Good Neighbors and the Lord's Blessing

I'll get to Christmas Pictures hopefully later tonight. First I have a little story for you. The afternoon of Christmas day we packed up the kids and a few things and went to my parents house. We were warned by TV weathermen that there was a horrible storm coming that night. That evening it began to snow and then the winds howled all night long. We decided just to stay the night at my parents and attempt the roads in the morning.

This probably was a good decision considering when we went home on Friday the roads were awful. From the time we went around the point of the mountain the freeway in Salt Lake County was nothing but ice. I'm not talking about some snow or some slush or even a few patches of thin ice. I'm talking like an inch or two of solid ice. It was starting to get broken up just a little so it was very bumpy. Around the Bountiful area it cleared up and the roads were just wet. Until the Lagoon area that is and then it got even worse. Here the freeway was even more solid ice. The rest of the way home we were driving on solid ice. This time it wasn't broken up at all, just solid ice from one side of the road to the other. It was seriously insane. I've never seen anything like it before in my 14+ years of driving. I think we drove 35-40 mph all the way home.

When we arrived home our driveway was covered in drifted snow and so was our front porch. Jason decided to park the car on the street until he could get the driveway cleared off. So we walked through the snow to get to our front door. As we were getting out of the car we noticed footprints in the snow leading up to our door. At first we thought nothing of it as we both thought maybe someone had just come to wish us Merry Christmas or something. Then as we got to the front porch we both noticed that one of the footprints was coming out of the house and a portion of the heel of the footprint was inside the house. I suggested maybe it was our footprint when we were leaving the day before. This couldn't be right because there wasn't snow up against the door like that when we left. Also, the footprint didn't match the footprint of either of our boots. We were both quite puzzled and a bit alarmed at this point.

First thing I did as I entered our house was look to see if our computer was still here. It was and everything else in our house looked just as we had left it--a Christmas mess (wrapping paper and boxes all over and breakfast fixins still out.) Since everything looked fine we went about our day but both of us were still trying to explain away the mystery footprint.

While Jason was out shoveling the driveway our next-door neighbor pulled up. As he got out of his car he came over to Jason and said, "We had a bit of excitement at your house this morning." He went on to explain that when he came out to shovel his driveway he noticed that our front door was wide open. He also noticed that our car was gone and there were no fresh tire tracks leaving. He said he came over and knocked, rang the doorbell and hollered "Hello?" When nobody answered he went home and called the police. The Roy City police came over and walked through our house to make sure that nothing bad had happened. When they determined that nothing looked stolen or anything they locked the door and pulled it shut. It was the Police officer's footprint that was leading out of our door.

We decided that the door didn't get shut all the way tight and when the fierce winds picked up on Christmas night and into the next morning they must have blown our door open. Nobody knows how long it was wide open. I'm a little worried it was open all night and if that's the case we're going to have a huge gas bill as our heater would have ran all night long.

I am certain that the Lord watched over our house that night. He knew it was unsafe for us to drive home and someone could have easily walked into our house and taken our belongings. I am thankful for his protective care and for a kind and watchful neighbor who noticed when something didn't seem right. I feel very blessed.