9

Angels on Alert

Caleb and Penny Norton bought a house in “the valley of the shadow of death”—and learned to fear no evil.

Caleb and Penny Norton, like many young married couples in their twenties, were idealistic and maybe a bit naïve. What set them apart from their peers was that they knew it and had purposely made up their minds to live that way.

When their first big decision together was to buy a house in a poor inner-city Seattle neighborhood, friends and family called them crazy. When late-night gunshots first rang out a block away, Caleb and Penny almost believed it themselves.

Still, Penny had once heard a missionary speak about his lifetime of experience in a remote corner of Africa. He shared story after story of the challenges he’d faced: fire, disease, war, poverty. Yet he concluded the evening with a statement she’d never forgotten: “There is no safer place on earth than the center of God’s will.”

“When we got married, we decided to make that our motto,” Caleb said. “We felt that making a difference right where we lived was what we were meant to do. We just didn’t realize how quickly and dramatically our faith in that would be put to the test.”

Penny was a high school music teacher who discovered her life’s purpose during a college summer exchange trip to Venezuela. She worked as an intern in the barrios with El Sistema, the renowned music education program, providing instruments and instruction to the country’s poorest children and offering an alternative to drugs and crime in the process. After attending a concert featuring the famed conductor Gustavo Dudamel—once an El Sistema participant himself—Penny knew she’d return home and use her love of music to help bring hope to inner-city schoolchildren.

Caleb had recently graduated with a master’s degree in sociology from a well-known liberal arts college. Despite the promise of a lucrative career in marketing—applying what he’d learned about human behavior to the task of creating more effective advertising—his heart was drawn to the opposite end of the professional spectrum: social work. He even knew where he wanted to implement his plan to change the world one disadvantaged person at a time.

After their wedding, he and Penny had moved to Seattle, his hometown. He’d seen the human cost of poverty and hopelessness with his own eyes, on several community service projects sponsored by his church youth group. To him, the “issues” he hoped to address were not abstract or theoretical—they were people. They had homes and children and dreams of a better life. They deserved a shot at peace and prosperity, just like everyone else.

Caleb and Penny believed that “activism” from a safe distance was ineffective at best and arrogant at worst. That’s why they made their first home in a tough part of town, where the problems they hoped to help solve would be their problems too.

“People don’t need another well-meaning program,” Caleb said. “They need good neighbors who will roll up their sleeves and do more than just offer advice from the sidelines.”

For the first six months, the plan seemed a brilliant success. The Nortons brought cookies door to door, organized potlucks and block parties, helped some of the elderly with fix-it projects, and looked for every opportunity to be the change they wanted to see. Their fellow residents responded by letting down their guard a bit.

All that began to change the day Alfonso died. He’d been the eighty-five-year-old next door, the first to welcome them to the neighborhood, tirelessly supporting their various community-building projects.

“We had really grown to love him, even in such a short time,” said Penny. “His death created a vacuum in our lives, and in the community, that we knew would be hard to fill again.”

Alfonso’s children quickly sold the house to a rough-looking forty-something man named Mitch. Caleb and Penny tried to introduce themselves right away, but Mitch made clear he was not interested in getting to know the neighbors—or being known by them. Within days of his arrival, the Nortons knew the “vacuum” had indeed been filled, but not at all as they’d hoped.

First, Mitch covered all his windows with black plastic and installed heavy locks on the doors. Almost overnight, hard-looking people began arriving at all hours. Strange odors hung in the air, filling the Nortons’ home with a sickly smell no matter what they did to attempt removing it.

“It was pretty obvious what was going on,” Caleb said. “But we were in new territory, trying to decide how to respond. What does it mean to be a good neighbor when you’re living next door to a drug dealer? We decided it meant minding our own business for the time being.”

That attitude changed one evening a few weeks later when Penny arrived home from work. As she got out of the car, a group of street toughs loitering outside moved toward her, making lewd and threatening comments. She made it safely inside, but that night Caleb said it was time to involve the police. The next day he told detectives what they’d been witnessing and asked them to keep an eye out for potential trouble. He also asked that his identity be kept secret so as not to invite retribution.

Police began patrolling the street more often and on several occasions even stopped Mitch for questioning. They suspected he was operating a meth lab and were trying to gather enough evidence to obtain a search warrant from a judge. Mitch concluded that someone in the neighborhood had snitched on him, and his suspicion soon fell on the “do-gooders” next door. He and his gang began shouting obscenities every time Caleb or Penny came or went. They overturned trash cans, punctured a tire on Caleb’s car, spray-painted gang symbols on the sidewalk.

As the police turned up the heat, though, so did Mitch. One day the Nortons returned to find a message painted across the front of their home: “Shut the f— up!”

“That’s when we felt we had no choice but to move,” Caleb said. “It was a hard decision, because it seemed to go against our reasons for being there in the first place, to make a difference by not running away. But I knew it wouldn’t be right to wait until things got so bad that one of us got hurt.”

That’s when the first miracle occurred.

One day, while Caleb and Penny were away, the thugs apparently decided to break in and ransack their belongings, to escalate the conflict and send an unmistakable message. A woman who lived across the alley behind them watched as four young men went to the back door. Unable to kick it open, they picked up the patio umbrella and its sand-filled base and tried to use it as a battering ram.

“The woman later told us they hit the door over and over, but it wouldn’t budge,” Caleb recalled. “She overheard them saying we must have installed a metal security door on the inside, and they finally gave up. But replacing that door had been on my to-do list since the day we moved in. It was so old and flimsy I expected a strong breeze to knock it down at any time. There is simply no way it stood up to that abuse on its own.”

Caleb and Penny were comforted by the thought of angels standing inside with their shoulders to the door, protecting their home from harm.

Miracle number two arrived several weeks later.

Though Mitch had finally been arrested on drug charges, his associates were still at large, and police investigators were trying aggressively to shut down the operation. The area’s real estate market was dismal, so the Nortons were still living in their house and had become a bigger target than ever. One night, someone broke a living room window and threw in a lit Molotov cocktail—a gasoline-filled bottle with a cloth fuse—designed to burst into flames when the glass breaks. The aging wooden clapboard should have gone up like a tinderbox within seconds. But the makeshift bomb landed in a heavy iron bucket used for cleaning ash and cinders from the wood-burning stove.

“That bucket had been a gift from one of the neighbors that very day,” Penny said. “The fire went out on its own. But we knew then we shouldn’t waste any more time getting out of there. We made plans to stay with friends across town until we could find something more permanent.”

That’s exactly what happened . . . after they received miracle number three.

On their last night at home, Penny stood at the front window—newly repaired after the last assault—when a car turned up the street. She watched it slow as it approached. She saw a man in the backseat lean out the window and point a handgun in her direction. She saw the muzzle flash and heard the bullet strike the metal window frame just inches away. Then she heard the gunman cry out in pain only a few yards away, as the car crept by, and saw him reflexively grab his arm, the one holding the gun. The tires suddenly squealed as the vehicle sped off.

“The only explanation we could imagine was that the bullet had ricocheted off the frame and returned to hit him,” she said. “I don’t know how that could happen—I just know what I saw. God was watching over us, and there seemed to be nothing those guys could do to hurt us.”

The last miracle happened just weeks after the Nortons finally moved in with friends: A member of their church bought the house to be used as a rental property. In a lousy real estate market, in an undesirable part of town, they’d been warned it could take many months or even years to sell. But the buyer paid the full asking price without a realtor or the typical fees and commissions. The quick sale of their home seemed like a “bonus miracle,” allowing them to start over—in another poor section of Seattle. This time they carefully researched their neighbors and installed safety measures before moving in—still idealistic but wiser and more cautious. Slowly Caleb and Penny are seeing their dream come true to create community and serve the needy right where they live.

And they know, without any doubt, that God’s angels have their backs.