Sometimes you can't just ignore a problem and hope it goes away. Case in point: Last year, I lived in the random little town of White Settlement. I was working like crazy, attending a full load of classes, and getting home late at night. My house was precious (painted yellow like a school bus) but the house next to me was a real dump. The basement was flooded, the windows were boarded up, and weeds were everywhere! Then one day, some random people moved in! Being the recluse that I was, I didn't exactly hop on the welcome wagon and bake a pie for them. But I was glad to know that someone was living in the sad, abandoned house.

Until....

Strange things started happening. One day, I got home from class and saw a large pile of tires stacked in the yard. Ten minutes later, they were gone. A few nights later, I was running late and my friend was waiting for me in his truck outside. When I got in the truck, my friend let me know that the "people next door" had gotten into a fight because one of them peed on the porch and the other one stepped in it with bare feet. (GROSS!) Then, I began to notice that they never had lights inside the house. I was concerned but decided just to look the other way and hope the problem went away. On halloween, I opened the door to find them making out on my porch. When they finally noticed I had opened the door, they said "trick or treat" and grabbed four handfuls of candy. These were adults, by the way. It was weird.

One night, I came home to find police cars surrounding the house next door. Turns out the bizarre trick-or-treaters without plumbing were running a little theft ring (which helped explain the mystery tires). They were spending their days ripping of wal-mart and kroger and housing all of their stuff in the dump next door. That would have been all well and good, but it turns out that the dump they were living in wasn't theirs at all. They had just seen an empty house and figured noone would notice if they ran their operation out of it.

They were wrong: I did notice. But my plan was just to pretend that I wasn't scared to death by by neighbors. Imagine--professional theives living next door to a bright yellow house with an occupant who was obviously never home. I was busy being an ostrich and pretending things were ok. I was lucky the police got to them before something bad happened!

So what does this story have to do with things today now that White Settlement is (thankfully!) behind me? I've been playing the role of an ostrich in a relationship that I've been involved in for over a year now. Red flags have been going off constantly but I have been hoping the problem would solve itself. It hasn't, though. You can't just ignore a problem and hope it goes away.

So, friends, pray for me! I'm being corageous and taking my head out of the sand. I'm facing the problem head-on before things get any worse.