Sometimes, things happen that are so strange that all you can do is hold them in your heart and ponder them until God grants you some insight into them.

One of those things happened to me the other day. I received a message on Facebook from someone whose name I will not divulge. If you know me well enough, you'll know who it is, but I don't want to embarrass him. All I can say is that there may be only two people in the world it would have surprised me more to hear from. One is the man who provided half of my genetic material, a man I haven't seen or heard from since the fall of 1952.

I was 2.

The other is my first wife, who I haven't seen or heard from since the spring of 1982. Ironically, those two people have first names that rhyme.

<em>Huh?</em>

Never mind. The person who messaged me was my last employer, who fired me in January 2008. We had had run-ins before, and I always felt like we had a difficult relationship. I'm not going to go into any details, because it truly is old news and I worked very hard to put it behind me. I had never heard from this man, and I was frankly stunned to hear from him when I did.

He wrote me to say he had been fooling around on his iPad and had come across this Website. My most recent post that he saw was one in which I expressed disgust with myself for letting myself go this year. He told me I needed to remember I was a good man, and that my love for my wife and children clearly show that. Then he wished me the best.

I answered him by saying how surprised I was to hear from him, and that I appreciated his kind words and had no hard feelings about what had happened four years ago.

[caption id="attachment_1443" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Where I once worked"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/DSCN0073.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1443" title="DSCN0073" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/DSCN0073-300x224.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="224" /></a>[/caption]

I honestly didn't know what else to say.

I've been thinking about it on and off ever since, and I've come to the conclusion that this is one of those things that is very possible to over-think. I got fired in January 2008 -- I thought unfairly -- but dozens of other employees were let go in the next couple of months in an effort to cut the payroll.

In fact, the company has never stopped cutting back ever since.

So the idea that I would have continued working there isn't worth considering. I chose an industry that, if it isn't dying, is certainly shedding jobs only slightly slower than the buggy whip companies did after Henry Ford came along.

I loved my job for a long time, but by 2008 it had changed enough that most of the joy I previously felt had disappeared.

I found myself retired earlier than I had hoped, but the fact is, my wife and I are very well-off financially and -- 3 1/2 weeks before my 62nd birthday -- I am very happy not to be punching a time clock.

Last year in Texas, when I had my epiphany, I realized that only three things really matter in the way we live our lives. If we love God, if we let go of past regrets and if we love others as we love ourself, we can't really go wrong.

So why my former employer wrote me doesn't matter.

All that really matters is that it was a nice thing for him to do.

Maybe someday I'll hear from Wesley and Lesl

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