Monday, October 11, 2021 —— A Rude Awakening

For those of you who wondered why I dropped off the blogosphere, as Mark Twain once said: ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” We took a two-week trip out west and although I had thought I would keep up my M-F daily blog, it did not come to pass. Fortunately for all of my faithful subscribers, this also resulted in a vacation for you from getting a daily email notification of a blog post. All in all, everyone got a vacation.

We stayed at the home of some old friends our first night on the road, had some nice conversation and went to bed feeling rather like we’d gotten off to a good start.

At 5:45 a.m., Mr. Friend came downstairs and woke Kris up. I sleepily overheard bits of a hushed conversation that made me think that Mr. Friend had accidentally backed into our car on his way out of the garage. Then I heard the ominous words, “So, you’ll want to go out and see if anything was stolen.” I shot out of bed on pure adrenaline at that point and we both rushed outside. Sure enough, some hooligans (is it okay if I assume they were young?) had broken out one of our car windows and had helped themselves to some of our belongings. This was a rude awakening on many levels.

Mr. Friend got to work sweeping up broken glass off of his driveway while we removed everything else from the car to start taking inventory of what was missing. It’s trickier than you might think to reconstruct a mental list of what was where when your car was full of stuff. We started writing things down, adding to it as we remembered other things we had packed that we were bringing out for others. Our two youngest children had asked that we bring out the old Play Station 2 and all the PS2 games. I had packed it in a in a generic box, throwing in all the XBox games for good measure, taped it closed, and then helpfully wrote on the outside of it “PS2 and games.” Gone.

Friend of ours had driven almost an hour to our house the day before we left to drop off a package from IKEA that they wanted us to deliver to their daughter and son-in-law who live in the same town as some of our kids. Gone.

My Nikon camera, lenses, and camera harness: Gone. In that same bag was my sad little fanny pack. Those of you who cringe to see people still wearing those may feel that this loss was a step in the right direction for me, but I will definitely replace it.

Some things that were taken didn’t make much sense: my two pillows, my neck pillow, my lap desk, a bag of my shoes. So many of my things were taken, that Kris joked that it must have been a girl gang. 🙂 They reached into our food box and left the bottle of wine we’d brought for our hosts and instead took the roll of paper towels.

These kinds of losses end up putting things into perspective. It’s all just stuff, all replaceable. The loss that I felt the most keenly, however, was that they also took my Bible. It was in a carrier with handles, so Kris thinks they might have thought it was a purse. He had given it to me in 1996 and I had filled it with marginal notes, observations, lists, sermon notes, underlined verses, drawings, dated answers to prayers and even had a list of our children and their birthdates next to Psalm 127 that I had written in as our family grew. I doubt there was a single page in that Bible that didn’t have some of my markings on it. Every time I read through the whole Bible, I had written the dates in the back. I kept a collection of sweet and encouraging notes from friends over the years in one of the carrier pouches. A lot of my spiritual history was in that Bible.

But as I recently quoted from Elisabeth Elliot: “A lot worse things have happened to much better people.” The most important words written in that Bible were the ones written by the Holy Spirit. I found a used copy of that same Bible on Amazon (it’s out of print) and bought it. After going through the five stages of grieving, I’m actually kind of excited about starting over with a new Bible. And on a hopeful note, perhaps our young lawbreakers will open up my old Bible right to Leviticus 19:11: “You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another” and come under conviction of sin. The gospel is there for them, too.

As we reflected on the experience after getting over the initial shock, we both thought about how much worse it could have been. Our focus shifted to what we didn’t lose and how grateful we were to have suffered only the loss of material items rather than to have experienced physical injury or loss of life in an accident. God was so merciful to us.

By the way, the hooligans did leave something behind:

If this were a TV show, detectives would have shown up and carefully placed these in plastic bags while wearing vinyl gloves and then sent them to the lab to check for fingerprints. In reality, when we reported it to the police, they didn’t even come out – it’s not the kind of crime they investigate, although they did dutifully assign it a case number.

The insurance company came through and by noon someone in a mobile unit was replacing our car window, and we only experienced a 5-hour delay in our travel plans. More tender mercies.

Later in the day as we were driving, we heard from one of our sons that he had lost his job unexpectedly. The day started with one kind of shock and ended with another. Even in that, as we talked to him, we were able to see how this job loss might actually prove to be a blessing in disguise. Through it all, the Lord our God is faithful.

“From the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, the LORD’s name is to be praised.” Psalm 113:3

How’s that for a nice long blog post – I’m making up for lost time! 😆

I’ll probably delete this in the morning and I’ll still be thankful for all of God’s tender mercies.