Extra Special Deliveries

Extra Special Deliveries

When our home was broken into in April (see the April 15, 2014, blog article), the police that night asked us what the intruder(s) had touched or taken. We gave a cursory look around each room and, apart from the shattered back door, some drawers and cupboard doors left open, and muddy footprints, we did not notice anything amiss. Not until the next morning, when I was leaving the house to distribute leaflets to our neighbors about the break-in—and went to get my house keys—did I realize that my keys, the fanny pack they were in along with my wallet, and my backpack had been stolen. So had my partner’s wallet.

Why didn’t we immediately check the night before to see if our cash and credit cards were still there?

Partly, we were in shock. We had been in bed when the awful noise of someone breaking down our door propelled us into crisis mode: I phoned the police and relayed our details while my partner leaned over the stairs and yelled at the intruder(s). They were downstairs moving from room to room doing God knows what, and we were upstairs panicking for the police to arrive God knows when. The actual break-in lasted just minutes—according to the length of the conversation I had with the police dispatcher, which only ended when a police German shepherd and its uniformed handler ran up the stairs and assured me we were okay. But the adrenaline rush continued into the wee hours of the morning.

Mostly, though, money—or the loss of it—was the last thing on our minds.

When we discovered, twelve hours after the event, that our wallets were gone, it was more the minor hassle of calling the bank and credit card companies to cancel our cards than anything else. The only cash in my wallet is what I call “emergency taxi money,” and it stays out-of-sight in a zipped compartment so that I’m not tempted to spend it at charity shops. And my partner happened to have a ten-pound note in his wallet, so we were less a total of forty pounds (about sixty-four dollars). No big deal, especially compared to our personal safety.

Money’s unimportance was further confirmed when, later that day, the police delivered my stolen backpack, fanny pack, and wallet, with all the contents still intact—including my emergency taxi money—thanks to a good citizen who had spotted the items in a backyard and reported them to the authorities. I was delighted simply to recoup the bags themselves, not because they were expensive goods but rather they are utilitarian and durable. Also nerdy-looking, which I like to think caused the thief to drop them like a hot potato. The stuff inside the bags was, I found as I did a quick inventory, basically pieces of information recorded on paper or plastic—quite replaceable and worth nothing to a stranger. Unless the stranger wanted to masquerade as an organ-donating, library-using, National-Trust-and-Historic-Scotland-site-visiting, fair-trade shopping, Oxfam-contributing, and penniless Presbyterian minister who is available to hear Fifth Steps and serves as Chaplain of Affirmation Scotland.

It took a break-in for me to count what’s invaluable.

Then a couple months later, a postal worker knocked on our door and delivered my partner’s wallet. The postal worker said they had just found it in the yard of a house a few blocks away and saw our address inside it. I explained how it had been stolen during a break-in. Apart from having gotten a little damp and been chewed on by either a fox or a dog, who might have dragged it from one place to another, the wallet still contained everything except the ten pounds cash. Oh well.

But most important of all, tucked inside was a very-yellowed, somewhat-faded card that my partner has kept over the decades; you can tell, because it’s dated 11-1-70:

MY DECISION

Confessing to God that I am a sinner and

seeing my need of a Saviour, I here and now

accept Jesus Christ, God’s Son,

as my own personal Saviour.

Some things—even if they are stolen—can never be taken away from us.