Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Prayer, Babies and Gunshots

My crazy busy weekend continued Saturday, starting with the Ladies' Tea at Mayfair. The tea started at 9:00 a.m. and I managed to get a couple of loads of clothes washed before leaving the house that morning. The tea was late getting started because of some technical difficulties; but, we had some ladies who could speak loudly and at least got us started with a prayer before breakfast. The breakfast was catered by "Let's do Lunch" in Decatur and it was really delicious. There was a breakfast casserole (eggs and sausage), some of the most amazing grits I've ever had, biscuits, and a fruit cup. To drink there was fruit ta, water, and coffee. The coffee and fruit tea were both very tasty. 

After we ate breakfast we got underway with a series of prayers, singing, and our first speaker, Linda Goode, who was quite funny. After Linda spoke, the ladies had 30 minutes to visit the different prayer stations before we returned to the gym for tea. While we had tea (and cookies for the sweet eaters), we had another speaker, Janice Greenleaf. Mrs. Greenleaf was also good, but considering she didn't start until noon and she spoke for almost an hour and then breakfast was supposed to be over at noon, I think she probably lost the attention of a lot of people in attendance. I think it would have been much better if the ladies had been given more time to visit the prayer stations, and then we wrapped up with prayer and tea. Good points to remember for next year. Everyone was given cute canisters (for storing tea of course) as a remembrance of the day. 

Once the tea was over, I made a quick stop by the grocery store and then home where I began cooking dinner for my cousin Lauren who had a baby earlier this month. At some point, I took a break in the cooking to check the mail when I noticed that there were a ton of police cars and a firetruck a couple of blocks down the road. This isn't necessarily the most unusual sighting in my neighborhood, but what I did find unusual was that almost everyone on the street was standing out in their front yards looking down the road. This was my first sign that something out of the ordinary was happening. I went in and checked Twitter, but couldn't find anything so just put it out of my mind. 

I left to drive the one mile over to Lauren's about 5:20 p.m. and the road was still blocked so I had to take a detour to get to her house. We ate dinner and visited for a while and I held that sweet baby for an hour or so while we had "family movie night" with G (the four-year old). His choice for the night was "The Croods" and I'm still a little confused about it, probably because I wasn't paying close attention. 

I left Lauren's to head home a little bit before 8:00 p.m. only to discover that the road was still blocked. We had since found out that there was an officer involved shooting and internal affairs and all other sorts of folks were investigating the incident. Apparently the police were called for a domestic dispute and the man came out onto his porch with a gun and officers fired shots and the man dropped the gun. They are either really bad shots or missed on purpose because the man was not injured; but, he was arrested. He apparently made bail though because I saw him outside of the house on Monday evening when I drove by there. 

So, that was my rather interesting Saturday, full of prayer, food, babies, and gunshots. There's never a dull moment in Five Points. 

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