A Billionaire's Blessings and Pitfalls

The Art of Unlearning, Chapter 8, Part 2

I get a lot of speaking requests, but this was my first “sailing” request.

“You want me to go on a real-life sailboat, with about a hundred other people, and cruise around the Caribbean?” I asked, with the representative on a speaker phone.

“Yes!” my wife was shouting in the background. “The answer is yes!”

“And how often would I speak?”

“You wouldn’t. We want you to be our guest. ‘Sherm’ and ‘Shirley’[1] appreciate what you do for other couples and want you and Lisa to have a trip where you can just learn from others, enjoy some time together, and see the sites.”

“If you don’t say yes, you’re never going to speak at another marriage conference ever again,” I heard in the background.

“Um, I guess the answer is ‘yes,’” I replied.

Sherm and Shirley steward billions of dollars, and give a lot of it away. What really spoke to me, however, was one of the first things his wife Shirley ever told me. “Sherm is the finest Christian man I’ve ever known.”

When a wife of several decades says something like this with such conviction, I listen. And since they’ve been married over forty years, you know they are way past infatuation.

Sherm’s life verse is Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” He chose that verse when he was eighteen years old and hasn’t strayed from it since.

Early on in his career, Sherm saw a man who had directed the men’s fellowship at his church, served in the military, and was a “model Christian.” Once his business took off, “He bought a racehorse, a fancy car, he lost his wife and children, and not only stopped serving at church, he stopped even going to church. I remember getting a bit concerned by the way he gushed to me about his first day of sales,” Sherm told me, “telling me how much he’d make if those sales continued every day of the year. His eyes got so big looking at the potential paycheck and so small looking at the good things he already had. He didn’t last too long.”

For this man, business success undercut everything that had made him a good man. It tore apart his faith. Sherm hasn’t ever forgotten it.