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On Monday evenings, I lead worship at my church's Celebrate Recovery ministry. Our CR meets all year long including holidays, Christmas excepted, including July 4th.

Anywhoo, right after I arrived and was about to get out of my car, one of Grapevine's finest showed up, parked facing my car, got out and started walking up to me. As I was the only one there, I knew he wanted to talk to me, so I asked him, "can I help you?" as he was walking up. He asked if I was the only one there, and I said I thought so, but that others would begin arriving in the next few minutes. I explained what I was there for and asked him if there was some sort of problem. He said that they had gotten a burglary alarm alert. Just about then another squad car arrived with a young female officer.

He asked me a couple of other questions, like how long the event would be going on tonight, how long people would be there, stuff like that. I asked him if he needed to see my ID and he said yes. So I handed him my ID holder with both IDs displayed in it. He didn't say much. He wrote down my name and that's about it. He didn't ask if I was armed. I allowed as how it was pretty hot standing out here in the sun. He then handed my ID back to me, and we went on inside.

By then my other guitar player had shown up, and we asked the officer if he wouldn't mind checking out the rest of the building. We've had a number of thefts in the past where thieves broke in and stole TV screens or computers from the church, so we thought it best to make sure things were OK. It turned out that our child care providers had shown up in the other part of the building and had inadvertently tripped the alarm, and they didn't have the alarm codes to cancel it.

Anyway, I was gratified that the officer didn't seem to care about my CHL. I'm guessing that he just took a look at me and assumed I was armed and wasn't worried about it. After the wuppin' GPD has taken here on this forum lately over 30.06 at the Grapevine Mills Mall, it was nice to be able to report on a professionally handled call by an officer who isn't upset by the idea of an armed citizen.