...thoughts expressed here are not necessarily final.

May 02, 2005 Reading for my finals this week- but i will live to blog again soon!

Thanks for the prayers. I felt the need to share this with others from our community. I wanted to let you know a bit more detail on what my dear wife has experienced recently. She is doing extremely well by the grace of God, but it has been a very tenuous time for her emotionally. We are sure God will work good out of this experience but we are not on the other side of it yet. All this happened on a training trip to Memphis on which Earnie (Earnestine) was able to accompany me.

The trip went well until about two hours before Earnie was to pick me up at the end of the last day of training. She had stopped by Sears to pick up something and was assaulted by three adult women who tried to mug her. She was parked next to the front door of Sears and it was broad daylight- 3 in the afternoon- in a part of town not normally characterized by crime.

As she left the store for the car, one of them pulled a car behind hers to block her and when she went to ask her to move, another hit her with something on the back of the neck and the third one twisted her arm and took her hand purse and knocked her to the ground. Then the two who attacked her went to jump into the car and get away.
She reacted instinctively and got up and fought back (for better or worse) and grabbed the one who had taken the purse as she was getting in the car to get away and hit the woman hard in the sternum as she grabbed hold of her and tried to pull her out of the car. She doesn't know why she did this, and that is one of the curious unresolved issues. The car started off and drug her several feet before she let go of her assailant (who was by this time being assailed herself). Something told Earnie she had better let go and so she did (thank the Lord) and she fell on the pavement hard.

Another woman who had a baby with her saw what was going on and was yelling for help, which didn't come until after they got away. the woman sisn't call 911 though she had a cell phone in her hand, but Earnie thinks her yelling may have helped speed the thieves on their way. Several people were looking on but didn't help and were slow to come even after the car was gone. I think the worst of what Earnie remembers is the foul language that was thrown at her during the encounter.

Battered, dirty, bruised and badly shaken, Earnie discovered to her surprise that the purse and her keys were on the ground - somewhere in the melee, the thief dropped it. The car did not have a license plate, just an illegible temporary tag. Since nothing was missing she decided she just wanted to get out of there and get to me and so she came on to pick me up. It all happened so quickly she didn't get a really good look at any of them. She got to me as I was about ten minutes away at the training session.

Anyway she wanted to come home straightaway rather than get involved in a
lengthy encounter so the police were not called in on it. I deferred to her emotional state at the time. After I figured out that I could not go find the would-be thieves and beat them up (my initial response) , we prayed for them and for ourselves and headed home. We drove home in a torrential rainstorm because she didn't want to stay anywhere else that night.

Please pray for her healing- nothing major, but general soreness and the bruises where her arm was twisted and her hand where she hit the thief is pretty sore a week later. I guess no one knows how they will react in a situation until it happens- Earnie figures if it hadn't been her it would have been one of the little ladies that was in Sears instead, and who knows what would have happened to someone more frail.

The unpredictable emotional fallout has been a challenge- she is still very jumpy and hesitant to be around people, and gatherings of strangers make her very nervous. We are praising God who watches over us. In retrospect, this could have been a LOT worse. In our lifetime together, I have had two guns pulled on me, our house was shot up in a drive by in Dallas, and we have experienced several other miscellaneous near misses that could have been disasterous, but have been preserved. We are blessed.

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From the personal weblog of Anthony Foster @http://anthonyfoster.com/blog/