yes, a typical may weekend for the marshalls must always include a wedding... of course! this was one for my cousin brittany. and of course it was a busy event for my camera.
the weekend started off with a little incident (which i will go into later in this post) and that incident slammed right into (and almost over) millie’s 8th grade dance.
but even with less than 30 minutes to shower, change, and get her hair styled by me, she looked lovely. i took photos of every raa 8th grader at the dance that came to my photo corner. and some of them came LOTS of times. and millie danced in a little group of her girl friends. which i thanked the LORD over and over for her good sweet girlfriends because the other dancing 8th graders.... hmmmm, how can i put this? i think they weren’t dancing proverbially. like perhaps they haven’t read proverbs 5...
so after i arrived home with utter exhaustion from my full day of decorating for the dance, getting millie ready for the dance (and please lets take a moment to comment on how WELL i did her hairdo in less than 5 minutes), actually making it to the dance, and taking over 400 photos at the dance. i fell into bed.
woke up early because we had a full saturday....
boy scout honor court. wedding. graduation party. PTO officers end of the year swim party. and finally at 10:00 p.m. procure items and have an entire Passover meal ready for sunday morning Bible study for all of the middle school students at our church. (do not ask why i planned that, it sounded like a good idea the week before).
so saturday was a bit BUSY all day. just a bit. like the bit that makes one want to cry.
so after i fall into bed and then in quick succession get up early to get passover meal ready and head up to the church. do passover meal with the kids. come home from church. NAP (sigh). and then we all went to see cirque du soleil- saltimbanco. adam had gotten some HEAVILY discounted tickets on friday morning for the sunday afternoon production. it was GREAT. we all enjoyed it and i hope the kids don’t try ANY of those things at home...
anyway, it was a typical may weekend.
except for one little thing...
we were robbed. actually it was a burglary. robbed means you were home when it happened and we were not home...
you might have read about it in the newspaper.... make sure you watch the video in the upper right hand corner. yes, i love to see someone shoving adam’s 40th birthday gift in the trunk of their car and slamming the trunk closed. i also love to see someone’s underwear showing in my driveway... it just doesn’t happen enough.
the newspaper did get some details wrong. it occurred at 2:15 p.m. (not 5:45 as they reported). i had JUST left to go decorate the cafeteria for the dance at the middle school. our youth minister had just dropped by to pick up the senior class DVD of photos that i had just finished making on my computer and then i left the house right after he left.
and one guy came and peered in the side door window and knocked. and when no one answered, he called some friends and the car backed into our driveway. he pried open the door with a crowbar (and destroyed the lock and the frame of the door). they were in and out in less than 2 minutes and took 2 t.v.s. the big one in the family room that i had given adam for his 40th birthday 2 years ago. and a little one that didn’t work all of the time that was in millie’s room. they tried to get the playroom t.v. but it is really mounted to the wall.
and they were gone. and so was our t.v. the same one that has been struck by lightning TWICE and died both times and replaced by the service warranty. which doesn’t cover theft. do you think God is trying to tell me something....
millie and maxx arrived home 2 hours later. saw the busted door and called the police and went to a neighbor’s house. the police came with guns drawn and searched the house (and told me later that it was very CLEAN, whoo hoo). i arrived home a few minutes after the police with ALL these police cars ALL around my neighborhood (they had “established a perimeter”) but none in my yard, so i wasn’t really thinking anything was wrong. the kids had called my cell, but you all know that i always have it on vibrate and always forget to check it...
a neighbor was waiting in my yard to reassure me that my kids were fine and at their house. millie was so worried that i would be worried about she and maxx (rosie was with me). the police escorted me through the house to see what was missing. and then adam arrived home (he had answered his cell phone when millie called).
and adam remembered what i had not...
that we had a nice little motion sensor camera that he had bought at costco about a month earlier that he had installed over in the area of the side door. and maybe just maybe that had captured these guys on video.
and it had.
and boy those police officers that were at our house were EXCITED! and so they ran the video on the news that night. and were able to get some kind of good shots of the guys.
and so we are in the newspaper and we were on the 11:00 news that night (never identifying us or using our street address). we are all fine. the kids were fine. i think the fact that we were able to see what happened via the video really helped us. we knew they were in and out really quick, they weren’t lingering over my underwear drawer, they weren’t rifling though the kids room. they just wanted that big flat screen t.v. and knowing that we DON’T know them and that they weren’t teenagers from our neighborhood, or the greene girls, helps us too...
onto the proverbially lesson...
proverbs 18:11 The wealth of the rich is their fortified city;
they imagine it an unscalable wall.
we do not live in a fortified city, we do not have unscalable walls or even a door with a really good lock. what we do have is an all seeing, all knowing God. He knows, He sees, He acts... talk about your motion sensor... in Him we live and move and have our being (acts 17:28)
whether we had ever seen that video or not, we can rest secure because not only does God tell us that our riches, our fine security systems, even our motion detector video camera really is NOT enough protection from this world, in the verse before 11 He tells us what is secure... eternally secure.
proverbs 18: 10 The name of the LORD is a strong tower;
the righteous run to it and are safe.
so, be safe out there everyone. and if any of my blog readers recognize those underwear's from the video... call the police...