God's Grace In Restraining Me

Today I've been floating peacefully in a endless pristine river that is God's grace. Only God's grace is powerful enough to have controlled and restrained me during an extremely tense and potentialy dangerous situation that occurred last night. Since moving on from the incident all my mind keeps going back to is the overwhelming sense of the Holy Spirit protecting me, my children, and the other party involved. You could say I am on a mountain top right now when it comes to experiencing the presence of God in a very real way across all my human senses. I take no credit what so ever for my current state of being, I personally have done nothing to bring it about...that is the beauty of it all. Have you ever heard the phrase "But for the grace of God...there go I"?

The incident last night involved my daughter, one of my sons, my neighbor, a car load of teenage boys and girls, a speeding car, and me. The speeding car, loaded with the teenagers, shortcut a curb right in front of my house. The car with tires squealing, rounded the corner, hit the curb, bottomed out, and approached me, my kids, and my neighbor - with in 20 feet of us. The driver never slowed down and all five teenagers inside laughed as they looked at us.

I asked my neighbor if she could watch the kids for a moment while jumped in the minivan and chased the car down. I was happy to see that it turned into a culdesac just a block from my house. But the teenagers had already entered one of the houses. I found the car and started writing down the license plate info and car description. We have a deal with the local police department. They've told us to send in license plate info of cars that are driving recklessly in our neighborhood and they'll write citations based on our word alone. I was going to take them up on their offer.

I was pretty pumped up as well and wanted to see the teenagers face to face. So I started to honk my horn in order to prompt someone to come out. Keep in mind I was not in any state of rage or anything - I was on a mission though and dead serious. No teenagers came out but a couple of adult women did. Neither one knew what house the teenagers were in but I suspected one of the women did because she seemed to be acting like a concerned mother. God's grace covered this moment because I am not sure what would have happened if any one of the teenagers came out. Or, what about if all of them came out? I figured there were at least four boys and I was ready to show'em all how disappointed I was in them. At that moment, it was only God's grace that protected me and them. There wasn't much I could do so I returned home.

With in a half hour of returning home though I saw the car coming back down the street from the culdesac. I walked out into the street and forced it to stop, by standing in front of it. I got the teenage boy to admit what he did. It was by God's grace alone that all I had to do was simply ask, even though I felt prepared to be a bit more aggressive. It was also grace alone that restrained me during the conversation as I listened to this punk mouth off to me. Again, I was not in rage of any sort, I was not shouting, I was not swearing, I was not threatening...but I was pissed! Thank God I remained controlled. Thank God the kid didn't have a gun or a knife (anything is possible today, right.) A few words later, I backed off and the punk moved on.

My daughter brought up the incident right before bedtime and asked about what she saw. I told her she saw Daddy in action protecting her and her brother. She wasn't scared for me but the punk. I told her how much I loved her and that God was right there protecting all of us.

Praise God!