About 6 months after my family and I had moved from Cleveland, Ohio, to Wellington, New Zealand, in 1992, we received notice of a legal judgment against us for damages to the property in which we lived in Cleveland.
I was stunned. This came out of nowhere. We didn’t know that our former landlord had even begun legal proceedings against us as he had served all documents at the Cleveland office of Ian’s company, which were never passed onto us. He was suing us for the theft of various items that he had left in the attic of the house whilst we lived there and for leaving the property in an unclean state. Both claims were incontrovertibly false.
The financial claim for damages, which had been awarded against us was for only a few hundred dollars. But it was not the money I was worried about. I was affronted at the sheer falsity of the action, but beneath that, I had a sickening fear of damage to the reputation of both Ian and I with Ian’s company, something to which I could never speak to defend.
I was extremely unsettled and anxious about this. The sting of the injustice of it all was intense. We had been denied our day in court to defend ourselves and now we had to bear the attack on our reputation and integrity. A court of the land had decided, and officially declared, I was both a thief and a slattern. I was powerless to do anything about it, and it was this seeming powerlessness that led to an increasing sense of anxiety and anger.
I remember one night I just could not sleep, my mind was racing. I moved to a bunk bed in the kids’ room so as not to disturb Ian. I ruminated over this unfair attack on me and my good name for some time. In the dark and quiet of night, as I hit bottom of my self-pity pit, with nowhere else to go, I started to ask for spiritual help.
No sooner had I mentally reached out for inspiration and assistance a Bible passage came instantly to mind. It is from the Book of Matthew, where Jesus says:
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.
The New Living Translation of the Bible puts it this way:
If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat, too.
This was exactly the inspiration I needed to let go of all of this. To find peace and resolution I had to trust the Powers That Be and abandon all attachment to being heard to reestablish my good name. I realized I had to accept the situation as it was and know that if I had not done anything to effect my reputation then any such attack could only ever be fruitless and ineffectual. But I had to trust.
In the morning I told Ian to communicate to the Cleveland office that, in the effort to achieve resolution of this matter we were willing to pay the claim. Interestingly, we never heard about this matter again. It just went away.
Whilst we were living in Wellington I made friends with a guy who was doing his PhD in Tort Law - the body of law which enables one to achieve restoration and reparation for damage, injury or loss due to the wrongful action of others. He told me that he had discovered that people involved in legal disputes under tort law actually do not begin to heal until their dispute has been resolved and the legal action ended.
Whatever needs to be done to resolve and end all disputes must be done, otherwise we will never know peace. There is nothing else for it. If we want peace, there can be no disputes.
