What Mom shouldn't know...

This is one of those things that you only tell your mom once everything is over...like running out of gas by yourself in the middle of nowhere at midnight, or deciding to stop in the Metroplex on the way home from college for a quick Phil Collins concert, or that you just got your necklace ripped off in a train in Argentina, or that your kid's head only has a large bruise and scrape after being run over by her sister. These are all hypothetical, of course!
So, on to what she shouldn't know(so, don't read anymore, Mom). On Friday morning, Sam calls me on my cell phone and tells me not to go home because on advice from our neighbor there are soldiers all over the neighborhood. So, what does a woman do in this predicament...go shop (okay it was only grocery shopping). When we got home in the early afternoon, there were soldiers all up and down our street. They were guarding a house two doors down from ours. They asked if we had any information about the neighbors and assured all was okay. Yeah, right! How come they needed all those guns, if everything was okay. As I was bringing the girls home from school, I warned them that there would be soldiers so that they wouldn't completely freak out. When we drove up, they had to step out of the way and move their large truck so that we could get into our driveway. The soldiers were in front of our house all night long and the next day. Apparently the neighbors, who had been here several months were involved in illegal activity. At around 11:00 Saturday night, they towed one car off from the house and drove away two others. They sealed the house and left. That was it; they were gone. Everyone sighed a sigh of relief. Today we read in the paper that this was part of an operative in several places in the neighborhood, and it was one of the largest military operations so far. From 4 or five different houses they confiscated guns, grenades, military uniforms, drugs and the list goes on. What they didn't get, according to the paper were people.
So, what do we do with all this? Were we nervous? Yes. Scared? A little. But, we choose not to live in fear. We are careful in what we do, but we continue on. We also see that our neighbors all kept a low profile and didn't seem especially surprised or afraid. Many people here are leery of everyone, even the military. So, they keep quiet and stay of their way. We serve a big God, one that is bigger than all this. He has called us to be in the world, but not of the world and He protects us from the world. We praise him that we have been protected.

Here is the picture from the newspaper of all that was collected. The three cars in the background were the ones from our neighbors.