A theft at our church

Someone broke into my office at church on Labor Day and stole my computer and PDA.

Other offices were untouched...so it appears they specifically targeted mine. Also stolen was some petty cash (including offering taken up at children's church).

From the way this all went down, it appears that the thief is someone who goes to our church, or at least has attended in the past...they simply knew too much to be a stranger. :tear:

My computer was password-protected; if they are able to get past that, this goes from inconvenience to train wreck...ID theft becomes a real issue.

Pray that these folks will fall under conviction.
Please pray that their interest is simply in my computer, and not my identity. That could ruin us.

Finally....pray for this person if my wife gets a hold of them! She had just gotten our banking stuff set up, and now we've had to change everything. They'd rather go to jail than deal with my wife at this point! :laugh:

 

Actually, there's no church member info (that's on a secure, encrypted server).

But my stuff is on there.

Until this past year, we didn't have internet service at our house; thus, all of our online stuff (tax filings, etc.) were done from this machine.

The good:

• It's password protected
• We live a fairly uncomplicated life financially (almost everything in cash; no credit cards/debt, etc.).
• I've called all the folks that need to know

The bad:

• If they break the password (it's not too easy), they could make a mess of things.
• It is likely someone who has attended our church. (as disturbing as this is...when I think about it, it's like this: we have probably 1,200-1,400 or so attenders...the law of averages would tell us that there's likely someone out of that large a number who would do such. Sad, but true).
• There's not budget money to replace everything, so I'll have to do without my PDA I've been using for years (it was stolen, too).

The ugly:

• My wife's mood when she realized that the four hours she spent setting up our household budget in quicken was wasted. If I were the thief, I would choose jail over her wrath.

But seriously...through all this, I hope to see this person come to Christ, even if it means I never get that computer back.