Article August 28, 2000 Issue

See you in court?

Justice prevails.

James Scott Rosebush

The courts are jammed with people seeking legal remedies through lawsuits, and it's tempting to think that the only recourse in dealing with inequity is to sue. But there's another path to justice, as my family and I found out.

When we returned home from an early evening bicycle ride, we found a telephone message from a real estate agent in our former hometown, three hundred miles away. At the settlement table that afternoon, the buyer of our house had unexpectedly refused to honor the signed sales contract. Without the transfer of funds from this settlement, we wouldn't be able to conclude the purchase of our new home. What we couldn't have known that night, though, was what valuable lessons we would learn about the practicality of prayer and appealing to the law and power of God.

The next day, I flew back to our former city and engaged a top real estate lawyer to examine the case. I thought surely that with the best legal minds working on the problem, there would be a speedy resolution. I was quickly informed that because the buyer was a tenant in our home, we could not evict him, which we needed to do in order to sell the house to another party at the fair market price. We met dead ends with every legal strategy we pursued. Feeling defeated and knowing that this individual was cheating us, we finally agreed to his offer to "help us out" by buying our home at a sum dramatically less than the original contract price.

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