Prisoners and Thug Kids

Recently, we had a nine active prisoners visit our church. It was kind of a scary thing. Yes our church agreed to it, yes it was my husband, Z, that was behind the whole thing, but scary for a 20 something year old girl. Z knew all the prisoners that were coming, so I comforted myself with that knowledge. I went to church a little nervous and little hesitant about the whole situation. So when I was at church I prayed that God would protect us all today. Everything was fine at church. The guys were really nice and normal even.

Later that day Z was in town and wanted to know if I would meet him downtown so we could go on a walk. It was one of the first gorgeous days of spring. So I was riding my bike downtown. I came to a crosswalk where I needed to wait for the light to change so I could cross. I stopped a distance from it because there was a group of four teenager boys that kind of looked tough. As I stopped one of them approached me and asked me something. That alone was kind of weird. Usually strangers don't talk to me here. What I thought he said was, "McDonalds." I figured he meant where's McDonalds. So I answered him. Then something weird happened. The four guys surrounded me. It was totally awkward and I really didn't know what was going on. I wanted to be friendly, but I'm not so good at small talk in German. But I noticed that the traffic light had changed, so I said excuse me and was on my way. As I rode away they started to laugh. I figured they were laughing at my German. I must have said something ridiculous or maybe just my accent. Then I noticed an angry Z across the busy road. He had seen the whole thing and asked what they said to me. Totally naive I told them they wanted to know where McDonalds was, but they laughed at me, so now I just don't know what they wanted. And the more I thought about it the less likely it was that what they wanted to know where McDonald's was.

Apparently as I rode away one of them had pretended to smack my butt and little did they know that my husband had watched them do that. Part of me thinks it would have been awesome to see those kids face if they really would have smacked my butt. Can you imagine what those kids would have done when a big muscular angry husband came to kick their butts??? That would have been AMAZING! Like a movie or something. But lets focus on God. He is always looking out for me. I don't know why when those kids circled me and I was able to get away so easily. I don't know why they didn't take my purse and bike. But thought back to that morning where I was surrounded by scary prisoners and asked God to protect us. He did, and He never stopped. It's strange to me that I was doing something so ordinary, something I do daily and wasn't thinking I needed God to protect me at that moment, but He did it anyways. He even had a back up plan in case I was too dumb to ride away.