What a Mess!

Well, yesterday ended with a thud and today began with a whimper. The thud was me falling into bed and the whimper was me trying to wake up this morning.

Our family’s lake cabin was broken into and vandalized yesterday. At least we think it was yesterday because that is when we got the call from the county Deputy. If I believed in luck, I would say that it was quite a stroke of luck that the Deputy was able to find us. He found a travel itinerary in the master bedroom that had Melissa’s old cell phone number on it. He called that and the voicemail message gave him my new cell phone number, which he called at 10:05pm last night.

Our sweet friends, Butch & Alice came over to sit while we went out to assess the damage and boy was there some damage!

It seems that someone or a group of someones smashed in the sliding glass door to gain entry to the house, where they emptied an entire roll of surgical tape (it looked like the house was T.P.’ed on the inside), they tore off some of the wood plank paneling, they smashed the microwave (with a crowbar we think), they dumped paint stripper on the linoleum floor (not sure what that’ll do, but it was really gross), and they busted out the master bedroom window. Everything was really random and nothing was taken. It looked like their only motive was destruction.

SIDE NOTE: Writing that last sentence makes me think of the natural condition of mankind’s heart…fallen and hell-bent on destruction.

I think the saddest thing that was destroyed was Melissa’s Dad’s bible. It wasn’t old or anything. I think Charlie gave it to him for Christmas of 2000. The sad thing was that these kids had so much disrespect for God and others that they would destroy a physical printing of God’s Word. I’m not really hung up on the holiness of the printing of God’s word. The same presses that print bibles are used to print unholy reading material as well. That’s why I think it is just as holy on my Palm Treo as it is printed on onion skin paper. The act just seemed so symbolic of their (of our) radical (literally “root”) depravity and disrespect.

While I was sweeping up the billion shards of glass that littered the floor of the cabin, I had the thought: If these kids (we think they were kids anyway) are ever caught, I think that they should be sentenced to help us clean up and fix up the cabin to be used as a retreat for missionaries, church groups, etc., and that while they are working, they should be forced to listen to the Bible on CD. Maybe we could even take turns reading to them out of the very book they tried to destroy. How's that for poetic justice?