Today was the annual "no-rehearsal Christmas pageant" that our church does. Any child can dress as whoever they want from the Christmas story. Then the Children's Sermon is the retelling of the Christmas story, by every character, and each kid gets to say something (guided by pastor and kid's pastor). It's always pretty funny - we even had a donkey this year! We had Roman with us in church this time, as it was generally louder and more informal than usual, we thought he could handle it.

He was doing great, the Christmas story ended, and our pastor did his prayer. Then instead of announcing the call to offertory, we heard this - "Ladies and gentlemen, there is a fire in the back of the church. Please exit immediately."

Whew! You've never seen people move so fast, and in general were pretty calm. We got out quickly and saw the first Fire Rescue and truck pull in. The family of females near us were in quite a panic mode; "should we go to the car? What do we do? We need to leave! ack! ack!" We waited on the sidewalk until someone announced that we should all go to our cars to give the trucks some clearance. Then people began to leave.

The black smoke we saw was coming out the door by the nursery - we're guessing electrical, but who knows. And I keep thanking God we decided to chance Roman in the service today, because we wouldn't have been allowed to go get him. And Roman? He now makes an excellent siren noise!