believe it or not

Last Sunday night, we were given free tickets from a family involved in our youth group to a concert in town with Bebo Norman, Natalie Grant and Jeremy Camp. They are Christian artists - and great ones, so we were really excited. It started at the same time that youth group ended that night, so we were in a big rush, not wanting to miss much. There's not a lot of parking by the cathedral, where they were playing, so we parked on a side street and booked it inside. The concert was awesome and we walked out that night feeling refreshed.

Then we got to our car. It had been broken into. Ugh. There were papers and all kinds of things (including a bottle of some weird foreign pop they left) scattered across the front seats of our car, and so began the search to see what they took and clean up the mess. They of course took our GPS (which was hidden but not locked away), our phone charger and a ton of CDs. They also took dumb things like nail polish (no, I don't paint my nails while I drive) and extra batteries. Thankfully, they didn't take the time to check our trunk, which had some goodies as well. It was a sickening feeling to know someone had been through all of our stuff.

The next scary thought was that because they took our GPS, we've been told it often leads to house break-ins as well. There is a "GO HOME" button on most systems, which you can hit and the pre-programmed home address pops up. - Convenient, but bad in this case because thieves assume there's a good chance nobody is home either. So much worse than a car break-in. That was a bit too much for my preggo hormones to process at first, but then I remembered that our "GO HOME" button was still programmed to our address back in Ohio. I couldn't figure out how to change it when we moved and then I heard that it's not a good idea to use that feature anyways, so I never messed with it. I still couldn't relax until we got home to see that the dog and house were untouched, but thankfully that was the case. Before we left we did file a report, but our $500 deductible pretty much means we'll just be left without the stolen items for now.

I will admit that it took us a bit to calm down from the incident (my house thanks me for working out my emotions at 1am with a thorough cleaning). It was disappointing to lose some nice stuff, but they are just "stuff." Once my fear settled, I couldn't help but go back to the moments just before we walked out to that street to go home. One of the last songs that Jeremy Camp sang was "Give Me Jesus" and I felt that God spoke to me through it. So either I believe those words or I don't -"...you can have all this world, but give me Jesus." I do believe them.

So to you, little-punk-thief-who-broke-into-my-car, you may have walked away with a few goods worth some cash, but you did not take anything I need - anything I can't live with out. I hope that one day you will understand what I'm talking about. In fact, maybe you should listen to some of those burnt CDs you took, which aren't worth anything - they might point you in the right direction.