What if a car pulls up with 'bad guys' in it? What if they demand money of me? What if they demand that I take them to my house? Would I really take them to my house where my husband and two young boys are playing in the living room? Maybe it would be better to take them to my parents' house? No, that wouldn't be good; I couldn't put my parents in danger like that. Maybe I should take them to our neighbors' house [the one that Jeff helped in the robbery]? No, I couldn't do that either; that would be terrible if anything bad happened to them. OK, I guess I'd have to take them to my own house. But what would I do when we entered the house? Would I have time to grab Josiah and David and get away? Maybe I could get the boys and go downstairs, then quickly open the garage door and run out. Then I would go to my parents' house to call the police. But how terrible to leave Jeff alone in the house with the bad guys! How could I do that? But what would I do? What should I do?
Then I stopped myself and thought, "Davene, what are you doing??? You don't need to be thinking these thoughts. You're safe; God is with you; there are no criminals here." In the past, the only thing I feared walking down the driveway--if I feared anything at all--was a skunk! But now, fear creeps up sometimes and catches me unaware.
It reminds me a bit of how my thoughts changed after we had gone to Israel for vacation in August of 2002 when Josiah was 2 months old. After we returned to San Diego, I happened to see a city bus driving down the Strand (the road between Coronado and Imperial Beach); and the thought popped in my head, "There goes a target. I wonder if there is a bomb on that bus." And then I reminded myself that I was in California, not Israel, and that buses were not being targeted by terrorists in California, and that I didn't need to be afraid to drive alongside a bus on the Strand.
It seems that when certain situations enter our life, they forever change our outlook; and in these particular instances, new reasons to fear have entered my life. However, more than ever before, I'm seeing the need to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5).
Another example of my changed thinking (not for the better) and my fight to take every thought captive: a few days ago, I was putting Jeff's boots away in his closet when my eyes caught sight of the baseball bat sitting there and my mind flashed back to the morning of the robbery. I was remembering how confusing that moment was when he had come into the room after his shower, we started hearing the frantic ringing of our doorbell, Jeff suggested that maybe the doorbell was malfunctioning (it had been doing that last fall), I thought it wasn't because I had heard voices outside, I thought surely it must be some of Dad's patients looking for him, I wanted to tell Jeff to just send the people away to go down the hill to Dad's house, he sensed danger so he grabbed the baseball bat on his way downstairs to the door. I remember thinking that morning, "Why do you need that? Just put the bat down and tell the people that Dad's moved." When I saw the bat recently, I was overwhelmed by thoughts of "What if?" What if Jeff had been shot? What if he had died? What if I had never been able to tell him again how much I love him? What if when he died, I had actually been harboring disrespect for him in my heart by thinking him foolish for taking the bat? What if our last conversation had been that rushed, confused one? What if, what if, what if??? I wanted to kneel down on the floor by the closet and sob. And then I realized, "Hey, Jeff wasn't shot! Jeff didn't die! We've had many conversations since then, and I've told him over and over how much I love him and respect him! I don't need to cry about this!" Suddenly the world was a bright place again...and the only thing that had changed was my thinking.
Keeping my thoughts bright--keeping them obedient to Christ--is so fundamentally important to every aspect of my life...and since the robbery, I've had a new arena in which to fight this battle!
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