Mugging and Kidnappings . . . well, sort of . . .

It's been an odd and unsettling couple of days. I'm delighted to report that we're all fine, but things have been interesting, for sure.

Yesterday, we had a man walk right into our house, and announce that he was looking for "John." Of course, we have no John in our family, and our house used to be an office before we rented it, so hopefully this was just an innocent mistake. Unsettling, though, that someone could walk right in off the street like that. We've had a lot of visitors lately, and I guess the dogs have decided that strangers are okay. We'll be working on that, and meanwhile, we're being much more vigilant about keeping the front gate locked!

Also yesterday, David was playing at the park, a bit apart from Rachel, who was sitting on a bench reading. Another little boy came up to David, and asked if he could see the toy David was playing with (a little plastic spy glass). When David handed it to the other child, the boy immediately ran off with it. We are all shocked at such a blatant crime. It is quite common for David to come home with fewer Matchbox cars than he carried with him to the park, after sharing them with the other children, but that isn't so unusual in such young children. This, however, was apparently a planned robbery! We've been joking that David was mugged, but it really isn't funny, is it? It's sad.

Then, this morning, Christopher ran an errand to the bank for us. After he left, we had a large number of visitors here at the house, and we transacted some complicated business for most of the morning. Finally, things quieted down, and I suddenly realized that Chris hadn't returned from the bank, and it was three hours later!

Now, you've all seen my stories about standing in line at the bank for multiple hours, so you know I wasn't surprised by this, but I did send one of the other children to check on Chris. She returned with the news that he wasn't in line at the bank, and he wasn't at any of the other banks, either.

Now I was starting to get concerned, so I called Allen and Russell, who were working at the construction site. When Russell mentioned that, a week ago, a young man was kidnapped from Gracias, and later released in another city a few hours from here, I began to seriously worry.

Russell came home, and started searching around the city, and we were all doing some serious praying. Eventually, Christopher simply walked in the front gate. He'd been in line at the bank for all those hours, and the other children had missed him (the bank guard, who knows us all fairly well, had told both Rachel and Russell that he hadn't seen Christopher, which of course didn't help the whole situation).

So, we didn't have a kidnapping, just a scare, but we did learn about our own need to ramp up security around here, starting immediately!