By April Terry (http://faithwarming.blogspot.com)

I used to walk during my lunch hour in the area by my office.  Usually, I didn’t walk alone, but on one Friday afternoon a few years ago, everyone had plans.   So I put my headphones on and proceeded to walk my regular course.  About twenty minutes into the walk, an object struck me on the side of my head near the temple and another object struck my chest with great force.  Instinctively, I reached up to catch my glasses and instead caught a hard, green lemon in my arms.  I watched a green Jeep Cherokee speeding away down the street.  As the pain sear through me, I froze waiting to see if I would remain conscious.  When I realized that I wouldn’t pass out, I looked up at the street and waited knowing that the dead-end street that the vehicle was on would force it to come back.  I stepped closer into the street and struggled to get my brain and my eyesight to focus so that I could see what the license plate number was.  I couldn’t.

Even though my temple start to swell and my glasses were broken, I thought I was okay as I walked back to the office until I saw a friend walking toward me.  She was on the same walk.  As I reached her, I started to cry and told her what had happened and she put an arm around me leading me back to our office.  She stood with me while we called the police.  Of course, the police couldn’t do a thing without a license number, so there was nothing to be done. 

I spent the whole weekend upset over the whole situation, so I said prayers.  I prayed that the people who had done this would be caught so that they wouldn’t hurt anymore people.  The police had told me that they had been doing this over the course of several weeks.   So, I prayed that they wouldn’t hurt anymore people and would be caught. 

The following Monday, my friend who had helped me before recommended that I take a picture of my injuries.  By Monday, the bruising had turned deep purple and was the size of a nine inch plate above my breast, but I decided that I was not about to be deterred from my walk.  I still didn’t have anyone to walk with and even though I was a little afraid, I wasn’t about to be intimidated.  As I headed out the front doors, the receptionist saw me leaving alone again and insisted that I take a pencil and paper with me just in case.  “What are the odds?” I told her, pretending to have confidence I didn’t really have. 

Ten minutes into my walk, I felt a large grapefruit hit me right in the hind quarters!  It was less painful than the previous Friday, but it afforded an interesting opportunity.  Due to the location where I was walking, the green Jeep had to come to a near stop to make a full u-turn at the end of the dead-end.  They couldn’t make it doing more than 10 mph, and although I was left with yet another bruise on my derriere, I got a good, clean look at their license plate.   Busted!  That was the end of the fruit throwing in that town.

As I look back on the situation, I am reminded of the old saying in regard to prayer, “Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.”  I prayed that someone would be stopped and they were, but it also took yet another injury to my body to make it happen!

Throughout the whole situation, I had several people come alongside me and care for me.  The receptionist and the friend who advised me and helped me back to the office.  Both of them not only listened to my stories, but also offered good advice and assistance during that time.  It was a minor injury, but it hurt my confidence and peace of mind.  They also cheered alongside me when I came back the second time with a license plate number on my pencil and paper, albeit amazed that I would go out alone once again. 

The high school kids who went fruit throwing during their lunch hour each day never gave a thought to the injuries that they caused, but they saw the pictures of my injuries and learned the consequence of their actions.  They were charged with battery, plead to a smaller charge, and were on probation for a while. 

Still, this experience told me something about the power of prayer.  Would you pray differently if you knew that you would have to take on another bruise in order to catch and prevent someone else from injury?  Would you still be eager to catch the bad guy if you knew that it would cost you something?  I wonder if I would have prayed a little differently had I known, even though I think the situation worked out the way I thought that it should.  Integrity isn’t really a free commodity that is magically gifted to us, but something that we have to pay for in action and intent.

Sometimes, doing the right thing costs us.  Sometimes, it costs more than other times, but in the end, the reward of knowing that we did the right thing is worth the cost.  I thought about the elderly folks we see in our area who walk their dogs and I thought about how dangerous an injury like that could be to them.  I finally decided that God picked the right person to wind up with a round bruise on their derriere.