Soon after my wife and I got married, we found ourselves serving in a unique church. The church was meeting in a 200 year old mansion. The church would hold its services in the middle part of the mansion while the head pastor lived on one side and we lived on the other side. The mansion had a lot of historical significance, Francis Scott Key would spend his summers there and it was used as a Confederate hospital during the Civil War. There was a rumor that the mansion was haunted and people had been challenged, before we moved there, to break in and spend one night in the mansion.
Now, when I say mansion, I don’t want you to make any assumptions. Yes, the house was very large but we were not living in luxury. The phrase “200 years old” cancels out the word “mansion” very quickly. One of the problems with living in such a uniquely historical place was that we were not allowed to make any changes to the front facade of the building. This meant no replacing decades old windows and doors and no modifying said windows and doors. In order to lock our front door we had to create a makeshift metal lock that did not mess with the look of the door from the outside. This did not work well, anyone could kick our door in if they wanted, or open a window if they wanted.
Which leads to another big problem, the mansion was right next to a prison. Before we ever moved I shared this small detail to my wife. She did not like this small detail and she voiced her concern.
“What if someone breaks out of the prison?” she asked with great fear.
To which I replied (and will forever regret saying), “Don’t worry, honey, prison breaks don’t happen anymore except in the movies.”
Fast forward about half a year. My oldest child was a few months old. She was a super colicky, refluxy, and an all-around cantankerous baby that would sleep for 20 minutes after 2 hours of trying to put her to sleep. One night, we finally got her to sleep. We laid her in the crib next to our bed. Moments later, we saw a flash of darkness. Did I forget to mention that we were not allowed to put curtains up, because that would hurt the historical look of the house and that there was a spotlight that shone on the house all night because of the house being historical but also, and more accurately, because of theft. This spotlight shined into our bedroom all night. That was when we saw the flash of darkness.
Megan looked at me, again in fear, and asked, “What was that?”
To which I replied (and I will forever regret saying this too!), “Don’t worry, honey, it was probably just a deer.”
As soon as those words came out of my mouth, the entire sky lit up with bright lights and we could hear the whirring of helicopter blades.
My phone rang. It was the head pastor. Apparently a prisoner escaped and was hiding somewhere on our property. There were a lot of places to hide: the barn, the carriage house, or, you know, in the mansion that had flimsy locks and was easy to break in to. The head pastor was a former police officer, he informed me that he would go up into the crow’s nest and keep watch over the property and that was to not, for any reason, go outside.
I do not own a gun, but I was wishing I had one at that moment. I needed to protect my family! I had a wife and a fussy daughter to take care of! So I pushed our bed up against the door. The only thing I had in our room that I could possibly use as a weapon was a microphone stand (I have no clue why I had that in my room) so I stayed up for a good part of the night, microphone stand in hand, ready to strike if an escaped convict tried coming into my house.
We never found out if the prisoner was caught, but we finally were able to venture outside again. I came out of that experience a little wiser. I learned a very valuable lesson that I will end this post with- Your wife is always right.