crime

Categories Everyday Life

Bite me

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I subscribe by e-mail to Crimemapping.com, a service that e-mails you anytime a crime occurs within a specified radius of a specified location. I have it set to e-mail me anytime a crime occurs within 1/2 mile of my house.

Generally, things are pretty quiet. I get one or two e-mails a week–the most common incidents are shoplifting from the gas station up the road a piece, petty vandalism (BB guns, mostly), occasionally a marijuana or marijuana pipe, and the ever present domestic violence cases. There’s a trailer park right on the 1/2 mile line–and it has domestic violence incidents relatively frequently.

Domestic violence is no laughing matter–and I generally don’t laugh at it.

But when I opened my e-mail this morning to see THIS, I couldn’t help but laugh.

Crimemapping report-Bit G/F's bicep

Did you catch that?

Someone got busted for BITING HIS GIRLFRIEND’S BICEP.

Weird.

I think the last time I bit someone was when I was 6–or younger. I mean, seriously? You BIT your girlfriend’s bicep?

Categories Everyday Life, Reflections

Traveling a Trail of Fears

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Today, I rode a trail where less than a month ago an attempted rape had occurred in broad daylight.

I rode it mostly as a manifesto against fear.

Having spoken my silent piece, I took a shorter path back: the road.

There I discovered a different danger. Instead of a nameless, faceless man intending to perpetrate a great crime against womanhood in general and me in particular, I happened upon a harried mother, intending no evil but capable of inflicting great harm.

No doubt she had other things on her mind as she came up to the intersection I was riding across. Perhaps she looked both ways, perhaps she didn’t. If she did, she looked right through me. Because she turned her SUV directly in front of me, cutting me off. And then she stopped, nearly forcing me to run into her.

Two different trails–one traveled with trepidation, one with confidence. On one trail, nothing occurred. On the other, I could easily have been killed. On one trail, I feared intentional harm. On the other, I was almost the victim of unintentional harm.

Try as I might like, I can never escape the dangers of this world. I cannot escape the fears that might overcome me–there are things to fear everywhere. So I have choice. I can travel the trails of fear, forever in bondage to potential harm; or I can entrust my life into God’s hands and travel the trail of faith.

“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” Luke 12:25

In looking for a link to said attempted rape, I discovered that police later issued a recall of the statement, saying that the woman who claimed to be attacked had lied.