The Story of the Church Break In and Prayer Requests (Part 1)

When the Lord called my husband and I into the ministry six years ago never did I think that part of being a pastor’s wife would include sitting in my living room trying to figure out how to discretely dispose of a bunch of drugs, but it so happens that this is exactly what we found ourselves doing late one Sunday night . Now, I am sure that this must sounds rather odd so let me take a minute and tell you how we ended up in that strange predicament.

About a month ago Nathan and the other guys who lead Surf School showed up at our church building on a Saturday morning as normal. Tiago was the first to arrive and he noticed that it looked as if someone was asleep in the church building. He told his little boy to stay quiet and wait outside until the Nate and the other guys showed up. Tiago thought that Nate must have let someone sleep in the church building and did not want to disturbed whoever it was. Once the other guys got there they told Tiago that there should not have been anyone in the church and they unlocked the doors and went inside.

As soon as the guys were in the church it was obvious to them that someone had been there. All of our stuff had been pulled out and gone through , the window was broken, there were knives everywhere, and someone had made a bed and covered the windows. Nothing had been stolen but they had left some drugs that they were bagging to sell on a table in the sanctuary . The guys were assuming that whoever had been there had spent the night at the church bagging drugs and going through our stuff to see if there was anything worth taking. When the guys showed up early Saturday morning they must have gotten spooked and jumped out the back window leaving a bike and their drugs behind.

Nate and the guys cleaned up the mess and called the cops to come and take the drugs. At the time they thought that calling the police was the best things to do but in retrospect it probably was not. After the police came some of our neighbors came and wanted to know why the cops had been there. This made us very nervous because the neighbors that came are dealers and it is never a good thing if the dealers know that you had the cops called to their neighborhood.

We were worried for a few reasons: 1 - We were afraid that the people who left the drugs would come back looking for them, and 2- We were pretty sure that we knew who the guy was that had broken into the church (based on the bike that was left) and we really did not want anything to happen to him. One guys that goes to our church was so worried that the dealers would come back he did not come to church the next day.

That night we did what we normally do on the scary days; we prayed more, checked on our sleeping kids a few extra time, and moved our baseball bat a little closer to the bed.

The next day as Nathan was preparing for church he opened a closet and found MORE drugs that they had not seen on Saturday, a LOT more. None of us knew what to do. We did not want to call the cops again because we did not want to get the guy that had broke into the church hurt, or killed by the bigger more dangerous drug dealers, but we also didn’t want to just throw the drugs in the trash and risk them being traced back to the church. Nate and one of the guys decided to try and flush the drugs down the toilet but after flushing about a pound of the them they clogged and broke the toilet , I guess if you can’t flush toilet paper it should go without saying you can’t flush drugs.

So there we were, my husband and I sitting in our living room racking our brains trying to figure out how on earth we were going to get rid of the “goods”. Now, if you are reading this and you are worried about the stress that this might have put on me or the baby, don’t worry about it. While it was a stressful situation I think that the Lord gave us the gift of laughter that night. All I could do was giggle about all of our crazy ideas on getting rid of the drugs and laugh that we were even in the situation. I was very worried about the boy that owed a bunch of drugs to someone but I guess that we were dealing with that stress through laughter and lots of prayer.

In the end we decided to divide the drugs amongst our used toilet paper trash bags, add some dog poop, a little gravel and then put the trash out right as the trash truck went by. I never thought I would be grateful for either our non-flushing toilet paper or mammoth size Great Dane poops but that day I was.

We both gave a sigh of relief as the trash truck drove away with our yummy concoction. We knew that we were not totally out of the woods, and we knew that whoever the drugs belonged to would be missing them but at this point all we could do was pray… and move the baseball bat a little closer to the bed. ;)

To be continued …..