 

When I was still living at the first Way Home I had re-enrolled in college. I had dropped out during my sophomore year, and, due to some bad grades I had been put on academic probation. When I re-enrolled I was still on probation, which meant that I could not fail any classes and had to maintain at least a "C" average. I had also taken a job in Manhattan working for the stock brokerage firm, E.F. Hutton. I worked at Hutton during the day and attended classes at night. This meant that it was difficult for me to spend much time on Way activities. Way leadership suggested that, although I was living in a Queens Way Home, it might be better if I attended Twig Fellowship in Manhattan, where I worked and went to college. If this situation had continued, things might have turned out differently, but two things happened to change the course of my life. The first was that I failed a math class. It may have been advanced algebra, or maybe calculus, I don't recall. Even though I had aced every other class, I was still on academic probation, and this one failure meant that I was dismissed from Bernard M. Baruch College. Around the same time I was offered the position of Twig Fellowship Coordinator. I was virtually locked in to a Way trajectory. 

I mentioned the two parallel paths—I want to address the one that was festooned with red flags first. As far as I knew, Eddie wasn't removed from his positions because higher leadership thought he didn't have leadership qualities. His branch responsibilities ended simply because there weren't enough twigs for three branches and the other two branch coordinators had more of the accepted credentials. His Twig Coordinator of the English-language fellowship position wasn't taken away due to incompetence or ungodliness or lack of leadership, but to allow him to concentrate on the various Spanish language fellowships. But with the 20/20 vision that comes from being 40 years in the future, I can tell you with conviction that Eddie was a sociopathic abuser. A characteristic that somehow escaped the notice of the supposedly spiritually savvy leadership. 

I'm not going to get specific about all of the insanity that Eddie engaged in. I mentioned in Part XIV that he believed that "casting out devil spirits" was the appropriate response to a roommate talking in his sleep. He constantly belittled the people around him, especially women. He drank to excess. We sublet a basement apartment to a woman who he coerced into sex. Several of us complained about him to upper leadership to no avail. The fact that Eddie was put in a position of leadership where he was supposed to care for other Christian believers and lead by example, should have suggested to me that upper leadership didn't know what the heck they were doing. But I somehow rationalized the situation. The "obey leadership" habit was hard to break. There must be some kind of plan that I was unaware of. Part of me thought that I just needed to up my spiritual game and commit myself more fully. More on that after I take you on a stroll down the other parallel path.

When I took over the fellowship on Metropolitan Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens, there were four or five of us. By the time I left New York that August, there were easily thirty people crammed into our living room on Twig Fellowship nights. The main method of increasing membership was to "witness". Like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, The Way engaged in door-to-door witnessing. Since we started out with just a handful, we would have a short meeting and then hit the streets, the bowling alleys, the bars and knocked on doors. We also started seeing people who had been inactive in Way events start showing up. Maybe they didn't like what was going on when Eddie was in charge and wanted to give us a shot. Maybe it was just coincidence, but these formerly inactive people started bringing friends. And the friends started bringing friends.  The house started filling up. 

One of the measures of success of a Way Twig or Branch was running a class. The Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class was for people who wanted to stick around, it was the first level of commitment in Wayworld. You needed seven new people to be able to run a PFAL class and typically several Twigs combined their new people into one class. We were able to run one all by ourselves. Then we were able to run another one. And a third—which was unheard of. Way fellowship meetings were beginning to tend toward formal at that time. We went in the opposite direction which seemed to draw in even more people. For some reason that I can't recall I started running meetings and teaching barefoot and sitting cross-legged on the couch. We were told to start running a 10:30 fellowship on Sundays—because Way HQ did. No one told us that it was to be 10:30AM, so, rebels that we were, we met at 10:30PM on Sunday and the living room was as full as any other time.  The biggest thing was that we started to get known as the place to go for miraculous healing.

As an agnostic who these days casts a skeptical eye on the miraculous, I really don't know what to think about this aspect of my time in The Way. We would pray for people and it sure seemed like they were healed of various maladies. There wasn't any eyesight to the blind or healing the lepers, but what we were all sure convinced that healing was taking place. And it wasn't just the hardcore Wayfers, but people who would show up at our house for the first time and swear that their illness, or limp or whatever was gone. To me, this was some bona fide Book of Acts stuff...signs, miracles and wonders. 

It was no wonder that, after the bad example of Eddie caused me to question my own commitment paired with what I was convinced was God working in astounding ways that I made a twofold decision: to enroll in the Advanced Class that was taking place that summer in Rome City, Indiana and after that to sign up for the Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program. A decision that would take me from my home of New York City and deposit me in a town of 5,000 in the Nebraska Panhandle. 

 Start from the beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part XIV - Assistant Store Director

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

I was feeling pretty good about my prospects. I had only been a B&R manager for two years and already had been promoted to Assistant Store Director. Of course, I didn't really know what an Assistant Store Director was supposed to do! (No one ever did) One of the things that I had to battle right out of the gate at the Cornhusker Super Saver was the management style of my predecessor. Lonnie was one of those extreme hands-on managers. If something needed to be done he felt that he had to do it himself. My management style was completely different. A manager, in my view, wasn't paid to do things, but to get things done. A concept I cover in my management blog. A misconception that many people have is that a "good" manager should be down there with the troops, getting their hands dirty. While this may be good public relations, it's not an efficient use of management time. 

There was an incident with an employee of the Frozen Department when I still worked at 48th & O. This employee was habitually clocking in, then changing his clothes, stopping for a snack, and then starting work. I observed this a few times and asked him to only clock in when he was ready to work. He kept at it despite my warning. When the HR Coordinator and I sat him down to give him a written warning, he was not cooperative. He sullenly noted that he "hadn't seen me do a lick of work since I had been hired". My response was to ask him what he thought I was supposed to be doing. When he replied that he didn't know, I asked him how he could possibly know that I wasn't doing it. His idea was that I should have been stocking frozen or sweeping the floor, rather than making sure that the store was running smoothly. I kept this encounter in mind when dealing with corporate directors. I tried to avoid judging them by the time they appeared in my store (usually making more work for me), since I really didn't know what the extent of their responsibilities were. 

Despite my confidence that my management style was superior, I still had to deal with expectations of the employees who were used to Lonnie doing things for them. For example the Deli team was used to Lonnie starting up the first batch of fried chicken on Sunday morning. I let them know right away that I wouldn't be doing that. 

The other main bump in the road was the personality of the Store Director. Brian had a reputation as a "nice guy". His theory of management was to let his people do their jobs without any input or interference from him, which was great when they were doing their jobs according to company standards, but not so great when they weren't. He would articulate company standards in our management meetings, then, when I attempted to enforce these policies, he would tell the employee that everything was fine and that they didn't need to listen to me. It set me up as the "bad guy" and set a pattern where any time I would try to correct an employee, they knew that a visit to Brian's office would negate anything I had to say. 

In the last half of my tenure at 48th & O I had been part of a program called "Next Generation Management". The purpose was to prepare up and coming junior managers for advancement by teaching us about the nitty gritty details of the retail grocery business. We would get a day of classroom training in some aspect of the business, merchandising, loss prevention, displays, sanitation, etc. (I don't remember them all). We would then receive an assignment in that session's category. We had six weeks to plan and execute our assignment, which included a projection of how much money our project either would save the company or would increase revenue. In many of these projects it was difficult or even impossible to project a financial benefit, but the judging criteria demanded that a savings or profit projection be included. I remember losing points for honestly stating that my sanitation project would result in cleaner more inviting stores, but that a price tag couldn't realistically be attached. Some of my fellow students tried to impress the panel of judges with overly optimistic financial projections, which didn't always work. One fellow student, in a calculated effort to make himself look good, always started his presentations with some variation of "Everything was terrible. Then I came along and fixed it. Now everything is great". It must have worked since he rapidly moved up through the ranks to Night Manager, then Grocery Manager and was promoted to Store Director at ALPS, the limited assortment store (similar to Aldi) on North 27th Street. B&R was always charmed by people like him who were good at self-promotion and brown-nosing. Sometimes it worked out, often it did not. (He eventually either quit or was fired after telling a corporate director where to go, and allegedly throwing his nametag at him)

Shortly after I received the promotion I was separated from my first wife and my personal life was in an uproar. I was thrown out of my house and had to quickly find a place to live. On that same night my part-time second job as a telemarketer went away, closed down for fraudulent practices. I was having a hard time concentrating on even the basic parts of my job, and I asked to resign from the Next Generation Management classes. After a few months I had adapted to my situation and asked the VP of Operations if I could be admitted into the next class. Instead he enrolled me in a program specifically for Assistant Store Directors (I can't recall the name). It was much more practical than the NGM classes, with fewer assignments that lent themselves to inflated results! In this program each of us would spend 1-3 days immersed in one of the various departments, shadowing an experienced department manager who would give us an overview of how the department was run. The idea wasn't that the experience would necessarily enable us to run these departments, but that it would give us the knowledge of what it took to operate a bakery, or a meat department. For example, in my time in one of the bakeries, I saw how  much time everything took. You couldn't just go to a Bakery Manager and expect that the shelves would be full without delay, but knowing the lead time for the various products gave us an idea of what we could expect from the departments. 

The one uncomfortable experience was working for three days with Joe, a Meat/Smokehouse Manager. Joe had been the Meat Manager at 48th & O. I got along with him, but we were never buddies. After I transferred to Cornhusker I saw him come in my store one night with a young woman (we'll call her Sheryl). It was common knowledge that Joe and his wife were separated and that he was living with Sheryl. A few days after, at a company gathering I mentioned to a manager at 48th & O that Joe and Sheryl were shopping at my store. This manager went to Joe, implying that I was gossiping about his situation.  I wasn't judging Joe's situation, just commenting that I saw a manager from another store shopping in my store. Joe called me at work and ripped into me for saying anything about seeing him and Sheryl. He would not accept my explanation that it was just an innocent observation and that I didn't know or care about his marital situation. From that point on, Joe and I did not get along. We managed to get through three days with him teaching me the basics of meat and smokehouse operations, and despite the ubiquity of knives, I came out unscathed.  

The classes, which included five assistant store directors and the corporate bakery director, fostered a camaraderie among the ASD's. We started convening unofficial, impromptu, "Assistant Store Director meetings" after our sessions at local bars where we would compare notes and just generally kvetch. This continued for several years as the ASD's became the core reset crew. 

One aspect of Store Director Brian's niceness that turned into an ongoing practice started out on my first Christmas working at the Cornhusker Store. The stores at the time were open 24 hours a day, and only closed on Christmas Eve at 6:00pm, reopening on December 26th at 6:00am. Convinced that left to himself, Brian would allow people to come in well after the supposed closing time, I deputized myself to guard the doors, refusing to let anyone enter once the clock struck six. Of course, many people tried to come in, all of them "needed just a couple of things", but I stuck to my guns and it became an annual thing. 

Start with Part I

Managers Part XIV - Management Time vs. Vocational Time

One of the false yardsticks that you hear all the time is that a good manager isn't "afraid to get his hands dirty", or "helps out". As we have already looked at, the job of a manager is to get things done, not do things. Before we get into the details of using leverage to get things done, we're going to look at another division of time: management time vs. vocational time.

Very few people start their careers as managers. In typical fashion the first rungs on the corporate ladder involve doing things: making things, selling stuff, serving people, repairing items. It is during this epoch where your worth as an employee is measured by your output, you learn that everything that you do can be measured. How many widgets did you produce? How fast did you ring up those orders? How many errors per thousand did you make? Quality comes into it as well; did you repair that vacuum cleaner correctly? But it's all about doing things and doing them according to a standard. In most companies the path to a bigger paycheck lies along the management track. You start out making widgets, soon you're a widget team leader, responsible for some other widget makers, eventually you're the widget department manager, responsible, not only for all the widget makers and team leaders, but the budget, payroll, supply ordering and shipping. Even though you now have all these additional responsibilities, in your heart, you're still a widget maker. You wear a little leather tool belt that carries your needle nose pliers and little screw driver that you use to assemble widgets. Once or twice a day you head down to the widget room to make a few widgets and build some camaraderie with your team. When you have some free time you're back down there. Why? There are three broad categories of vocational lures:

1. Identity: this is who you are, a widget maker! Once you become a manager, you're not just a manager, you're a widget manager. Very few people identify as a manager, i.e. a practitioner of the craft of management, but rather as a member of the vocation from which you were promoted.   
2. Pride of Craft: before you were a manager you could point to what you produced and be proud of it. You could see the widgets, or the displays that you built. You can't see management
3. Instant Feedback: When you're doing things, you know when you're done, you know when it's complete. Even if it's just paperwork. You're always right there where it's happening. But as a manager, since you're planning, fixing, correcting, training, observing etc., you're either at the scene after everything is completed, or anticipating the scene before it happens. If something goes wrong you find out about it afterwards. You don't get that endorphin rush from getting things accomplished because what you're doing may not bear fruit for days or weeks or even years. 

None of this means that a manager never does physical work. On the contrary, many management jobs include a physical component. In my previous career, a department manager was required, due to labor constraints, to do a certain amount of stocking and cleaning. In my last job before retirement, statutory requirements necessitated that many tasks be done by a manager because the law says so. The definition of vocation vs. management time will vary depending upon the job description and staffing levels. Stocking the yogurt on a Monday morning may be necessary for a manager in a small grocery store, but unnecessary vocational time in a large superstore. In short, anything that is not in the manager's job description, but is in the job description of a subordinate, is vocational time and should not be indulged in by a manager. There is nothing intrinsically vocational about a task, as long as it isn't supposed to be done by someone else. 

Some managers cannot seem to grasp this concept and make several classes of excuses to continue to be vocationally occupied:

• "If you want something done, do it yourself" - which presupposes that you be everywhere at once, and did a bad job of training your subordinates
• "I want my people to know that I am willing to do anything that I ask them to do"—admittedly this has short term benefits—the crew thinks you're a good guy—but what about the jobs that you are really bad at?
• "We were really busy"/"We were really shorthanded"—there may be times when it is necessary to lend a hand, but what you're doing is training your people forgo thinking and just expect you to jump in. 
• "I'm a leader, not a boss, and I lead from the front"—this totally misunderstands the role of a manager, and buys into the myth that "manager" and "leader" are necessarily two different things

Most first-level supervisory jobs still require a large amount of vocational time and a small amount of management time, say 30 hours vocational and 10 hours management, with the amount of vocational decreasing and the management component increasing as your amount of responsibility rises. What happens, however, if you insist on spending the same amount of time "in the trenches" as you did when you weren't a manager, your work week will get longer. The reason that your work week will expand is that if you're keeping your vocational component at 40 hours, in your first management job in the example earlier in this paragraph, you will be working 50 hours (10 management and 40 vocational). And you're only getting paid for 40, since you're on salary - but hey, 50 hours isn't bad, right?. But as you move up in rank, the management portion will increase, so if you're still dead set on spending all that time doing things, pretty soon you'll find yourself working 70 hours a week (30 management and still 40 vocational). Your subordinates are all used to this, so trying to cut back will leave you, in effect, short-handed. 

It's a trap...but there is a way out...

Start at the beginning: Part I

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIII (More Alleged Prophecy)

But all those Old Testament prophecies came true! That's the proof!

Let's say I'm going to write about someone I met in 1994. I'm writing in 2003. In my hypothetical biography I "quote" my subject as saying that the World Trade Center towers will each be hit by an airplane on September 11, 2001. Amazing! How did he know that? Let's further speculate that my biography is quoted by several other authors and eventually it becomes "common knowledge" that my subject prophesied the 9-11 attacks seven years before they happened. I'm sure you see the problem. Since I wrote my biography after the allegedly prophesied events it's obvious that I inserted words into my putative prophets mouth based on my own knowledge of events in my own past. 

Or take another scenario. Maybe my subject actually did make a statement that was interpreted as predicting the 9-11 attacks. His prediction was along the lines of: "From the heat of the day the adversary will fly upon the king and humble him, incurring his wrath". Of course "the heat of the day" refers to the Middle Eastern, "desert" origin of the hijackers, the king is obviously the United States and the incurred wrath after being humbled can only refer to the Iraq and Afghan wars...right? Of course not! A statement composed of nonsense is twisted to fit what the listener wants to believe. 

Quite Nostradamusesque. 

Both scenarios roughly describe prophecy fulfillment in The Bible. 

Prophecy in the Gospels is mostly referring to Old Testament prophecies about Jesus that supposedly came true. One prediction that Jesus made about the future was that the Temple would be destroyed. But us it really a prediction when the person who wrote the "prediction" wrote it after the Temple had been destroyed? Even the scattered references that Jesus makes in the Gospels to his own death and resurrection that are very specific as to how long he will be in the grave were written down a generation after the events supposedly happened. Funny how no one focusses on Jesus' prophecy that the world would end and God would initiate the Kingdom of Heaven before the current generation passed away. Which didn't happen. Twenty years later Paul evidently thought the same thing and incrementally adjusted his views on the subject throughout his career. 

Scattered throughout the New Testament are references to things that were done "so that the prophecy might be fulfilled".  As I've stated before, I believe that a person existed upon whom the Gospels is based, "Jesus", and that there is a core of truth to be found in the four Gospel accounts, but that by the time the Gospels were being written myths and legends had arisen around Jesus' life and message. Some of these came about because early Christians were scouring the Old Testament looking for hints that prefigured Jesus' life in the ancient texts. Sometimes they found something that seemed to match a fact of Jesus' life in greater or lesser detail, in other cases "facts" were invented in order to match a given prophecy. Some of them are based on mistranslations or misunderstandings of what the relevant passage was saying. 

One prophecy, from Isaiah, is quoted as saying that the Lord will give a sign, a virgin will give birth and his name will be called Immanuel. There's quite a lot about this passage that debunks the idea that Isaiah was talking about the messiah being born of a virgin or that any of it referred to Jesus. Firstly, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew is quoting from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament that was available during this time period. (Most Old Testament quotes in the New Testament use the Septuagint wording, rather than the Hebrew) The Greek word in Isaiah is parthenos, which means "virgin", but the original Hebrew word is almah, which could refer to a virgin, but simply means "young woman". The second significant issue with using this verse as a prophecy of Jesus' birth is that it does not indicate anywhere in the text that it is referring to the future messiah, let alone specifically to Jesus. The verse says only that the birth of a child will be a sign. A sign of what? Subsequent verses say that before this child is old enough to differentiate good from evil both kingdoms, Judah and Israel, will be "laid waste". It further indicates who the foreign powers that will do the wasting will be. There's a few possibilities for how this verse came to be associated with Jesus. One is that there was by the time Matthew was written stories circulating that Jesus' literal father was God. By the time Matthew was written the idea that Jesus was the Son of God had well established itself. Christians, maybe even "Matthew" himself, dug up this passage in Isaiah to show how this "virgin birth" was predestined. Or, the Isaiah verse was noticed first, and the whole virgin birth scenario was created in order to make it look as if a prophecy had been fulfilled. At the very least, the alleged event, Jesus' virgin birth, was not prophesied, and at worst was cobbled together based on a mistranslation from Hebrew to Greek. Not to mention that he never, in his lifetime, was called "Immanuel". 

How about the prophecy that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Micah 5:2 mentions that one will go forth from "Bethlehem Ephrathah" and will be a a "ruler in Israel". This one at least has indications that it might be referring to the future messiah. But was Jesus a "ruler in Israel"? Sure, he said (or his biographers said) that he would be, but 2000 years on we're still waiting, aren't we? It's not impossible, or even improbable, that "Matthew" knew about this passage in Micah and created the whole story of Bethlehem, throwing in the census to provide a pretext for Mary and Joseph to be there. (Kind of an implausible pretext - what possible reason would there be for people to return to a village their ancestors had lived in a thousand years previously?) Some commentators speculate that the verse is not referring to the messiah's literal birthplace, but to his descent from King David, who according to the Books of Samuel, was from Bethlehem. And speaking of descent from King David - we all noticed that the two genealogies are different, right?

Some of these prophesies are so generic that they could apply to anyone, here are 47 of the more popular ones. If you're a believer, these will convince you that everything about Jesus was predicted thousands of years before his birth, if you're an agnostic, or a disbeliever, you'll scratch your head wondering how this would convince anyone. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XIII

These days, while still leaving open the possibility of the supernatural, I'm pretty skeptical. I operate in a mildly religious philosophical framework, but am well aware that I might be wrong. But back in the seventies and eighties I was a believer. I believed that there was a God who was intimately involved in human affairs. I believed in miracles. I believed in miraculous healing. I spoke in tongues. I prayed and fully expected to get results. 

I grew up in a Christian family in a majority Catholic neighborhood and although we all prayed and believed in God, I have to say that growing up we didn't expect results with the surety and confidence that we did in The Way. I recall a conversation with my father, one of the most observant, religious people that I knew, explaining how I really believed this stuff, and how his facial expression expressed skepticism. The Catholicism of my youth, like that of many Americans contained the caveat that God might say "no" to your prayers, a hedge against lack of results.

The Way had a different approach to hedging against lack of results: The Law of Believing. 

The Way differentiated between "faith" and "believing", even though both words were translated from the same Koine Greek word, πίστις (pistis). Although their definition of "faith" was never entirely clear, it was vaguely defined as "an inside job", something accomplished by God within you, while "believing" was an action that you took. You actively believed what God, via the Bible, said, and you acted upon that belief. For example, if the Bible said that you could be healed of disease, then you believed that promise and reaped the result of believing it. Perhaps you've spotted the hedge?

Of course the problem was that it all depended on whether or not you were really believing, and in the circular logic employed by so much of religion, if you got the desired result then it proved that you must have been believing—if you didn't get the desired result it couldn't be God's fault, you must not have been believing. In some ways this neatly solved the theological problem of why God allows bad things to happen. In Way World, God doesn't allow bad things to happen, you cause them to happen due to your lack of believing. 

This doctrine claimed that anyone who suffered from chronic illness, financial difficulty or any kind of problems simply wasn't believing. The Way also taught that fear was the opposite of believing. It was often referred to as "negative believing". It was the other side of the believing coin. They also lumped doubt and worry in with fear. You didn't dare express doubt that a certain outcome would materialize, or worry about possible layoffs at your job. This doctrine manifested itself in an almost crazed positivity, a denial that anything negative could possibly happen. People would ignore the reality of their lives in order to maintain the illusion that they were believing and not succumbing to doubt, worry, and fear.

The initial doctrine describing how believing was defined as believing what was written in the Bible morphed into several related practices. One was the tendency for Way people to say that they were believing for something, often something as insignificant as a parking space, as if parking spaces were promised in The Bible. The other was the increasing tendency to view whatever "leadership" said or did as blessed by God, so if something bad happened to a leader, or they just didn't get a desired result, it wasn't that they "weren't believing"—they were being attacked by The Adversary (Wayspeak for The Devil). In the early eighties I ran a PFAL class—and all of the students subsequently declined to further involve themselves with The Way. I was berated for my lack of believing, which obviously caused all these people to "trip out", (Wayspeak for anyone who walked away from The Way) but the wife of the state leader had the same thing happen to her and it was explained away as The Adversary attacking her "godly stand" on The Word. 

Like I mentioned in Part XII, I transferred from the Queens Village Way Home to a different Way Home in the Richmond Hill neighborhood after some incidents that should have caused me to question the whole foundation of The Way, but instead had the opposite affect of causing me to double down on my Way commitment. I didn't want to give in to fear, I wanted to manifest positive believing. During the next six months a combination of more red flags and what looked like genuine miracles pushed me even further into Way-World. The red flags perversely convincing me that a deeper commitment on my part would be the solution to eliminating these speed bumps in my life. After all, it must be my own lack of believing that was causing these issues. The apparent signs, miracles and wonders further convinced me that it was all real. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIV

Part XIII - Grocery Guy

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 After working part-time at the Cornhusker Super Saver as a stocker for around six months I noticed a lot of postings for management positions on the bulletin board in the break room. The plethora of opportunities was due to a new store opening at South 27th and Pine Lake Road. I decided to apply for the Grocery Manager slot at the 48th & O Super Saver. I thought my previous experience working as a manager at Food 4 Less and my recent time working on the Night Crew would help me get my foot in the door. I did indeed get my foot in the door and my foot stayed in the B&R Stores door, the parent company of Super Saver, for just under 17 years. 

I started as Grocery Manager for Store #4 of B&R Stores, the original Super Saver in August 1999. I got a little bit of training by Jeff, my predecessor. I would come in at 6:00am and learn how to put in a grocery order. I'd then go back to The Omaha World-Herald office to finish up my two weeks notice there and train my replacement . Other than that, it was figure it out as I went along. My second week there I was told that I was going to be on my own as the manager-in-charge for second shift on a Friday night. The Store Director and Assistant Store Director would be leaving at 5:00pm, and I would be on my own until the Night Manager arrived at 9:00pm. I had no idea what I was doing, or even where anything was. Fortunately most of the action was handled by the Front End shift supervisor, who oversaw the cashiers. A team of grocery clerks brought the shopping carts in, cleaned the bathrooms and kept the aisles and displays full. When I asked George, the Store Director, if I was going to get any training, he told me that I'd figure it out. I was the evening supervisor 1pm-10pm every Friday. The only manager in the store for 5 hours.

Friday nights were where I learned a lot about managing, not just the tasks, like ordering, but keeping all the balls in the air, dealing with angry customers, keeping all the clerks busy, making sure the Deli and the Bakery and the Meat department crews were all doing their jobs. One night, as I was making my rounds, I saw our evening janitor, Bill, gathering up trash to take out to the dumpster. Or that's what I thought he was doing. As I observed him, I saw that he was hiding items of produce under the trash bags, very carefully constructing what looked like a cart full of trash, but was really full of items that he was stealing. I called the police and had him ticketed for shoplifting. He ended up getting the charges dropped because the cop screwed up the paperwork. He had the gall to ask for his job back. He did not get it. 

I mentioned in my reminisces about my part time job with The Omaha World-Herald that my hours were different than what I thought they would be. I knew that I would be working at least one weekend day, but was surprised to learn the rest of the schedule expectations. A salaried manager was expected to work, not 40, but a minimum of 45 hours each week. Most days I was scheduled to work 6am - 3pm, with an hour for lunch, plus a half day on Wednesday, although "half day" was a misnomer. A half shift should have been 4 hours, so theoretically I should have been leaving at 10:00am, but we had a managers meeting from 9-10am, and since it was ad day, I unfailingly had vendors looking for me when I came out of the meeting. Noon was a more common time to leave. Fridays was 1-10pm without a lunch, since all the other managers left by 5:00pm. I had Sundays off.  Fortunately, shortly after I was hired we were given the choice of working 5 days or 5 ¹/₂  days, so my schedule changed to 6am - 4pm, with Thursday and Sunday off. 

Periodically our supplier, which at the time was Fleming Foods, would host a "Food Show". This was a gathering of vendors, who would promote their products, and give us an opportunity to buy quantity at lower prices. They also had an ad schedule; we had the opportunity to order our ad items in advance. An experienced grocery manager would have had a pretty good idea how much of a given product he could sell at a particular price, and order accordingly. I, on the other hand, had no idea what I was doing. I'm pretty sure my orders bore no relationship to what we could potentially sell. It was possible to check the computer database to see what had sold the last time a specific product was in the ad, but this computer was inaccessible at the Food Show. One vendor, who was known as a weaselly sort, offered to sell me some Rotel, which sold well during Super Bowl.  I checked the database and ordered accordingly. The problem was that the database listed sales in units - I thought it represented cases. If I remember correctly we sold about 100 units around Super Bowl the previous year, which meant I needed 8-10 cases of 12 each. I ordered 100 cases. The vendor had to have known that I was making a rookie mistake, but let the order go through. We eventually sold it all, but it took all year! I never trusted that guy again. 

Years later all bulk or pallet sized orders originated in the corporate office. But when I was first promoted to grocery manager we had the freedom to order large quantities and run our own internal sales. I would regularly order a truckload of Old Orchard cranberry juice and other flavors, figure out what price point I wanted sell them at, calculate what price I needed to buy them at to achieve our gross profit goal, and negotiate with the supplier to get my target price. For about a year I would order a truckload every quarter and sell the whole delivery in less than two weeks. 

There were definitely some interesting characters in that store. Don, the Assistant Grocery Manager, was one of those guys who had a story for every occasion. He was a guitarist, and he used to talk about having played with some famous people, including David Crosby. No one believed what we thought were just tall tales until several years later talking with some local musicians who confirmed that he had indeed played with David Crosby! 

Terry was our janitor. He was a scruffy little guy with a giant moustache, who always seemed down on his luck. He would share his financial woes with the rest of us, woes that boiled down to him spending money foolishly. A couple of us offered to help him manage his money for a few months, especially since he was constantly taking out high interest payday loans to make ends meet, which always put him further behind, but he refused. The craziest thing he was involved in was getting involved with a woman in another state. This was around the year 2000, the infancy of the internet, and I don't remember how they got in touch. Despite being chronically broke he paid for her and her adult daughter to move here whereupon she moved in with him, hooked up with another guy, and kicked him out of his own apartment. He was the only person who I ever gave a zero to on an category of his annual review. This was in the category of appearance. There were a lot of issues there, but coming to work with a large hole in the seat of his jeans...while not wearing underwear, earned him that zero. 

Our maintenance man was another guy named Don. I don't remember him doing much maintaining, just a lot of walking around or standing up front with his arms crossed when we were busy. One busy holiday afternoon, while we were overrun with customers and having trouble keeping up I asked him to fill a few displays (rather than standing up front with his arms folded). He responded that he wasn't any good at that and went back to standing up front doing nothing. He was once asked to build a mobile podium for the cashiers' managers to use. The tiny wheels he put on it bent under the weight of the wood after one shift. 

I was assigned by the store director to do Don's annual review. The reviews had 15 categories where we rated the employees on a scale of 0 - 4. A "2" indicated that an employee was just doing the basics, but not really doing anything outstanding. It was a typical score for someone new. A "3" meant that they were an excellent employee. "4's" were rare, but I always tried to find some reason to give a few. Some managers maintained that they meant "perfect", which was incorrect—it was more like "over and above", or "an example to others". If you didn't miss any work and showed up in the proper uniform every day I gave you a "4" in the attendance and uniform categories. (A "1" meant you had areas that were well below standard; a "0" was rare enough that I only gave out one in 17 years. I gave Don a pretty good review. A couple of "4's" and "2's" and mostly "3's". Weirdly he sat through the review sullenly declining to give an feedback or response. After we were done he stomped into the store director's office and slammed the door. He thought that he should have received all "4's" and complained about his review. Fortunately, the store director backed me up that time. 

I was still involved in The Way at that time, and despite my theoretical management knowledge I wasn't a very good manager at the time. The Way subscribed to the "Yelling" school of leadership, believing that a leader's title gave them claim on respect and obedience. I had internalized that lesson and exercised it at Super Saver. While this approach made me unpopular, it didn't do much to harm my career, since being an asshole only hurt a manager if their sales and profits were below budget. The abuses of managers who were making money for the company were routinely ignored. (A produce manager who ran a very profitable department in a very profitable store literally assaulted an employee, choking him in the back room, with no repercussions)

My biggest challenge during my time as a Grocery Manager was my relationship with the Night Crew. In theory the Grocery Manager decided what displays would be built and where, directing the work of the Night Crew. The Grocery Manager did the daily ordering which determined their nightly work load. The problem here was that the Night Crew had very firm ideas about how things what they would do and how things should be done. My own inexperience added to the mess. In theory, the Grocery Manager was supposed to "walk the store" first thing in the morning to make sure the Night Crew had left everything in order. In practice, any changes or input were going to be ignored. Very soon after I started, Mike, the Assistant Store Director, pointed out a few minor things to me that he thought needed to be changed, and that he wanted me to communicate to the Night Crew. They were so minor I can't even remember what they were, but when I talked to Alex, the Night Manager, about it, he out and out refused my instructions. If you've read my series on managers, you know that a manager has several possible sources of leverage over their employees. 

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence others due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

There were several problems that stymied my ability to get the Night Crew to do what I needed them to do. 

1. I wasn't technically the Night Manager's boss - he was very aware that, although I was responsible to give them direction, on the org chart we were equal. I didn't have any formal authority to tell them what to do
2. I had no control over pay, vacation, promotion. There was nothing I could do for them. 
3. I couldn't force them - same as #2. There was nothing I could do to them. 
4. I couldn't dazzle them with my deep knowledge of merchandising or even stock crew operations, because I didn't have either. To them I was an outsider (true) whose only experience was six months as a stocker. My many years experience as a manager was worthless to them. 
5. I've worked for managers who got things done simply because they were good people that their employees would do anything for. I've been that manager on occasion. These guys had no respect for anyone, least of all me. 

The problem was exacerbated by the refusal of the Store Director to address the problem. I exacerbated it myself a couple of months after I started. Thanksgiving was coming up, my first big holiday as a manager. As the big day approached I kept hearing the phrase "double truck". Due to the holiday, one of our regular deliveries would be eliminated, so extra stock needed to be ordered to make up the difference. But I took the term "double truck" very literally. If normal procedure called for one case, I ordered two. If it called for two cases, I ordered four. When I arrived at work the next morning the aisles were choked with stock that would not fit on the shelves. Craig, the Assistant Store Director (the previously mentioned Mike had transferred to a new store) had to literally prevent Alex from assaulting me. 

My lack of experience coupled with the Night Crew's lack of respect for me or anyone else escalated. One night a member of the forklift crew ripped up a list of changes that I left for them right in front of me. Alex refused to walk the aisles with me in the morning, despite our VP of Operations and Store Director mandating that it be done. It finally came to a head during a meeting that included me, Assistant Grocery Manager Don, the Night Manager and his Assistant Night Manager, the Store Director and Assistant Store Director. I don't know if Alex had complained about me, or if store management finally saw a problem that needed to be resolved. The meeting was tense, but it seemed like we were getting things figured out. Alex and his assistant talked about the amount of time it took to execute a change in a display and I promised to keep the operational side of things in mind when planning. It all appeared to be headed for resolution; I summed up my side of things by saying that I just wanted to have open communication. Alex responded with "Well, I'm communicating that you don't really know what you're doing" or something similar. Store Director George attempted to smooth that over by asking both of us if we could work together moving forward. Alex shrugged and gave an answer something like "I'll do what I can". George was prepared to accept this, but Assistant Store Director Craig exploded. He asked Alex what he meant by that. What he thought "doing what I can" entailed. He ripped into him for his comment about communication. He ripped into him for his attitude. He made it clear that he thought that the problems between day and night teams were entirely Alex's fault. 

From that moment on I had an ally in Craig. Even though Alex didn't respect Craig either (he had recently left another grocery chain to work for Super Saver), Craig did have real authority over the Night Manager and backed up my decisions, while at the same time teaching me how to be better at my job.

Not long after this meeting most of the bulk and truckload ordering had moved from store level to the corporate office. All available storage space was rapidly being filled. Unlike Food 4 Less, the back rooms at Super Saver were small and were not designed to store large quantities. Overstock was stacked on top of the warehouse racking on the sales floor. All of that top deck space had been filled and pallets were being stacked three high on the floor near the check stands, and in other areas of the store not designed for storage. Alex and his crew complained to no avail, until one day, fed up with the mess, Alex and several of his most experienced forklift drivers walked out. This left us short staffed, but no one missed Alex. 

The two years that I worked at the 48th & O Super Saver were in some ways the last gasp of the old school way of running a grocery store. I mentioned earlier that bulk ordering shifted to the corporate office. Adequate staffing was coming to an end. In Super Savers the Grocery Manager oversaw the janitors and grocery clerks, who were responsible for bringing in carts from the lot and generally keeping the store in order. In those days there would be four grocery clerks and a "utility clerk" (basically a janitor) on duty in the evenings, with six clerks on weekends. It wasn't long before Walmart came to town, resulting in fewer sales. The corporate answer was always to cut labor. By the time I left Super Savers in 2013 we were lucky if we had two grocery clerks on duty at any time. Before the cutbacks having that many unspecialized staff meant that not only could you handle special events that required extra staff, like anniversary cake giveaways, but if someone called in sick in another department you could loan them out to check, or stock dairy, or fill produce racks. Corporate never seemed to understand the effect that cutting staff had. Their answer to staffing shortages was, for years to come, was to "just get a grocery clerk to do it", when there were no grocery clerks to do it!

Another change was the bonus structure. For some reason Grocery, Frozen, Dairy, General Merchandise (GMD) and Spirits Managers were not eligible for bonuses, but the so-called perishable departments, Meat, Deli, Bakery and Produce were able to earn quite lucrative bonuses. A Meat Manager could conceivably make $60,000-70,000 in bonuses on top of a typical $35,000 (typical for the 80's) a year salary. The potential bonuses were much reduced, which angered many long term managers, especially the Meat managers who had grown to expect the large payouts as part of their salary. 

After about two years as a Grocery Manager I started to set my sights on a promotion to Assistant Store Director (ASD). My own ASD had started coaching me on some of the responsibilities of the position and I felt confident that I would be able to step up. There had been some changes with store directors retiring and ASDs moving up, leaving several open positions. I considered applying for the position in one of the smaller stores, but my ASD counselled me to wait, suggesting that something better would open up soon. In fact, he was promoted to store director, opening up an ASD position in my own store. I interviewed for the position and was offered the job. However, unknown to me, Tom S, the Operations VP, was offering the same job to Lonnie, the Grocery Manager at the Cornhusker Super Saver. So I had to interview again, this time for the ASD position at the Cornhusker store. Brian, who had hired me as a stocker two years before, was still in charge and hired me as the Assistant Store Director for his store. 

Time for the next new adventure.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XIV