I had just stopped by my 10 year old's Sunday School class to help her pin her hair up and then pick up some notepaper at the coat rack where my family congregates after services when it happened. The halls were thinning out to very little traffic. Sunday School teachers could be heard getting their students attention and getting class going. The hum of the normal Sunday at church was underway and then I saw him. Average height, sandy blond hair, a struggling beard, young, a forest green backpack with odd bulges, black turtleneck under a parka, a hesitant step, twitching hands, a face that wouldn't meet my own, a man looking at everything except the people around him.
It didn't feel right, so I paused my course and watched for a minute, thinking that my feelings would abate in observation. He would look into a classroom scanning it. Was he looking for a child? His child? My gut said no - he couldn't possibly be old enough to have a 10 year old. Maybe a baby, not a child this old. Maybe a younger sibling? Still the nervous hands, the shuffling gait as he moved to another room to scope it out. And a chill ran through my own mind. What was in the back pack? Why was this man so nervous? why would he not meet the eyes of others? What was he doing at the beginning of a class period looking around at the classrooms?
He rounded the far corner of the hall, and I squashed an urge to follow. Suddenly mad at myself for thinking the worst. Mad that my mind automatically turned towards Sandy Hook and Columbine. Mad that I think that way. That I walk through the halls assessing the "danger factor" of common strangers. I went back to my seat in the sanctuary and the anger faded but my unease didn't. My husband noticed. Asked twice what was wrong before I finally answered that I wished I didn't see people and think the worst. He asked what I saw and then told me if I had red flags going off that I needed to trust my instincts. I needed to go tell someone.
There are few people in life that I listen to as much as I listen to my husband. I didn't trust my own instincts, fearing paranoia - but if he trusted them I needed to act. I circled back through the classrooms hoping to see something to invalidate my unease, but the man was gone. I wondered about the other levels of classrooms. Was he looking there? Was he by the children's amphitheater? My heart sunk to even think of that scenario. The amphitheater is one of the neatest, most kid friendly spaces in the church, and it would be jam packed with children. A fishbowl for a shooter.
With that grisly idea in mind I went to one of the leaders I knew. I didn't know how to start the conversation. 99.999% chance that this was all in my head. I briefly thought of what they would think of me - a paranoid parent, more so now than when I camped by the one way mirror in the nursery area to see if my babies would stop crying.
Since my children were that age so many things have changed my world. I am a parent of 911. My husband and I worked closely alongside a man we trusted in youth ministry, only to find that he had groomed a young teen and continued an abusive relationship with her for years. The damage done in that former church still echoes through my life. I don't trust people anymore. I don't trust my instincts about them. I don't trust that church is a safe place for my children.
Before that there was my own upbringing. My father was an OPFOR leader (opposing forces) . He was in charge of being the enemy for military training sessions. He regularly spoke on the topic of home defense. He testified in court as a weapon specialist. He was a gunsmith and had a class three firearms license. We grew up shooting pretty much any weapon that you can imagine in our front yard on a plot outside the city limits of a small mountain town. After Columbine, he was one of those who helped train teachers, first response teams, SWAT teams and counter-terrorism forces.
It's hard to imagine that didn't effect my grown-up outlook today. A former pastor used to come to me after heated words had been stated in business meetings, or overheard in the church parking-lot. My mind was a recorder. I remembered the exact wording of statements. I was hyper-vigilant and would assess the reactions to events in a room full of people. I was crowd conscious. When I was tired, I was easily overwhelmed as I had no way to filter visual and auditory information out.
My mind has dulled since then. I no longer notice everything. I can't tell you the order of sentences in a debate. But I still find myself assessing things. The closest way out of a building. The tenor of a group of people chatting in the lobby. The body language of a stranger in the halls. . .
"I'm jumping at shadows." I told my friend behind the counter. "It's probably nothing, but there was a guy scouting out the classrooms in the B200s." To her immense credit she handled everything exactly right. Calm and cool she took down the description I gave her. I knew that it would get radioed to key leaders in different areas of the building to be on the look-out. Later another one of those leaders would thank me for my vigilance. By that time I would be even more convinced that it wasn't vigilance, but paranoia.
I returned to the worship service in the sanctuary. My husband looked at me. "You did what you needed to. Two weeks ago we had training on this. They said the number one thing is to trust your instincts." My husband works at a place that is a potential terrorist target. It didn't surprise me that they had that type of training there. "I just want to go back and camp in her Sunday School class." I shakily replied. He squeezed my hand. "There's a place where you have to trust God too, you can't be with them all of the time."
I smile as I write this, wondering how I got so lucky as to have a man like that in my life. He definitely keeps me grounded. A sermon on marriage was good. Not a full distraction, but a comforting one. I turned my crowd assessment inward looking for areas to improve in my life, things I could do to be more supportive for my husband. A definition of the word "submit" that was far outside of the doormat style obedience that I had been taught as a child fascinated me and I found encouragement there.
The service ended and we split up, my husband and I, and "Uncle" Steve; they to retrieve my children from various parts of the building and me to a teachers meeting in preparation for the next worship hour. The teachers meeting had not started, and I found my footsteps wandering through the building back to my daughters classroom. The halls had heavy traffic. Parents picking up children. People making their way to the coffee dispensers. People leaving one service, people coming to another. And in the mass of bodies I saw him again.
No parka, no backpack now, just a simple black turtleneck, but the same shuffle, the same twitch to the hands. This time I followed. As I did so I noticed the rhythm to the twitches in the hands. I began to suspect a medical condition instead of stress. The black shoes had thick heavy soles, not combat boots, but corrective soles. He ducked down into one of the alcoves in the hall, and pulled out the green bulging backpack. I continued following and watching. The body language was bugging me less, but the pack still bothered me. Who carries a backpack to church? Well, I do - I reasoned with myself. I carry a pack with my laptop in it many Sundays. That doesn't look like a laptop in that pack though. It hangs oddly, like there is something too long in it.
I argue with myself, remembering some of the sniper rifles that my father had. Ones that came in pieces. But those are rarely used in shootings. It is the assault rifles and handguns that are the usual culprits. It is hard to hide an assault rifle in a backpack. The man goes into another classroom. He sets the pack down and begins to open it. I watch through the open door from a vantage point down the hall. The man pulls out the pieces to a music stand and begins to set up. The red flags are gone, and in their place warring for the top feeling are both a sense of profound relief that what I had feared was not the case and a sense of embarrassment that I had so misread the situation.
Today as I write this down. I am looking at the events and still uncertain if the path that I walk is one of vigilance or one of paranoia. I laugh as I imagine someone else coming to the nursery counter reporting a tall odd looking woman with a backpack wearing a vintage military jacket stalking down strangers in the hallways.
I tend to look at my husbands words as wise, his training as something that God had given the timing for. I am thankful for the leaders in our Children's ministry who are the solid type of people that take everything, including suspicious stranger alerts, in stride and calmly. If I am indeed paranoid, which is something I suspect I lean towards, I am praying that it is a weakness that God can use to show his strength through and not one that the devil can exploit.
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