Resisting

In the wee hours of a Saturday morning, we awoke to shouts and aggressive pounding on the front door. We had only been in bed for an hour or so. Finally, my groggy brain realized that about the only reason someone would awaken us like this would be to announce a death. I leaped from bed and tried to dress, but my clothes wouldn't cooperate. Finally, I sat on the edge of bed to collect my wits. By then the banging and shouting had ceased.

Still expecting a death message, I assumed the next step would be for the bearer of news to come around to the bedroom window. Fully awake now, we held our breath for a few minutes until we realized the knock on the window was not going to materialize. “Was someone at the door, or did we just have a bad dream?” I asked. My wife insisted it was not a dream; the dogs in the kennel were going ballistic.

We hadn't turned a light on yet, and, remembering we hadn't bothered to pull the shades earlier, we decided it would be wise to leave them off. We crept out the hallway to the living room, hoping no one was looking through the windows. Peering around the corner of the hall, I could see the full length of the driveway through the picture window in the living room. It was totally empty except for our Eskimo Spitz, who was sitting on his haunches, looking towards the woods below the apple trees. I crept over to the window to make sure there wasn't a bicycle laying in the grass between the driveway and the door. Still nothing.

Thoroughly bewildered, I wondered again if we hadn't just been hearing things in our sleep. Secretly, I was thinking how easy it would be to forget this whole goose chase and just go back to bed. My wife insisted that this wasn't just noises in the night. But what now? What point is there in calling 911 at this time of the night, seeing there was no one around? The door was still locked, no windows were broken, no signs of anything suspicious. The operator would think we were high on something with this kind of description.

After a few minutes, the dog began barking again and walking slowly toward the apple trees. Quickly, I stepped back to the corner of the picture window which was about two steps beyond the front door. Nothing. A snowball bush to the right of the door obscured the apple trees, but the whole front yard was dimly lit by a pole light beyond it.

Then the dog began to bark louder as a human shadow came sweeping across the lawn. My heart leapt to my throat. I willed myself to keep watching, until the shadow rounded the snowball bush and morphed into the back-lit form of a man with a two-pound sledgehammer in his raised hand. I almost fainted.

I jerked back from the window and gasped, “A man...with a sledge”

We clutched each other in terror. This can't be real. This only happens in books, in faraway places. Not rural Pennsylvania. How will it feel to be hit with that sledge? Will he kill me before he hurts my wife? Should we call the police? What good would that do at this point? He probably cut the phone line anyway. Do we let him knock the door down? Or should I open it calmly and ask him if he needs some help?

I remembered the debates we had at work about nonresistance. Some of my coworkers, raised in Anabaptist households, admitted they kept 12 gauges handy in case someone ever broke into their house. They claimed they wouldn't shoot to kill, just to disable. I argued there was simply no room in scripture for that position. Their argument always went to the question, “What would you do if someone tried to hurt your wife or children? Would you actually just stand by and let them do their evil?” My response was, “I trust God will show me in the moment what to do, because no sort of physical confrontation is an option.” Never did I expect that position to be tested in rural Pennsylvania.

Not knowing what else to do, I peeked out the window again to discover a second shadow sweeping across the lawn.  Feeling surprisingly calm, I kept watching. When the shadow rounded the Snowball bush, the slender form and the jaunty angle of a baseball cap reminded me of our neighbor's son, whom I imagined to be about twelve years old.

“Aha,” I thought, “Kids playing pranks. We'll see who gets the short stick on this one.”

Without saying a word to my wife, I stepped to the door, silently turned the lock, carefully turned the knob. With a jerk, I pulled the door wide open and shouted, “GET OUT OF HERE.” The guy six inches away on the other side of the screen door grunted in surprise as he staggered backwards. He caught his balance and whirled to run. I rattled the screen door a few times and bellowed, “GET OUT OF HERE! BEAT IT!”

Even wearing logger boots, those boys would have qualified for the Olympic 100-yard sprint!

After explaining the logic behind jerking the door open to my terrified wife I was ready for bed again. Unfortunately, sleep was the last thing on her mind. She thought I should call the police, but I reasoned it would do more good to stop in at the neighbors in the morning and talk to the boy's parents. Secretly, I was also thinking of the hour or two it would take for an officer to show up and I couldn't go to bed in the meantime.

I checked the locks on the doors and windows and pulled the shades. I tried to convince my wife that bed would be just as safe as any other place in the house. In a show of fearlessness, I turned off all the lights.

I promptly went to sleep, only to have a sharp elbow rouse me a short time later. The dogs were going wild again and someone had been pounding on the garage door. The woods came within ten yards of the garage door, creating a perfect target for the harassers. I turned on every light inside and outside the house and wished for morning.

After the second pounding session, we heard no more from them for the rest of the night.

Toward noon, I stopped at the farm up the road and asked to speak with Chuck and Linda. I told them what had happened and would prefer if it didn't happen again. They were offended that I accused their son and insisted vehemently that he was so scared of the dark there was no way it was him. Hearing the conversation, their son came outside and I immediately saw he was considerably smaller than I had remembered him to be. The form in the night had been a good six inches taller than this lad. I apologized profusely for jumping to conclusions. They assured me it was fine, and if anyone ever pounded on our door again we should call them right away. They would be down at our house in minutes each with a loaded 12 gauge.

We didn't have any more night visitors that summer, but toward fall I discovered two of my guns were missing. After searching every possible corner for them I called the police to report them stolen. I knew there was little chance of recovering them, but I wanted a report in case they were ever used in a crime to prove they hadn't been in my possession. The officer asked me if anything unusual had been going on at our place during the summer. I related the story of the Door Pounders.

Our other neighbors, across from the farm, had two teenage sons who had been giving the law all kinds of grief during the summer. Some of the events that summer included: smashed mailboxes, burning blankets dropped onto the interstate from overpasses, and car windows shattered by rocks thrown from the roadside. The officer wasn't allowed to discuss specifics, but was confident our eventful night was just another of their escapades. We'll never know what their intentions were that night, but it has given me much to think about since. Especially the realization that tense, split-second decisions will always show who we really are.