Well, as weird as this may sound, some good things are already happening as a result of me getting burglerized.

The first good thing - well, I guess it was good - is that it set in mind a train of thought that helped me to deliver part of the message this morning at Meeting for Worship.

I suppose I ought to give a little overview of how our Meeting works so people who aren't familiar with Friends Practices will understand what I'm talking about.
Our Meetings for Worship are conducted in silence, called waiting worship. We believe that the Spirit of God communicates with people directly ( a theologian like Jeff would call this "continuing revelation" - and this is not an idea that is unique to Quakerism) What IS unique to Quakerism....

is that we are willing to sit there, in silence, each one personally praying or meditating, or counting the ceiling tiles, however he or she is inclined, until someone feels that they have received a message that they should speak to the group.

How do you know when you've got the message? How do you know this isn't just some random thought that's bouncing around your brain? How can you tell if you are divinely inspired? Well, I was taught by wise elders that you know you are supposed to speak the message when you Cannot NOT speak it. When, try though you might to ignore it, keep it to yourself, deny it, whatever - nope - you find yourself talking anyway.

If that sounds scary, let me assure you that it is, in a way. I am not the only Friend who has, at times spent large portions of the Meeting praying "Please! Don't let me get the message!"

It's a little difficult to explain the experience...it's very personal and very spiritual. In my own case, the first time it happened to me, I had been attending for about 8 months. I was in the midst of the feeling of being far away from myself, which I often experience in prayer, when all of the sudden, my mind was filled with very clear words. I questioned, internally, what was going on and felt very strongly that I should speak the words that came to me. I found that idea absolutely terrifying, since I believe that that meant that I was actually in the presence of the Holy Spirit: that God was talking to me and he wanted me to do something right now.

In the meeting that I was attending at that time, not all persons who spoke a message got to their feet to do so - though that is a tradition in older meetings like the one I am attending now. That turned out to be a good thing, since if I had absolutely had to get to my feet I think I might have fallen over. I was shaking very badly. From head to foot I was, indeed, "The Quaker"!! Nevertheless, my voice came out with no hint of a tremor and was perfectly loud enough to be heard throughout the Meetinghouse - which, if you know how low my voice is is something of a miracle all by itself.

Afterwards, some of the elders came up and thanked me for delivering the message. I could tell by the look on Joseph's face that he had a pretty good idea of what I had gone through ( he's one of the ones who told me how scared he was of getting the message when he was young) I had no idea what to say, since I had no idea what I had in fact SAID.

Anyway, I've gotten a little better over the years. Specifically, I've learned that if I'm starting to get "That Feeling" it's better to just speak it and get it over with than make the Holy Spirit shake it out of me! And though I still can never say, exactly, what message I did give, at least now I remember what the heck it was about. In this morning's case it was about how if you try to keep you negativity and anger in check and do your best to follow the Light of God within you might be able to say something helpful to someone else without realizing it.

That came out of me actively trying to forgive the person who burglerized us, although I am not quite there yet - I'm making the effort.

The second good thing is that I feel remarkably less stressed by not having a cell phone. Until I did not have one, I had no idea how much stress that little booger had been causing me. Was it on in the car? Was it charged? Was it off in theatre? Did I miss a call? Did it ring and I didn't hear it? Did I get my messages? Why wasn't it ringing?! Etc.

But today I went to family dinner and had a great stress free time, because if anybody was trying to reach me....oh well. ( Also D. mixed up a pitcher of those martini's again...they're very tasty and just one of those will calm down even the most raging stress ball in a hurry!!)

The third good thing was that we (hopefully) wound up doing a good turn for someone else whose pocketbook was stolen. When The Hub was on his way down to the wood show this morning, he saw a handbag laying alongside the road on Rt. 140, but he didn't have time to stop and check it out. He didn't think it was mine, but stranger things have happened. So, when I got home from family dinner, The Hub and I drove down there to see if we could spot it.

Yep, we could. After a roaring argument about who was going to brave traffic to get it ( both of us thought the other one shouldn't do it) we both went. Naturally, it wasn't mine, but there was a bank card in the purse, as well as a few dollars in cash. We didn't want to paw through it. It gave me a mildly queasy feeling seeing that there was cash in there -as if something worse had happened to the girl whose purse it was than that she had just gotten robbed - but perhaps her theives were in a position to not have to bother with small bills, or maybe someone just ripped her off to be mean to her. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" ( triple bonus points to anybody who knows where that line is from!)

The upshot of the whole thing is that we took it up to the State Police Barrack, where it was matched up to the victem of a crime in Owings Mills. We explained what we were doing and how we had come by it.

"Do you have your drivers licence on you?" the young serious officer asked.

I smiled at him "It's stolen!"

He shook his head and laughed at himself. The Hub handed over his license, the officer got our phone number, he'll call us if he needs us.

But, who knows? Maybe on some cosmic level my purse got stolen so that we would find hers. Maybe hers is really important on some level I can't understand.

Another thing, I can't tell if it's good or bad, is that all the cats in the neighborhood are burnt up at The Hub because he put up those motion detecting lights in the back. Now when they try to hunt around our pond it's no longer the deep, dark, hunting ground it once was. So the cats - there are a remarkable number of visiting cats here- flatten their ears and glare at the door.
I guess this is a good thing for the prey and a bad thing for the cats.

Which, I guess is what keeps the universe in balence. Or something.