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The Master Builder

When something is meant to be, it’s fascinating watching it unfold, one event after the other. To begin with, I had to deal with the money that was coming in. These were all small home improvement jobs, but they were bringing in much more money than I was used to dealing with. It turned out that Radha had some experience in bookkeeping. During summer vacations, she used to help out in the bookkeeping department at the Florida Farm Bureau, where her father was president. I’d never seen anyone use an adding machine as fast as her fingers could fly across the keys. I had minored in accounting in college, so together we set up the company’s books. I imagine my CPA brother-in-law, Harvey, must have been surprised when I called him for advice on setting up a business. He filed the paperwork to incorporate Built with Love and offered to look over the books and handle the annual tax returns. This had to be the smallest business in the world that had a CPA. As usual, it all seemed like overkill to me, until the next unlikely event took place.

Not long after the start of Built with Love, we were meeting on the field one Sunday after services. It was our tradition to get together in a big circle for community announcements before sharing tea and cookies. After announcements, a man came up to me and said he had heard I was doing some building. I concurred, and he asked me if I could use a builder license. Any permits needed so far had been pulled by the home owner, but it would be good to have a contractor license in case anything bigger showed up. I told him I would be interested, and he informed me that he had a builder license that I could use. He had the look of a devoted hippie, and I hadn’t pictured him as a licensed contractor. I asked him how he came about having a license. He told me that a few years earlier there had been a period of dispute between the county and state licensing agencies. During that time, anyone could fill out the paperwork and be issued a contractor license. He had done just that, and now he had an active license. It seemed too good to be true. I called the county the next day and asked about the license number he had given me. I was informed that the license was active and in good standing, and I was free to work out any arrangement whereby Built with Love could utilize the license.

Just in case the flow of life hadn’t already been impressive enough, I was now a licensed contractor. And it was a good thing, because I soon had a very special building project to do on Temple property. It seems Donna’s twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin was not going to be big enough to house both her and the child she was expecting. I would not have had the wherewithal to build an addition onto her house just a few months earlier. The perfection of the Universal Flow I had been surrendering to had taken care of the problem before I even knew there was one. We hadn’t changed our lifestyle, so the funds that Built with Love had been earning all got plowed back into the Temple’s property. I knocked out an entire side of Donna’s cabin and built an addition that included room for a crib and a proper bathroom.

Our daughter, Durga Devi, was born in August 1977. Amrit, Mataji, and many others sent her traditional gifts of blessings for health, prosperity, and spirituality. She was born into what had become a spiritual community. It was going to be very interesting to see how she would grow up.

You would think that it was time to settle in and digest all the changes that had taken place in our lives. I had always lived within my means, even when earning $350 a month as a part-time teacher at Santa Fe. Now, Built with Love was earning me a few thousand a month on top of my Santa Fe salary. There was certainly no need for more income—at least that’s what I thought. It had become a pattern of mine to think, or wish, that an energy flow was complete when, in fact, it had just begun. It’s a good thing I was following the energy and not leading it, because the Universal Plan was always much more expansive than my mind could imagine.

Just before Durga was born, I received a call from a commercial outfit wanting to convert an ABC liquor store in Gainesville into a clothing store. I had never done a commercial job, but it was permitted under Built with Love’s license. By then I had a crew doing most of the work, and I was driving around in a pickup truck playing contractor. I got the job, but before I could even begin, the fun started. The woman in charge of getting the store open called me and insisted that I come over immediately for a meeting. When I arrived, she explained that they had changed their plans and needed some extra work done. I offered to work up a change in price, but she got very irate and said she didn’t care about the cost; she wanted it done right away. As her energy got intense, I began to quiet my breath and focus on my mantra. Even back then I used my work in the world as an opportunity to let go of myself and remain calmly centered. I politely, though somewhat kiddingly, asked if she wanted me to immediately drive to where my crew was working, pull them off the job, and have them do the extra work right away. I knew I was in trouble when she said, “Yes, that is exactly what I want.” I told her that it was going to be an expensive proposition, and she told me in no uncertain terms that she was on a very tight schedule and throughout the job would be demanding a lot of me, but her company was willing to pay whatever it took to get it done. I assured her that I would do the best I could to help them out.

Throughout the job, she kept changing things and wanting everything done yesterday. But she also kept throwing money at the job to be sure I was properly motivated. I got the work done in close to half the time originally allotted, in spite of all the changes. With all the bonuses, change orders, and overtime charges, I walked away from that job in just four weeks with a profit of around $35,000. I remember that amount because it was way beyond the few thousand a month I had been earning and because of what happened next. I received a call from a neighbor who owned one of the five-acre lots that adjoined our land. She had been building two very rustic cabins on her property but had now decided to move. She informed me that she would accept $37,000 if I could come up with the up-front cash she wanted.

To say I was humbled by the fact that I had just earned almost exactly the same amount of money on that very strange job would be an understatement. I saw a synchronous flow that I would never forget for the rest of my life. Was this part of some Universal Plan that the Temple expand beyond the original ten acres? I had no interest in such an expansion; I had never even thought of it. But the money was there, and it was obvious what it was intended for. None of this had anything to do with me—I was just the middleman, the caretaker. I didn’t feel like the money was mine. I had never asked for it or gone out of my way to get a single job for Built with Love. The jobs just came by word of mouth, one after the other, and I served them to the best of my ability. All I had to do now was simply step aside and allow the money from that very strange job to be used to purchase our neighbor’s property in the name of the Temple.