I work for an attorney who has 60 attorneys and about 250 people total in the firm. We have 15 offices all over the city. I answer his phone. So every day, I never know what’s going to come up and I frequently think that it’s like working in an emergency room because even though the patients aren’t all bloody and messed up, mentally they are really upset and fearful and angry when they call and it’s my job to either find them someone who can help them or tell them I don’t know how to help them. If I can’t help them, right over the phone I ask if they mind if I pray for them and I ask God to lead them to exactly the right person to help them and I’ve never gotten in trouble yet for doing that.
One evening six weeks ago, at about 5 o’clock, a woman named Emma left a message on my voice mail who worked in one of our outer offices. She was asking my boss to call her about a problem. So I called her, and she burst into tears. Our firm had garnished her wages 100% and she had no money to feed her two little boys. It turned out that her husband had abandoned her and the children 6 months before. When he left, he agreed to pay half of the rent on their house but he never made a single payment. She never found out from the landlady that he never paid his half all those months. She just got a call from a neighbor one day that everything she owned had been tossed out on the front lawn, except the valuable stuff, which the landlady stole.
The landlady then got a court to garnish Emma’s wages for payment of the rent and because Emma was a contract employee with us, and not a permanent employee, the law says you can do that – you can take 100% of a person’s wages. Emma was never served with the garnishment papers because by then she had moved into a hotel. The first she knew about it was when the court saw that her social security number was receiving wages from our firm and they issued an order to our firm to divert all Emma’s wages to the landlady.
So Emma called very upset, and the reason she was calling my boss, as the head of the company, was that no one in our human resources department was giving her any sympathy whatsoever and she desperately needed someone to stop this garnishment.
Well, I had had quite a day with a lot of calls and I said, “I’ve got to hang up and just think about this. I’ll call you in five minutes.” I made a couple of phone calls and I found out that in the state of Georgia, if a woman has children and she does not have a permanent address, those children will be taken away from her. They will not give her any money, they just put the kids in foster care. So it was no use going to the state for help.
I sat back in my chair, and I realized that it was God who had put it in this woman’s heart to call the president of the company because He knew she would get me. I was just so worn out that day, and I said, “God, why me?” And as clear as I ever heard the voice of God, he said, “Because you’re the one.” Later I found out I was the perfect choice to help this woman.
So I called her back and told her I’d meet her at her hotel at 8 o’clock. My husband came too, and we both liked her instantly. She was from Michigan and had a bouncy, upbeat personality and a great sense of humor. She wasn’t about to give up even though her back was up against a wall! She was also saved and filled with the spirit, so she was trusting God to help her. She thanked us profusely for coming. The first thing we dealt with was paying for her to stay another week at the hotel. Then we took her and the kids out to dinner so she could tell us a little about herself and how she had ended up in this mess. Then we took her back to the room and while the boys went to sleep, we laid hands on her, anointed her with oil, and prayed for her. I just took authority over the devil and put some protection on her and asked God to lead her to people who could help her and work the whole thing out. We left her with enough money to get her through to the weekend.
Next day, she emailed me that she had perfect peace in her heart when she went to sleep that night. She woke up the next morning, and the Lord right away led her to a law firm that provides free legal service to people who need it and they immediately offered to help her.
Meanwhile, I went to human resources at my firm and asked them what they could do to help her. The woman who runs it was being extremely hard hearted and wouldn’t budge. She was being advised by one of our attorneys who told her there was nothing they could do but withdraw all 100% of her wages.
Emma had been advised by her attorney to declare bankruptcy because the minute you declare bankruptcy, all garnishments are disallowed. So the bankruptcy attorney sent a letter to my firm demanding the wages and my firm just ignored it. Ignored several letters. For several days. I was so mad at HR and this attorney who was advising them I just wanted to beat them up. Finally, I told Emma’s bankruptcy attorney to sue the attorney at my firm who was holding everything up and they did. And rather than go through with the expense of a law suit, he finally just wrote the check. And who did he send it to? Her old address and she never got it. Fortunately, one of my best friends works in Accounting and I had her stop payment on his check and issue a new one and I got it to Emma that day. She was able to put a deposit on a house she had her eye on and moved in. And where was that house? 2 miles from me. That’s why I was the perfect choice to help her! Atlanta is a HUGE city.
Well, while this was going on, before Emma finally got her check, I was with two of my friends having dinner one night. Exactly one year before, my friend’s husband had killed himself and my other friend and I knew we couldn’t let her be alone on that day. So we were having dinner when my cell phone rang. I just about fainted. It was Emma’s husband who had abandoned her. He told me, “Emma told me what you did for her, that you saw her through such a hard time and you didn’t even know her. And I was so ashamed that I put her in that situation that I just asked her to forgive me and we are back together now and I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you did for Emma and my two boys.” And I said, “LeRoy, look, I receive your thanks and appreciate this call very, very much. But I do want you to know that it is Jesus Christ who orchestrated this whole thing and I felt from the beginning his concern for Emma and your children. He really let me know how important they were to him and let me know he expected me to help them.” And he answered, “Kathy, up till now I have never wanted to hear about Jesus Christ. But my ears are open now. They are op-en.” So Emma and her husband and their two boys now live two miles from my house! And we have become really good friends and for the first time in his life, he is willing to listen to someone tell him about Jesus. There is a fantastic church about 40 miles from us in south Atlanta and the two of them get in the car every Sunday and drive down there. Emma said he never showed any interest in anything about Jesus before but every Sunday he gets them in that car now and off they go.
Now isn’t that an amazing story? Could I ever have dreamt that would be the outcome when I first got that phone call? What would have happened if I had said, “I’m sorry, m’am, this is out of my hands, you’ll have to abide by what Human Resources tells you. I can’t help you?” I would have missed an awesome opportunity to show the love of God to someone. What I learned from this is that God was really at work behind the scenes in this situation, very aware of how much Emma was hurting, but he was also dependent on someone with feet and hands to get out there and do the job. And after that I prayed, “Lord, please keep me sensitive. Please don’t let me miss an opportunity to be your voice and your hands and your feet. In Jesus name, amen.”