Unwavering faith through two viral fights

We need folks like Bob Cawley at times like this. And we almost didn't have him.

Bob is the fixed ops director at Horne Auto, a 12-franchise dealership group in Gilbert, Ariz., just outside of Phoenix.

The scourge of a virus is nothing new to him.

On Christmas morning 2018, he found himself in an emergency room with leg pain. The next day, he fell to the floor at his home and couldn't find a way up.

Doctors diagnosed Guillain-Barré syndrome. The Mayo Clinic's website calls it "a rare disorder in which your body's immune system attacks your nerves." The description isn't pretty.

Guillain-Barré often starts at the feet and moves up. By the time Cawley was tended to, it had found its way to his chest. His case, doctors said, was caused by a virus.

He couldn't feed himself. He couldn't walk for months. In May, he went back to work — half days — in a wheelchair. Later, he traded in his wheelchair for a walker, then a cane. He rarely uses one now.

"I still have neurological pain," he told me over the phone last week. "I'm still a little tipsy at times."

He hopes he'll be one of those who is fortunate enough to recover completely.

In the meantime, he's been sidelined by another virus. No, he doesn't have COVID-19. But his underlying condition makes him vulnerable to infection. So he's working from home, overseeing eight service departments that are doing a fraction of the work they handled a month ago.

Cawley was an ordained minister before he got into the car business in the late 1980s. It was a Sunday when I caught up with him. He had just finished conducting a pastoral session with a small group via Zoom.

He shared some words that might resonate with believers and nonbelievers alike.

He's struck by hearing the term "uncharted territory" on TV. "The Bible says there's nothing new on Earth," he says. Mankind has gone through some terrible things through the ages.

"Everything comes to pass. We will make it through," he says. "We may not look the same when we're done. It will reform and shape a lot of things."

Not that the coronavirus isn't reshaping us already, in insidious ways beyond being a lethal threat. It's robbing us of our need to at least think we can control our circumstances, Cawley says. And it assaults our humanity.

"Man wasn't meant to be alone," he says. "We need connection. When you take away our way to touch … that's tough."

Four months before he fell ill, Cawley was the kickoff speaker at the Automotive News Fixed Ops Journal Forum in Atlanta.

He talked about leadership, a subject that he teaches in two six-hour classes to managers at Horne. Somehow, his words resonate even more today.

"A lot of people want to be the boss," he said then. "They don't understand that being the boss means you work for everybody. You just became the servant of all. You're going to be taking care of all your employees, all your customers, all your employees' families."

He went on.

"The only thing you will ever leave on this planet that's of any value is what you instill in the heart and mind of a young person," he said. "The only thing that's important, when you become a manager, is to change the lives of the people who work for you."

He's 67. And he's about to change a life. One of his service directors is being groomed to be his successor. That individual is now working on a corporate project. When that's done, he's going to work alongside Cawley for the better part of a year.

"And then I'll work my way out of it," Cawley says.

He'll be about 70 then. With any luck, he'll be long past Guillain-Barré, and we'll all be past the coronavirus. That will leave plenty of time for Bob Cawley to tend to other flocks.