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The Scary Messenger of Change

I settled into my new house in the spring of 1991, and it seemed like I was living a dream. I was completely content with everything around me: family, business, and the Temple community. The perfection of what I was surrounded by was enough to challenge the rational mind. And I was always aware that I had never asked for any of it—I was living in a life made by the flow of life.

I can look back now and see the exact moment when the winds ushering in the next period of change first blew across my face. I didn’t understand what was coming at the time, but at least I knew enough to embrace whatever was taking place. I had already learned time and again that it didn’t matter if I understood what was happening; it was sufficient to devote myself to the present moment and trust that the flow of life knew what it was doing. The flow of events that happened next was so miraculous that it had the effect of permanently freeing me from an entire layer of my personal mind. If life could pull off these events, how could I not completely surrender to her perfection?

Before we begin, however, I have a confession to make: I cannot foretell the future. There was no possible way I could have known that in order to keep up with Personalized Programming’s destined growth, it would not be sufficient to double or even triple my current twenty-five employees; I would need to grow to more than three hundred employees. What is more, I could never have imagined that our building needs would have to grow from our current forty-three hundred square feet to over eighty-five thousand square feet to provide for what was coming. If someone had tried to tell me this back in the early ’90s, I would have considered them crazy! Yet to grow like that, there had better be some planning. Apparently there was, but it certainly wasn’t by me.

This amazing story of how life’s perfection provided for our future growth began one Friday afternoon when a zoning inspector suddenly showed up at our office. He seemed very surprised to see a business out here in the woods, and he told me to call his boss, the head of county zoning, right away. That was how it all started, and it seemed very ominous.

I knew the head of zoning from my work with Built with Love. I gave him a call, and after some pleasantries he explained to me that even though the public was not frequenting my business location, I did not have the required zoning for a business out here. I explored possible solutions with him, including getting the zoning changed or obtaining a special exception permit, all to no avail. To make his point ironclad, he told me that due to the state land usage plan, even if my father were president of the United States and I had a million dollars to spend on the effort—I could not get legal business zoning on any part of our property.

Realizing that I would be in big trouble if he shut me down, I shifted to damage control. I told him that I appreciated his position and asked him what I should do. He told me to start looking for a piece of land down on the main highway since that would be the closest business zoning to our property. My heart dropped as I realized that this little piece of heaven that had come together organically over the years was about to change. The main highway was a minimum of three miles away, and the distance to available property would likely be much greater.

I took a deep breath, raised my chin up, and gave him my word that I would take care of the problem. I requested a reasonable amount of time to find the land and make the move. He didn’t promise me anything but said he would be checking back with me to be sure we were coming into compliance with the requirements.

This is how life managed to not so subtly nudge me into looking for a new business location. The moment I hung up, I went into Rick Karl’s office to get his legal advice. Rick agreed that we had no real basis out here in the middle of agricultural zoning to get spot zoning for a small business. So we called a Realtor to start looking for the closest possible business property. I, of course, didn’t want to move the business from the Temple, but my experiment with surrender meant I had to stay open and see where the flow of life’s events would lead me. Months went by, one after another, but nothing suitable showed up. With each passage of time, the risk increased that the county would shut us down. Nonetheless, I was patiently waiting for life to make her move.

In September of that year, life made her next move. We received a phone call from the person who had sold us the beautiful eighty-five-acre piece of property a year earlier. He now wanted to sell the adjoining fifty acres that ran up to the paved county road. It fit in perfectly with the Temple property, so we went ahead and bought it. There was no way at the time we could have ever imagined that this purchase would end up related to Personalized Programming’s search for legal business zoning. We were just dealing with what was put in front of us.

A few months later another property event unfolded that we had to deal with. It seemed that someone was planning to build a 185-acre construction waste dump directly across the street from the fifty acres the Temple had just purchased. We looked into the matter and were shocked to find that it was true. The piece of land had been annexed into the City of Alachua years ago and was no longer under county zoning. The land was owned by a prominent city commissioner, and he had recently sold it to be used as a construction waste dump. It was projected that for the next twenty years, a hundred large dump trucks would be driving down our road seven days a week and dumping on property directly adjoining ours and our neighbors’. So much for the flow of life—I thought we were supposed to be led into green pastures, not garbage dumps!

The neighborhood was in an uproar. The Temple was the largest landowner in the area, and people started asking us what to do. We looked into it, and it appeared that the City of Alachua had the authority to grant a special use permit for a waste dump—if city commissioners chose to do so. We really had no choice but to focus our attention on this matter, to the detriment of the search for our new office property.

We decided that our best course of action was to write a letter informing the citizens of Alachua that since there was no comprehensive waste management plan for the city, a dump could be placed anywhere, including on the vacant lot next to their house. The goal was to push the city into passing a comprehensive waste management plan instead of arbitrarily issuing special use permits, as they were about to do for this dump.

Believe it or not, it actually worked. The night of the city commissioners’ meeting on the topic, City Hall was jam-packed with a standing-room-only crowd. Before calling the meeting to order, the mayor stood up and told everyone not to worry because there was not going to be a vote on a special use permit tonight, or any other night, until the city passed a comprehensive waste management plan. The commission thanked the citizens for their input and committed to working on a plan as soon as possible.

Little did we know that our victory regarding the garbage dump was really life’s miraculous hand taking care of Personalized Programming’s zoning issue. A few days later, we got a call informing us that because the waste dump did not get its permit, the 185-acre piece of property had suddenly come up for sale at a very reasonable price. Since the property was in the City of Alachua, we were told that it was possible to get it zoned for business usage. I will never forget Rick’s face when he walked into my office to tell me of his conversation with the Realtor. The impossible had happened—the flow of life had just unfolded in a way that led to a phone call telling us that instead of a waste dump adjoining Temple property, we could put our business there. Rick and I just sat in silence for a while. The feeling of awe and grace in that room was so powerful that neither of us could move, let alone speak.

Just look at what Rick and I had witnessed in the past six months. First, life had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to leave my office on Temple property and find a new location. When I tried to comply, nothing would fall into place. Then, out of the blue, we were presented with a piece of land that would ultimately connect Temple property to our future office property, without us having the slightest idea of what was really going on. The flow of life then presented us with what appeared to be a terrible situation wherein someone was preparing to build a waste dump adjoining our property. But what was really going on was that life was preparing to give us a great gift—the most perfect piece of land for Personalized Programming’s future. This land adjoined Temple property and could get legal business zoning, something we had previously been told was impossible out here where we lived. And let’s not forget that all this happened while I only had twenty-five employees and could not possibly have known that I would ever need anything like this—but apparently life knew, and she certainly took good care of us. So it came to be. Personalized Programming now had legal business zoning on property adjoining the Temple’s land. It was time to build.

With so much land having come in such a miraculous manner, I was forced to rethink my plans for the size of the new office building. I stretched my thoughts into the realm of building something that assured that we would never have to build again. We designed a beautiful, 14,500-square-foot office building that was worthy of a company as successful as Personalized Programming. Built with Love, which I had sold many years ago to one of my job foremen, built the building, and it turned out exquisite. In June 1993, Personalized Programming moved its twenty-five employees just down the road to their new home. We moved from 4,300 square feet to 14,500—at least we would never have to build again.

Amazingly, that did not turn out to be the case. Over the next year we more than doubled in size and had to start planning for another building. Building 2 was even larger than Building 1 and adjoined to it with a covered walkway. It’s a good thing that life had given us enough land to handle this totally unexpected expansion. By the time it was all done, we ended up with five buildings, giving us more than 85,000 square feet of high-tech office space. To this day, I stand in awe of how life unfolded so perfectly to provide us exactly what we needed, exactly when we needed it.