Just one example: Chaplain Steve Lee, head of Peace Officer Ministries, at work, somewhere.

“The police called me from the house of a woman with a gun to her head….”

That’s the conversation I overheard in the hallway outside my office. (A workshop for “chaplains, peace officers and pastors, focusing on effective Christian ministry to and through law enforcement” is meeting at Concordia Seminary this week.)

The rest of the story involved 16 cats, animal control, health and human services, and the woman—gun to her head—shouting out the window, “You’re not taking away my babies!” The end of the story involved this particular chaplain talking the woman down, averting disaster, and restoring calm to the neighborhood.

I didn’t get a chance to get the chaplain’s name or where he was from. So he remains anonymous to me. Which is just as well. Because it occurred to me that there are thousands of ministers in thousands…

Interesting recent story from The Journal-News in Hillsboro, Ill.

Here’s the lede:

For the purpose of Thursday night’s emergency exercise drill, the Continuing Recovery Center in Irving had become Irving Mosque, the home-base for a radical, heavily armed group with suspected terrorist ties.

According to the story, about 120 people in 30 different first-responder agencies took part in the drill, about 70 miles northeast of St. Louis. Some of those agencies included the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, the Illinois State Police Statewide Terrorism Intelligence Center, the Illinois Secretary of State Law Enforcement, the Illinois Secretary of State Bomb Squad, Madison County HazMat and Madison County Unified Command.

My favorite quote in the story (the only quote in the story) comes from Montgomery County EMA director Diana Holmes who said the exercise “went very well”:

I would like to thank everyone involved, and especially the folks in Irving who allowed us to use their community for this…