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Smash hit

She hesitated to say it at first today–it was not quite the typical uplifting experience one usually hears in a Mormon first-Sunday-of-the-month testimony meeting–but finally she did.

She and her husband had decided to take their little kids and go up to San Francisco to watch the parade for the Giants, victorious in their World Series win.

And I’m sure they had a great time doing so–but then they came back to their car.

Not one, not two, but three windows had been smashed in, probably in vengeance that all there had been for the thieves to steal was, if I heard right, a soccer ball and a My Little Pony.

THEIR car.  I mean, we’re talking a carseat and innocent little kids and broken glass and thinking of the drive home down the freeway hoping for no still-attached-but-unseen shards shaking loose at their children. (I don’t know how much the first responders were able to do about that.) I can’t even imagine what it was like to be trying to fix that enough and to reassure their kids while staying calm themselves.

And yet.  She is the kind of person I want to be when I grow up. She said that yes they called the police and the insurance company and all that, but first, they said a prayer together.

And their hearts went out to the person who, as she put it, was going through such a life that they thought that this was the best choice they could make now. They prayed for him or them, whoever they might be; they had to live with what they had done. “It’s so sad!” And she shook her head, wishing there were something she and her family could do to help them have  a happier life than that. She grieved that, should they ever successfully come back around to where they should be they wouldn’t even know whom to apologize to in order to see themselves being forgiven, to have a chance to accept the grace (that word being my description of who she is and what she lives by) waiting for them.

Cars and plastic ponies, fix them, get another, they’re just stuff. Her older children will remember that prayer and that thought and their mother’s example and their father’s steadiness in the face of such a scene of personal, deliberate destructiveness for the rest of their lives.

There is no way a criminal with a crowbar could have known he was helping raise young children to be more compassionate future adults. But with those parents in charge, he was.

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