He is risen...

Indeed. And I bet you think I am talking about Jesus, and not the malcontent my wife and I had the displeasure of seeing the other night, nary a shirt or shred of decency to be found.
I enjoyed my Easter. It isn’t often a pastor can say that he got to sit with his family on Easter Sunday, but I did, and I enjoyed that special privilege and it is one of the things I enjoy most about team pastoring. Everything about the day was a lot of fun. The ham was totally amazing and everything I remembered it to be (it has been a while since I had glazed ham), we had fun, played Uno, the whole day was sweet, only to be trumped by arguably the most surreal event that has happened to me in a good long time.
On the way home from returning movies (around 10:30 or so) I drove by the church to check the security of the place and noticed a couple of suspicious vehicles parked in the lot (I say suspicious because any vehicle parked in our lot at that time is, as my two years experience tells me, very strange indeed. Plus they were parked in the darkest corner) So Candace and I headed that way to see if everything was kosher. For all we knew thieves had parked there so they could rob the houses just over the fence. The first car was empty, looked exactly like a parked car, and I thought this was also the case with the second vehicle when I realized two things. 1) The interior light was on. 2) A girl’s face was staring back at me looking through the back window. Picked which one I was:

A)startled
B)befuddled
C)bamboozled
D)delighted

Congrats to you if you picked (A). So now we know there are people in the vehicle, and there is yet a glint of hope that perhaps they are not doing what we perceive them to be doing, and then as we rounded the corner we got our confirmation… There are those who would love to say they have seen a Yeti or perhaps a Bigfoot, or better yet the Loch Ness Monster, or a real life Eskimo… but me… I got treated to the Great White Skinny. As we rounded the corner this streak of white (I am sure that is what it would have looked like on a camera, much like the Bigfoot footage everyone had seen, but I didn’t have a camera although it looked increasingly likely that they did) leaps from the back seat to the front and switches off the interior light.
Which brings me to my next thought, if you go to all the trouble of going to a place where you hopefully won’t get caught, why wreck it by having the flippin light on? I mean, we would have driven by and been on our merry way, but nooooo! You have to have the light on for who knows what reason… well I can guess but we aren’t going to go there.
There is a part of me that wanted to jump out of the car and take care of it, tell them to move it along and find someplace more appropriate to have an indiscreet encounter, like perhaps a Safeway parking lot, or you know, a dealership or something. Point is, go play Titanic someplace else.
There was a much bigger part of me that was asking the question, what if you know them? Two cars means they met there, means possibly one or both of them picked a familiar place, these are the thoughts going through my head while I am trying to drive back my inner Grissom and not go to far to sleuth them out. That was a tough one for me, and I can’t say I knew what the right thing to do was. Based on circumstance they were most certainly doing something they shouldn’t be otherwise they would be doing it elsewhere, but if they are my parishioners they aren’t going to care one iota whether or not I think it’s wrong. I am sure I could get them to leave. But it was the fact that I might know them that made me second guess myself and in retrospect I wonder if I made the wrong decision. It is my job to not only declare the Gospel but to hold people accountable to the Word of God, and if I had known them it would have made for a very complicated discussion and possibly a very difficult future for a family or two… Truth is I was so stunned by the whole thing I didn’t think to get license plates or anything, I just sort of drove home to call the RCMP. We went back down after calling, walking behind the building, checking to see that the cops actually came to get rid of them, but gave up after a few minutes. The windows were fogged up, the lights were back on, not sure anyone was home…