Sunday, April 22, 2012

Friday the 13th

I'm generally not a superstitious person, but it "just so happens" that something INCREDIBLY weird happened to us on Friday the 13th.  Here's the story:

At 4:00 a.m., I heard a door bang closed.  I guessed it was Joel, too tired to be quiet after getting sick (he still has a digestion problem that sometimes causes severe nausea).  At 4:44 a.m. (yes, I still have a little ocd problem that won't allow me to set my alarm for 4:45, it MUST be 4:44), my alarm went off, meaning I needed to get in the shower and Jason needed to go for a run with his friend.  There's a little problem with our timing on these mornings, though, because I really want that extra time to get ready, but Jason and his friend have agreed to leave their houses at 5:10 a.m. and meet in between the two houses.  This wouldn't matter for normal families, but we're not normal.  We have two little boys who could VERY easily wake up while I'm in the shower and go right out the front door without anyone knowing.  DANGEROUS!!  When I'm the only one in the house and need to take a shower, I have to chain lock the front door.  So Jason, being the easy-going guy that he is, said that he would just leave whenever I got up and do a little extra running before meeting his friend.  I overslept a little, got up at 5 a.m., sent Jason outside, chain locked the door, got in the shower.

And that's when the real "fun" began.  Jason went into the garage (which, by the way, is connected to the house by a wall with no door -- there's no way to get into the house from the garage) to get his running jacket.  Connected to our garage is a very small shed.  There's a window between the garage and shed, but no door.  The back garage door was dead-bolted from the inside of the garage.  As Jason was grabbing his jacket, the shed light came on.  He looked up and was shocked to see A MAN IN OUR SHED!!!!  He yelled, "HEY!!!  GET OUT OF THERE!!!!" and proceeded to dial 911.  Normally, Jason doesn't take his phone outside with him, but "for some reason" (a.k.a. "because of God's providential care"), that day he had.  He waited out in front of the house to make sure the guy didn't get away out the front way.  Jason was pretty much a "sitting duck" because I had chain locked the front door and there's no key for the back door.  There was absolutely no way to get into our house without breaking glass.  It "just so happened" that the intruder didn't have a weapon or violent intentions, so Jason was safe outside when the police drove up less than five minutes later.

When I got out of the shower, I heard Jason calling up the stairs.  I was SO irritated!!!!  I was thinking, "What in the world??!!!  He's gonna wake up the kids at FIVE SOMETHING A.M.!!!!"  He knew I'd be thinking that, so when I got closer to the door, he quickly said, "There was a guy in our shed.  The cops are here!"  Obviously, that stopped any tirade I had planned!

The police were looking around the shed, shining their lights in the shed, looking for evidence telling where the guy had come from and where he'd gone when they realized that HE WAS STILL IN THE SHED!  The guy had buried himself under all the boxes of junk in there (this is our garage sale junk/summer equipment storage shed).  When they get him out of there, they realize that the guy was NAKED from the waist down!!  He had on a shirt and coat -- that's it!  Since there were no footprints in our front or back yards or on our deck, he must have jumped the fence NAKED (we have a 6-foot wooden fence, and the gate doesn't open).

He didn't seem to be trying to steal anything (who would want our garage sale junk or plastic kiddy pools?); he was apparently trying to hide from someone.  He had gone up on our deck, probably looking for food since the thermoses outside the door were opened (they had seven-month-old creme soda in them that I had meant to throw out six months ago) and the grocery bag of dirty diapers was off its hook.  He had set up one of our camp chairs inside the shed behind the door and unrolled an old sleeping bag.  Apparently, he was getting good and comfy in there.  For "some strange reason" (again, God's working), he turned the light on within the 30-second timeframe that Jason was in the garage, otherwise we wouldn't have known he was in there.

One of the police officers "just happened" to be a friend from church.  This made me feel so much better in this crazy situation because someone we knew and trusted was helping to take care of everything.  After the shock wore off, we could see all the terrifying "what if's" of this ordeal.  The guy was high (track marks on his arms, needles in his pockets, and unintelligible thinking), and therefore completely unpredictable.  He could've broken into our house; he could've had a weapon; he could've been violent; he could've NOT turned the light on right then and it might've been ME that found out he was there AFTER Jason and the kids left for school; he could've not gotten caught at all and broken into our house after we ALL left for school/work.  BUT none of those things happened.  It all worked out so that we were all safe.  He was arrested, charged with burglary (because he was caught "red-handed" inside a building with our stuff), and taken to jail.

This all made me (1) thankful for a God who watches over us, (2) thankful for Jason's quick thinking, (3) thankful for a good police force, and (4) thankful for locks and alarm systems (which is now also installed on the shed, not just the house).  Of course it also made me feel violated and angry, but I'm choosing to focus on the gratitude!

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