My 50th Birthday - Trust in God’s Plan
Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.
Proverbs 19:21
One week away from my 50th birthday, I had no expectations. I was good as long as no one was planning a surprise party. I looked forward to driving with the kids to Iowa to watch my niece graduate from high school and spend the weekend with family.
An Unexpected Call
At 3 a.m., my cell phone rang. It was an emergency call from the top cybersecurity guy at our Internet company - a long-time customer was reaching out to us for urgent assistance in protecting their network after a hacker had compromised one of their critical servers. I powered on my laptop and joined the impromptu Microsoft Teams video call.
That week, the cybersecurity situation at work was a roller coaster of emotions with little to no sleep for our response team. There were moments we felt relieved about containing the hacker before he could inflict real damage. But the following day, we would identify a suspicious file that revealed the hacker had a stronger foothold than previously thought. Our minds would dart to bad outcomes, like malicious ransomware wiping out our customer’s data center.
I found a top outside cybersecurity company to augment our efforts, both for their expertise and to get some more eyes on the situation so our guys could sleep.
Weekend in Iowa
We embarked for Iowa early Saturday morning. As we reached the outskirts of Chicago, the work storm raged again - I started receiving urgent emails from the new security company that the hacker was pivoting to another form of attack. I connected to our internal Teams call while driving - receiving updates and giving thoughts to our team throughout my 8-hour drive.
As I pulled into my mom's rocky Iowa driveway later Saturday afternoon, I wasn't sure about my weekend plans. I stayed online with our team until midnight, having some people go to bed while others worked through the night. I directed part of our team to press on with shutting down as many of the customer’s non-production and redundant servers as possible to reduce their network’s attack surface. The remainder of our team raced to install advanced EDR (endpoint detection and response) software on any server without it.
Fortunately, things worked out so I could attend my niece's graduation ceremony on Sunday. I then rushed back online with our team. After a few hours, the situation calmed down, and I grabbed the opportunity to spend some time with my family. We enjoyed supper and hustled back outside to play ball with my 8-year-old son, brother, and his daughter (a college softball player). I was ecstatic about playing on the same patch of grass where I had grown up with my dad and younger brothers, fielding grounders and fly balls as the sun set in the west past our grove.
Happy Birthday?!
On the morning of my 50th birthday, I woke up at 5:15 a.m., jolted by an emergency code red email update about the security situation. The hacker launched a new vector of attack against the customer. I roused our weary team and rallied everyone to the Teams call. I planned to drive back to Chicago for my son's baseball practice that afternoon. But I told him we needed to delay our trip until we had stabilized the security issue.
That morning, we played a stressful game of whack-a-mole with the hacker. The bad guy would compromise a server and take it down while we brought another clean server online. It was becoming more real that we might need to shut down our customer's e-commerce website to protect their larger network, costing our customer tens of thousands or more while their site was offline. I briefed their cybersecurity insurance lawyers - we were doing our best but had doubts about keeping pace with the hacker.
Throughout the week, I whispered to God, scribbling prayers on my legal pad as I sat with our team on the call. I had witnessed a lot of highs and lows that are a part of business, but this was the most harrowing situation in memory.
Around 11 a.m., we started getting massive help from the outside security company. They wrote a custom rule for the EDR software that instantly killed any hacker attempts to gain access to a new web server. We still needed to locate and clean up malicious programs the hacker had installed in the customer’s environment. But we were finally slowing down the bad guy. My mom helped me pack as we climbed into our Toyota Sienna and drove home to Chicago.
On the drive, I connected to our Teams call on mute, listening to new developments and chiming in when I had a question or comment. I called team members privately on their cell phones at various points to give feedback or bounce ideas off them, to offer encouragement. My mom was amazed by the discussion, hearing the various personalities and accents. I felt gratitude as I described each one, many of whom I had worked with loyally at our company for 10, 15, 20+ years. I was proud of our guys' expertise, dedication, loyalty, and teamwork.
To lighten the mood, I laughed with our team that it was my 50th birthday. I told the guys that, on my 40th birthday, I had served on jury duty and selected to be on a case, which made me late for dinner with my wife and my best friend and his wife. I said I didn't want to think about what was in store for my 60th!
As we drove east across Highway 20, we obtained more insight into the situation. The hacker had been running a program to install a credit card skimmer inside the code of our customer's website. The malicious code was designed to snatch all credit card numbers submitted with e-commerce orders and re-route the numbers to a server in Russia.
The GREAT news was that the hacker had a bug in their code - the credit card skimmer never worked! No credit cards or personal information had been compromised! I called the customer, and they were thrilled to hear the positive update, greatly appreciative for our around-the-clock support.
We then tracked down the hacker's program and cleaned that from the server. We kept tightening up the customer’s security, giving the hacker less room to maneuver to another method of attack.
As we pulled onto I-90 by Rockford in the twilight, I thanked everyone for their incredible dedication over the past week. We agreed that things looked promising, but if the last week had taught us anything, we knew things could quickly change. I told half of our team to log off the call and get some rest. The others kept grinding through additional changes as we discussed the next steps in our battle, tired but buoyed by the forward momentum.
My family thought we should do something to celebrate my birthday, so we stopped at Portillo's for a late supper - an Italian beef, fries, iced tea, and a slice of their chocolate cake. While there, we randomly bumped into one of my best friends from work. I saw the coincidence as a hopeful sign that things were turning in a positive direction.
My Kids' Birthdays
May is a special month for our family. More important than my birthday was that my son Eric's birthday is one week after mine, and my daughter Elizabeth's birthday is one day after his. As things settled down at work, my focus shifted to finalizing the details for their shared birthday party on Memorial Day.
Four girls were coming for Elizabeth; Eric had seven boys, most of them from his travel baseball team. My mom was going to hang out with my daughter and the girls at our house, having fun with Taylor Swift-themed crafts and activities. I was taking the boys to the local baseball field. Even though they had played five games in a tournament in Wisconsin over the weekend, they only wanted to play more ball.
On the morning of the party, after picking up the birthday cakes from the local Dairy Queen, I had an hour or two of quiet with nothing to do except wait for the kids to arrive. I pulled up YouTube and brainstormed about potential games the boys and I could play at the field. Definitely home run derby - the diamond had the perfect fence. I found some other simple skill games that incorporated throwing and batting.
OK - I was prepared. I could finally relax.
Surprised by Joy
As the kids arrived at the party, the girls sprinted to the trampoline in our backyard as the boys tore around the front yard playing wiffle ball. After about an hour, I piled the boys into our mini-van to take the short ride down to the field with the dad of one of my daughter's friends (Tyler).
As I walked onto the field, I saw a couple of the boys having a serious discussion in the dugout as they hung up their equipment bags. Before I could say a word, Eric's friend Shane marched up to me and said, "Coach Ray, here's what we're going to do. We're going to pick sides. You're going to be all-time pitcher. The other guy - Tyler, right? Tyler can be all-time center fielder. Sound good?"
I smiled and nodded yes. Tyler and I walked out to our positions as the boys chose teams. Each team had 6 in the field - 4 kids (first base, second base, shortstop, and left field) and 2 adults (pitcher, center field).
Whenever I put on a baseball glove, I am 10 again. It reminds me of the James Earl Jones speech in "Field of Dreams" - “it's as if I've been dipped in magic waters…”
But what happened next caught me by surprise. As we played, my instincts transported me back to the pickup games we played on our farm as kids after walking beans. We didn't have enough kids to fill all the positions in those days either. As the runner rounded third base, I reflexively bolted to cover home in the absence of a catcher. I then realized I would spend the next few hours running around a hot, dusty diamond with a baseball glove, covered in sweat.
I was in heaven.
At one point, there was a close play at third base, and I couldn't keep from running and diving at the bag to get the tag down on the runner. Safe!
I picked myself off the dirt, shaking my head about not making the play. As I returned to the rubber, my son Eric yelled, "Dad! What is up with your leg?" I glanced down and saw that I had somehow scraped my shin while diving at third. Blood covered the bottom half of my right leg. I laughed and motioned the next boy into the batter's box, let's go, who’s next. Tyler in center field had to think I was out of my mind.
Eventually, we stopped the pickup game to play home run derby. Gordy, our team's travel baseball catcher, was anxious to return to the house and eat birthday cake. Most of the kids would have stayed at the field all day if I had let them. But Gordy finally won out, and we packed our stuff to head home.
Four of the boys crammed into the very back of the van. I laughed, asking what the heck they were doing. I helped them in and confirmed the back door would shut, half chuckling about what some busybody would think if they saw us.
We pulled into our driveway, and I released the van's back door. As the door slowly raised, a herd of boys flew out the back in a cloud of dust. I gazed across the street, sharing a smile with my 75-year-old neighbor Tom. It reminded me of how we used to pile into the back of my dad's pickup on the farm as kids growing up in the wild '80s.
Full of Gratitude
Later that night, I flopped on my bed, exhausted but grinning. As I drifted to sleep, it struck me that God had gifted me a beautiful respite that day. After being in full responsible adult mode for the past week, He gave me a free pass to a baseball fantasy camp. It was not a fancy experience with former big leaguers in Florida. He did one better - he allowed me to go back in time to join my son and his friends in a real-life scene from "The Sandlot."
God had carried me through a stressful week with unexpected twists and turns. Tomorrow morning, I would return to the reality of dealing with the aftermath of the cybersecurity issue and likely some brand new problems. But not today.
Thank you, God, for these first fifty incredible years. I pray for your divine guidance as I move into the second half of this wonderful life.
Image credit: Alamy