Thank HaShem, the other side kept delaying

By Rabbi Baruch Lederman

Rabbi Baruch Lederman
Rabbi Baruch Lederman

SAN DIEGO–Another delay?!  Another costly delay. It was getting ridiculous already.  Michael Malady entered into a contract to buy a condo in New Jersey as an investment. He wanted to fix it up, spruce it up, and resell it. Time and opportunity were a wasting.

He was supposed to close on September 1, but the seller needed more time to move out of the apartment. Michael, being a nice fellow agreed to push off the closing to October 1.

When October rolled around, the seller begged for two more weeks. Michael patiently agreed to push off the closing till November 1.

On November 1st, Michael was contacted by the seller’s lawyer. Due to a death in the family, she needed to reschedule the closing for another day. The closing was pushed off for another week.

The next week, as Michael had one foot out the door on the way to the closing, his phone rang. It was the lawyer. It seemed that the Bank forgot to sign some papers and they couldn’t execute the closing till those papers were in order. This would take a bit more time than usual because the bank was located overseas.

Now Michael was chomping at the bit, but there was nothing he could do at this point but sit on his hands and wait.  It was during this fourth delay that a report was released. Engineers had been inspecting the entire condo complex for a proposed renovation project.
The engineers found severe structural damage that would take several years and cost hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix.

Based on these new findings, Michael backed out of the deal. Had he closed when he wanted to, he would have been stuck with no recourse. It would have been a financial disaster for him. If he kept the unit, he would have been assessed with steep repair costs. If he tried to sell it, he wouldn’t get nearly as much as he paid due to these new findings.

As much as he had been fed up with all the delays, he now realized that Heaven was looking out for him all along.

G-d’s hand is there for all to see. We simply need to train ourselves to look.

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Dedicated by Dr, & Mrs. Frank Felber in memory of his father Abraham Felber, Avraham ben Yozef, in honor of his Yahrzeit, Shevat 1.