tony and the tale of the missing camper

One of the greater challenges I faced in my first few months at my job was a co-worker named Tony. He was a nice man, for sure, and his faith often challenged me with its sincerity. But Tony had a crush on me. This in itself isn't a bad thing, except that Tony is 18 years my senior, has three kids, and was only in the early stages of recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. I wasn't interested, but Tony wasn't in the best emotional place to just accept that. So I spent months trying to show grace while also setting firm boundaries, which added a whole lot of stress onto the already stressful load I was carrying.

And then Tony vanished. He left a meeting to run an errand and never came back--just texted to say where we could find his office keys, and for me, where to find the deed to the camper he'd just purchased. As I feared, I was the only one who got a letter of any kind, a five page oddity that centered around a prophecy about my next few years. Exceedingly weird. Without Tony, we all had to work about 90 hours that week. And now, though I in no way wanted it, I was the owner of a small camper made to fit on the truck that Tony had agreed to buy from me. I wanted neither truck nor camper nor weird letter.

Hug the monkey (wrench).

As much as Tony's exit was poorly executed, one silver lining shone brightly: I would no longer have to deal with weird emotional interactions with this co-worker/friend. That's a monkey wrench I can hug. But the camper? Now I had Johnny, the guy who'd sold it to Tony, telling me I needed to get it off the property it was stored on. I was annoyed in the extreme. The annoyance was slightly lessened, however, when I began to realize that I had basically been given a gift that would be 100% profit. I could sell that puppy for a few hundred bucks and pay off a few bills.

Yes indeed, hug that monkey (wrench).

So I set off on the still annoying but now-hopeful task of finding a buyer. The first prospect fell through, and I let it slide for a while. But then they came out of the woodworks, and I had just had a phone chat with a very interested buyer. Taking a walk later that evening, I decided to stroll past the storage place so I could chuckle again at my silly, rickety camper.

Gone. The camper was nowhere to be found. Wandering into the storage area, I talked with someone who told me it had been given away. Johnny had gotten impatient, made up some story about how the girl who'd bought it (aka, me) had lost the bill of sale, and told someone to take it away. Gone. No more camper. Dude couldn't even tell me who'd taken it.

Wait a second: Did someone just steal my monkey (wrench)?

It was funny, being so confused about how I was supposed to feel. One the one hand, I didn't have to worry about the damn monkey (wrench) Tony had so abruptly tossed into my lap. No more stress of trying to get the thing into someone else's hands. On the other hand, I had begun to count on that money for a few bills, and instead of cash I'd gotten a nasty phone conversation with the man who gave my camper away. The monkey (wrench) had become part of the plan, and now someone had, well...thrown a wrench into it. What am I supposed to be hugging here?

In the end, I laugh about the whole thing. True, I could have used that money, but it wasn't like I paid anything for the camper in the first place, and I'll get by just fine. Mostly, the camper was a pain in the rear, rudley dumped on me, and I had not at all been excited about having to sell it. All the other details that Tony had tossed a wrench into--from the sale of my truck to the way things run at work--had become oportunities to see God at work, always taking care of me the way only he knows how. This, too, was such an opportunity. The same God who knows how much money I need, also knows how much stress I can handle, and so he removed some of it. He stole my camper.

Breathe a sigh of relief, and hug the monkey (wrench).