Penance or a Good Deed?

October 31, 2007 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Life, Religion 

This week has been a long week.  I’ve been attending a training class in Philadelphia.  That requires me to get up before 6am in order to get to Trenton in time for a train that will get me to class on time.  Last night, I added a church meeting to that – going straight from the train station to the church and getting home about 9:30pm.

When I got home last night, I discovered that the trees and bushes on the side of the house were covered in toilet paper (and inexplicably paper towels).  This is the first time in 12 years at this house that we’ve had our house vandalized (well, we had our mailbox pulled down once).  I spoke to a few neighbors who were out and they knew that it was done before 8:45pm.  We also reported it to the police – a neighbor’s house was damaged by eggs Sunday and another neighbor had a pumpkin stolen.

Tonight I got home and my wife reported that 4 neighborhood kids (including 2 kids commonly known as “bad” kids) stopped her in the driveway and asked her if it was OK for them to clean up the mess.  They did, and we gave them the first candy of the night.

Now I think it’s somewhat likely that they did the deed in the first place.  Either way, they made up for it and did a good deed.

I had been seriously considering withholding candy from everybody, but this restored my faith in people.

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