Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Death of a Liar


I feel odd.

Over five years ago, my ringing phone awakened me from a nap. It was an attorney in another state dunning me to pay on my credit card.

Being sleepy, my first reaction was fear that I had forgotten to make my payment on time. Then, I realized that the company would have added a late payment fee onto my next statement and wouldn't have sicced a collector onto me until I missed several payments. That this was an attorney meant the situation was serious.

Gradually more alert as minutes ticked away, I began arguing with the attorney. I wasn't the one she was after. She had the right phone number, but the wrong location, wrong occupation, wrong Social Security number, wrong spousal information, and wrong everything else because she was talking to the wrong person. I didn't even have the credit card she was calling about.

After she apologized for disturbing me and hung up, I started pulling pieces together from things I recalled seeing on the Internet about a person fitting what the attorney said was supposed to have been about me. Spending a few minutes to verify my memory and find a phone number, I used my Caller-ID to call the attorney back and gave her the other person's phone number saying, "Try this number."

She thanked me and was curious as to why I tracked it down for her and from where I got it.

I replied, "Because I hate lying deadbeats and remembered I saw it before on Yahoo."

The reason I feel odd now is because while searching for something else on Google, I discovered that the person who had apparently given out my phone number to avoid collection calls back then was a member of the First Baptist Church in her town. From her photo, she was a nice, responsible woman like my deadbeat aunt who also attends church albeit Lutheran in a different state.

The sad part is that I ran across the information about her being a member of the Baptist church in her obituary online. I wish I could ask her, as a Christian, whatever in the world made her think she could put my phone number on her credit card account as if it were her own and get away with it? It wasn't a mistake. The numbers are much too different for it to have been a typographical error.

I hope she repented.


Psalms 37:21. The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again

Revelation 21:8. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.


No comments: