When it rains

A few hours after I posted my blog about vandalism last Saturday night, a rock crashed through the glass of my mini barn window. The rock bounced to rest close to the south wall of the barn, glass flying.

I was blissfully unaware and the new camera my friend had given me after my package was stolen was on duty on my front porch, not the back porch by the mini barn.

The first thing I heard was footsteps running up the wooden steps of my back porch, then the pounding of an urgent fist. I could only guess that it was someone asking for ice cream.

I wasn’t really in the mood, so I raised my eyes to the ceiling like I do sometimes when I don’t know what to do (an increasingly common situation).

“God, help me know what to do.”

I went to the door on the second round of pounding, and found a crowd of seven or eight children of varying sizes and shades of brown.

“Someone threw a rock through the window of your shed!” they said.

Thank God for that prayer I had prayed.

I stepped down and sure enough, the window glass was splintered into many pieces, some on the concrete under the barn, some inside the barn on the counter, a few jagged pieces still clinging to the window frame.

I’ve kind of cut back on talking these days.  Unlike my friends on Laurel Street, I’m rarely witty or funny or think of just the right thing at the right time. If in doubt, why not stay silent?

“It was that white boy on a bike,” the children said. “He’s mean to us.”

“I told him, no more ice cream,” a boy said helpfully.

“You mean the boy who did this came to my ice cream party?” I asked.

Disappointing.

Most of the children said ‘no’, but the boy who had mentioned the ice cream continued to nod his head.

“You mean just the other night,” I said, and he nodded.

This information narrowed the pool of suspects to four children who had dropped by my house a few nights before. One had been the boy speaking, one a girl, and one a boy I trusted fairly confidently.  The fourth was a new boy I could not remember meeting before.

When the children pressed me to take action, I stalled.  In particular they wanted to go inside the barn to “help me” and see the rock, and I declined.

“I try to think what Jesus would do,” I said.  Perhaps this has become a cliche to some, but I can assure you it wasn’t to me at that moment.

What would He do?

“He would call the police!” several voices suggested confidently.

“Well, maybe,” I said puzzling.

“Are you a Christian?” one girl asked.

“He would have the power to fix the window,” a smaller boy said.

“That’s very true,” I agreed. “Do you guys know how Jesus acted when he was here?”

Some said no and some said yes, but one older girl waved her hand and said, “He said, ‘Father forgive them!'”

That’s taking it a little far, I said.  No, just kidding! I knew she was right. In fact, I was quite impressed with her ability to relate this real-life scenario to a real-life story of Jesus’ suffering.

“Why can’t we have the code to open the lock on the door?” one boy kept asking.

But they finally left, and I walked into the house.

I stopped, speechless on the tile kitchen floor and flung my hands in the air. I think my kitchen might be getting used to such demonstrations.  

The next day, a little girl at church calmly told me who had broken the window.  She had not been there, but “he told me he did.”

I pulled out my phone and scrolled to the four-some ice cream photo.

She verified the boy who had said he had done the vandalism. Not the new boy I had just met, but the boy who accused him.

Although it was too late to be helpful, I moved the camera to the back of the house.

Like Randy Newmann said if What would Jesus do? has become a lame wristband phrase, it’s because most of the time it isn’t a question of knowing what He would do, but that we know exactly what He would do, and don’t want to do it. Perhaps the hardest thing to do sometimes is to trust God with every little section and shard of life, and just chill and wait and let Him work, and thank Him for everything, even when it rains glass.

But it really isn’t a question: We know that’s exactly what Jesus would do.

And then there’s Isaiah, who has been inspiring me all month, with God’s words:

“I will contend with those who contend with you”…”I, I-” (love that repetition!) “-am he who comforts you; who are you that you are afraid of man who dies?”

He was talking about Israel. But his great love for them, jealousy over them, shocks me. And for His new chosen people, His church–us!–surely it is the same.

And, like another evidence of His love, the running program is reminding me about some truths I’ve learned in the past while running. I wish I were lighter and faster. But running my first six mile stretch this morning, with an ACE bandage wrapped around my right foot, I remembered that another factor in running is endurance. 

Seven years ago at Thanksgiving I ran the 18-mile Lake Shore Path in Chicago. I hated my decision by about mile 13, but I finished.

A few years later, I ran the Sunburst half marathon (13.1 miles) with my friends Carissa and Charlotte.  The three of us got in line at the back of the pack, the less speedy crowd. I believe it was 90 degrees before 8 o’clock that day. But what I remember is the last half of the race.  We kept passing people.  The whole last part of the race, we passed people who had apparently overestimated themselves.

We had gone into the race with a plan.  We knew our speed, and how we had trained, and we did what we always did.  We knew how much G-2 we would need to drink at 95 degrees, and we had it with us, because that’s what we always did.  And we finished, not particularly fast, but strong.

I’ve decided to run that 18-mile trail again on December 2 (barring injury or unforeseen events).  Seven years is a great time to re-do something.  

But more important than exercise is life, and the decision to keep living.  God knows if we’re weak and uncertain and too serious in the storms of vandalism, both the physical kind and the psychological kind we sometimes can’t share.  He knows our weaknesses and loves to help us past them.

In the meantime, we just need to keep going.