Didn't expect this today...

This week is our church's bible school. We're kickin' it old school with the "Wordless Book" as our theme. The wordless book is a book with no words (duh!) and just solid colored pages. The black page represents our sins. The red page represents Jesus' blood which He shed to pay for our sins. White represents Jesus washing away our sins and making us clean. Green represents our growing in Christ, and yellow represents the streets of gold that are in heaven. Basically we are using a simple tool, the wordless book, to explain salvation in terms even young children can understand. We are keeping it simple and focusing on the basics.

The enemy, satan, doesn't like what we're doing.

A bullet hit our house today. We live in one of the safest communities in the nation. I've never read this statistic anywhere, but I'm sure it's true.

Today, Samuel woke up from his nap at 11:00 a.m. I went upstairs, got him up, and changed his diaper on the floor. While I was still sitting there, I heard a gunshot, and less than two seconds later, it sounded like a rock hit the house on the outside of his bedroom wall, just about four or five feet from where we were sitting. I went outside and looked up at the house, and there was a hole in the siding of the house right where I thought it had hit.

I called Dan, and he came right home. We looked at the siding and tried to think of what could have done it. A bird? A rock kicked up by a lawnmower? After about 20 minutes of going back and forth, we decided to call our friends at the Northern Regional Police station. They sent over an officer who looked all around the outside and inside of our home. He didn't see any evidence of the bullet entering the house. We didn't have a ladder for him to look at the hole more closely. He assumed that, if it was a bullet, it was a wayward bullet from someone hunting and filed a report with the game commission.

Around 5:00 a game commissioner stopped by the house. He had called on his way over, asking us to have a ladder, so we borrowed one. He climbed up the ladder, loosened a few pieces of siding, and found the bullet. It was pretty mangled and showed evidence of having hit a tree before it hit the house. The commissioner said that most likely it was from a 22 magnum and that it came from the direction of the housing development up the hill from us. That is the last place I would have expected it to come from. He also said that nothing is in season to hunt right now except small game, like groundhogs. He said he would drive around and ask some questions, but wasn't sure if he would find anything out.

Another interesting twist was that I was wearing an Eden Christian Academy shirt, and the commissioner asked me about it. He said he knows lots of kids at Eden and that he used to be a youth pastor at a large church in our area. God sent us a great Christian man to look at our house and get some answers for us.

Does this whole incident have me scared? I'll admit to skipping lunch because I knew it wouldn't stay down. I'll admit that I feel somewhat shaken, physically. But, no, I'm not scared. I'm more convinced than ever that God is holding us in his hands and that we have nothing to fear.

Tomorrow we're going to take our bible school kids to a personal care home down the street and share Jesus' love and the plan of salvation with them. Satan doesn't want us to do it and is trying to scare us. But it won't work. We're not afraid.

Below are pictures of the bullet and the hole: