The Aftermath

I remember thinking what a great day I was having as I took in my time with the kids. Baby on my side I unlocked the front door and swung it open glancing momentarily at the slider that leads to the backyard...It was wide open. I stopped for a moment and thought darn it the kids left the door open again...what I saw next will change me forever. There in the open cubby where are bigscreen TV used to be was a myriad of wires that used to find themselves attatched to what was now gone. I don't remember doing it but as I made my way to the back I set the baby down, I was ready for a fight and in retrospect I probably made the experience even more tramatic for Tanner as I screamed into the emptiness of my backyard at people who weren't there. Tanner, who had not noticed yet frightenly asked me what was wrong. We've been robbed son...

I thank God that the perspective of what was taken sunk in immidiately, it's just stuff and we have insurance. But days later as my wife slept in the bedroom with my kids and I kept playing out different scenarios in my head, I have come to realize that what they stole that day was much more than stuff, and we will probably never feel totally safe again. Perhaps it was naive to have ever felt that way in the first place. I'm sure that to the thieves that hit our house, we fit the perfect profile and our house was an easy target, I won't venture to know the mind of a thief. I can take comfort that our experience has heightened relationships with neighbors and I guess kicked a fence project I had been planning for years into high gear. In my eternal search to make sense of things however, I have not been able to shed my desire to hurt those that hurt my family. I know, not very christian...It's possible that my stuff was used to help a family in need or someone whos lost their job but I dont give a shit and the prospect of exacting revenge is like a ticking time bomb.

Don't worry, I'm not going to go all vigilante on anyone but I'm fighting mad. The people that hit our house have been working this area for a year and the police department has not caught them. When the investigation was done there where no fingerprints taken, I investigated possible witnesses and found three that could describe the car and the driver but the police didn't even write down what they had said.

In the Aftermath we installed an alarm and built a fence on the east side of our house that was vulnerable before. The police said they hit the same house three times in two weeks over by the Golf course...are you shitting me? Anyways, thank you for the calls and the prayers, we know God never gives us more than we can handle and I will extract his guidance from this eventually, but for now Its hard to see through the red. Everyone is safe, nothing was taken we can't replace and the whole incident has been a testimony to the strength of our family under very stressful conditions. Maybe im not that far off from that godly lesson.