The Best and Worst Day Part 2

As we were coming out of Pappacito's, we saw some of our friends, Carl Cartee and his family, from home walking into the restaurant. We had not seen them in years and stopped to talk for a while. We found it so ironic that we were from the same town yet only tend to see each other on the road. Carl is a worship leader, so he and his wife travel as well. After visiting for a little while, we walked to our truck. We were parked in the lower parking lot right by the steps leading to the upper parking lot and restaurant. Brock clicked open the locks of the truck by his remote and I bounded down the stairs to the driver's side. I was anxious to get home and had already decided to drive us there since Brock was exhausted. I sat down behind the wheel of the truck and adjusted my seat. (I am 5'2" and Brock is 6'4"...much adjustment is needed.) Then, I went to program the gps to go home. "That's strange!" I said. I could not find the gps. Brock asked, "Do you think someone could have stolen it?" I looked in the backseat and my face grew very hot. Both of our bags were gone. When you travel, you carry everything with you in a bag. These bags have our "everything" in them. Passports, my camera, my wallet, my business and personal checkbooks, the ipad Brock got me for Christmas, Brock's laptop that we use to play our music for the show, the book that I was in the middle of (and I had just gotten to the good part), my Bible study book that I had just purchased at Women of Faith and had just begun, my overnight bag with all of my toilettries, priceless magic, magic tricks and dvd's Brock had just purchased from a conference from people from Europe and Canada that would be almost impossible to replace. The list just goes on and on. We called the police and waited a while for him to get there. In the meantime, we called the credit card companies and canceled my cards. Sometime during this, we saw that they had broken the lock on the door. We just had not noticed since we used the remote to open the door.

The police officer came up and we talked with him about everything that was taken and filed a report. Just as the officer was about to leave, the Cartees came down the stairs after eating their dinner. Brock asked Carl if he saw anything since he would have walked right by our truck to get up to the restaurant. He said, "Is this your truck?" He actually saw a guy sitting in the driver's seat of our truck and another guy sitting in a Chrysler right next to our truck. He was suspicious of them for some reason, but what was he to do? He didn't actually see him break into our truck and he had no idea it was our truck. He said that he double checked to see if his van was locked and escorted his family up to the restaurant. We stopped the cop from leaving and told him that we had an eye witness. Here was more irony that our friends were eye witnesses to the crime. We have had much theft in our day but never had we had a description of the thief. For some reason, this helped me. In the other cases (which you can read about here), our stuff was just gone! Now, I at least knew what had happened to a certain degree. Then, I realized something that made my skin crawl and my stomach churn. If the Cartees walked up on them and we were coming out of the restaurant at the same time, we would have walked up on them if we had not stopped to talk. I remembered how I ran up to the driver's door before Brock even reached the truck. I would have swung that door open coming eye to eye with the thief. I have no idea how desperate he would have been or what he would have done. He could have had a weapon or anything. Brock would have been walking to the other side of the truck only to come into contact with the accomplice in the car on the other side of the truck. Suddenly, having our stuff taken was not as big of a deal. God saved us from that one!