Sunday, December 19, 2004

This happened a long time ago (well, a few months), and it's become a kind of joke amongst me and my friends. It is true, I tell you, every bit of it. This happened the night I returned from the summer's Crank's Creek Missions Trip:

I was in the habit of going on runs for exercise, and this night I suited up and went outside. I began running, and as I ran up one of the streets at ten thirty at night, a little car pulled up and a woman got out. She walked up to me. I thought she’d be asking for directions, but she told me, “We’re having a scavenger hunt and we need a good-looking boy to sing a song for us. We just need you to get in the car.” I knew something was up because she was forty years old, it was ten-thirty at night, she called me good-looking :-), and also—by the way—she was hiding something behind her back. I knew what was up. No explanation needed. “Do you want to come?” she asked.

“No,” I told her. She began to move the arm from around her back, when suddenly her beaming face—cheery to build up confidence in kids—fell to a look of fear. She stumbled back to get in the car and I seized the moment and ran up through the backyards of houses. I hit a street again on my sprint for home, and the car pulled up again.

Now the passenger’s side door and the front door opened, and I knew they were getting out; but they slammed their doors and gunned down the road for no reason at all. I warned the neighbors, called the cops, and God told me, “I sent you out there because there were a lot of little kids running around. They needed to be warned. You saved a kid tonight.” Then he added, “When things got hairy, I protected you.”

I know none of you were there—because I was alone—but if you had seen the woman’s face the first time she tried to pick me up, you would’ve known something frightened her. Maybe God put fear in her heart? When she and the driver prepared to pick me up again, something frightened them so bad they gunned away down the road. When I got inside, I opened up my Bible and read,

“For the angel of the Lord guards all who fear

him,

and he rescues them.”

- Psalm 34:7, New Living Translation


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