Fourth Event: Curious John starts praying, asking God the Father in faith for the reason why He orchestrated the overturning of the altar.
Written by Curious John

After our altar was vandalized, Father Joe led us in prayer, asking the Lord to help us make sense of why it happened. I was curious about why it happened too; because it made no sense why they would knock over our altar, just to get arrested and inevitably have to serve prison time and pay a fine. So, I would read the Decatur Daily each day that week, looking for articles about the two vandals, the guy who knocked over our altar and the gal who egged him on by accusing us of idolatry.

On Monday of that week, I noticed that their middle names were Joseph and Marie. That's when I first suspected that God, our heavenly Father, might have had something to do with it, because our church is named after the Annunciation of the Lord, which was made to Mary first and then to Joseph. Also, the middle names of the young married couple who came to our church with Marie and Joseph were Beth and Eugene. Beth is short for Elizabeth and Eugene comes from the Greek 'eugenes' meaning well-born. Elizabeth's husband was 'eugenes' because he was born into the Jewish priesthood.

Anyway, Tuesday came around and lo and behold, I read in the paper that Marie and Jospeh had acted on a vision which they had received, one that is a near opposite of the vision which Mary and Joseph received, a vision that had to do with destroying a church rather than building one, as Mary's Son Jesus would eventually do. That vision is what convinced me that the overturning of our altar was divinely orchestrated by the same One who orchestrated the Annunciation of the Lord. There were too many parallels (or antiparallels?) to dismiss it as coincidence.

Those articles were enough to convince me that God orchestrated it, but just in case you're not convinced, the Huntsville Times (our other local paper since Huntsville is a larger nearby city) came out with an article in the second Sunday after the incident. That article said that a few days before the incident, Marie had a dream (about her and Joseph tearing up a church), that she didn't tell Joseph about it, that a few days later Joseph had the vision of what she dreamt about, that they told each other about their experience, and that they were "consumed" by the coincidence in the days leading up to the altar incident.

That was their mental state on the day they wandered into our church during Mass, and it explains why they acted so irrationally at Mass. Marie even said that God must have elevated their abilities, because she hates to speak in front of crowds and Joseph isn't strong enough to lift our marble altar, which weighs about 500 pounds. She summed it up by saying, "God allowed us to be His puppets."

Having no doubt that God the Father had orchestrated the overturning of our altar, and still curious about why it was overturned, I began to pray to Him, asking Him in faith for the reason why He orchestrated the overturning of our altar. By "in faith," I mean believing that we would receive what we are asking for, as our Lord says in Mark 11:24. I believed that at least one of us would receive the answer, because why would God orchestrate the overturning of our altar without telling us why He did it?