This story took place on June 4, 1996.
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[We] were gathered in a living room when we heard a siren approaching on the highway and then sudden silence. That was strange. What does it mean? It was so unusual that we stepped outside to get a better look. The ambulance had turned down the almost-deserted dead-end dirt road - which explained why the siren was no longer needed. But why would they be going down there?
We watched the ambulance disappear at the end of the gravel road and wondered which neighbors might be affected by this emergency. Hardly anyone lived on that road.
We heard ourselves talking about what it means to "love my neighbor as myself." We remembered how a mutual friend liked to stir up that topic to make us all think. You know how if you are coming home and see smoke billowing from your neighborhood...? The panic and the fear... and then the relief when you discover it's not your house. Whew! But wait; it's my neighbor's house... Hmmm... This it tricky. Worth pondering.
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... we would discover that the neighbor with the emergency was my own dear dad who had been planting beans in the huge field at the end of that dead-end road. And now he was gone. Suddenly.
As I was saying, sirens can be triggering for me...
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* The above excerpt is from my book, Beyond these Walls - Book by Book, which features wisdom from several authors and books that impacted me on my unexpected journey from being embedded in church culture most of my life until suddenly being launched outside the walls of organized religion.
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