Are you sure you have the right address?

We started married life in an upstairs apartment of a small house in a small town. Below us lived our landlady and her son.

I always heard her puttering about in the kitchen. She puttered and muttered in German, which is a whole other story.

Our first apartment wasn’t chic, but we were just happy to begin life together wherever that took us.

I’d taken out a steak for dinner that day. It was a huge luxury, so to stretch the budget, we planned to share it.

We had a cat. I found him on the counter with the steak between his teeth. He high-tailed it into our bedroom with the precious meat, while I chased and yelled at him.

I forgot about the lady below.

“When I catch you…”

As I yelled for him to stop, and promised to make mince meat out of him, he took to the back corner underneath the bed.

I went flat on my stomach, turned my voice into honey calling for him to come out. I’m not sure how all that sounded to the lady below.

As he settled to enjoy his steak dinner, I flattened myself to scooch toward him. About half-way there, someone knocked on the door.

I figured it was the landlady and I could feel the heat rise into my cheeks as I mentally replayed all she must have heard.

The second time the knock was firm, and I began my retreat.

My mind was going through all the things I could possibly say as explanation for the ruckus.

I took a deep breath, straightened my shirt, flattened my hair, and opened the door. Two men in dark suits and dark ties stood on the other side.

The one on the left flipped open his badge.

“FBI, ma’am. May we come in?”

Just like on TV.

An absolute wave of impressions accompanied by embarrassment washed over me.

“It was a cat.” I said, totally out of left field.

They did not blink. They did not smile.

“He took the steak.”

“May we come in?” the suit on the right repeated, starting forward.

As I backed down our hallway into the living room, I unfortunately continued to try to dig out of my flustered guilt-hole.

“The cat stole the steak. I chased him. I would never actually kill him. I just said that. I love him.”

Then, it dawned on me there was no cat to be seen. Surely they thought there was a child involved, and, how in the world did they get here so fast?

I weakly added. “We don’t have any children. We just got married a month ago.”

Without a smile or any small talk about cats, children, or absent husbands, we stood in the center of the living room. Silence fell. One of the men produced a picture.

“Do you know this person?” he asked.

I stared a bit. “No.” I answered, handing it back.

And although it was true, I’m pretty sure I had the guiltiest look on my face.

So, the conversation continued with them becoming a bit more adamant and the questions more pointed. The dates they gave for the lady in the picture residing in our apartment overlapped with when we first came into the apartment.

They began to insist that I must know her.

I kept telling them she had not lived with us. I did not know her. Never even seen her. But, something about two men in black suits wrote “guilty” all over me.

And as the need to defend grew, I repeated that we had not moved into 411 East 4th until after our wedding on June 6 with no one else living there.   

Suddenly there was a pause. They looked at each other. The guy on the right slipped the picture back into his suit pocket.

“Is this 411 East 5th Ma’am?”

“No, it’s 411 East 4^th,” I answered.

It’s always a good thing to have the right address, or you can end up at the wrong place.

The Apostle Peter at the end of his life, saw a need to warn the church to make sure they were going in the right direction. He cautioned them to not twist and turn God’s Words to accommodate their own human thinking and rational. He didn’t want them to walk away from truth because that always ends up at the wrong address.     

Peter acknowledged that some things in God’s Word are hard to understand, “which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.” (2 Peter 3:16 NKJV)

Peter calls them out as “unstable” and “untaught,” and some of his audience were just that. They had arrived at conclusions which were contrary to God’s Word. But, the Word of God stands and it is true in every time and culture. Hard things, those pieces we don’t fully understand in Scripture, can’t be filled in with error or we end up at the wrong place.The Word of God stands and it is true in every time and culture. Share on X

Sometimes the church shifts to accommodate culture. Peter is adamant. This is wrong. He writes this from a prison cell. Outside his dark walls persecution of Christians grew inhumane and gruesome.

Shortly before his martyrdom, Peter ended his epistle with these words:

“You therefore, beloved, …beware lest you also fall from your own steadfastness, being led away with the error of the wicked, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”  (2 Peter 3:17-18 NKJV)

Be steadfast in the truth of God’s Word. Stay the course.

So, are you wondering about what happened in my FBI story?Be steadfast in the truth of God’s Word. Stay the course. Share on X

They turned and left. No apologies. No smile.

But on their way out, they did discuss quietly that they needed to go one street over.

I stood in the dim hallway, staring at the closed door.

Muted German came from below.

Our cat audaciously came out of hiding and rubbed against my legs.

And, we did not have steak for dinner.

 

 

*Photos by Philip and Sylvia Schroeder 1974