Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given - Duane Dog Chapman [41]
I sprung into action. I instinctively knew something bad was about to go down. Tim prayed for the guy, laid hands on him, and knocked him back in the name of the Lord. That’s when I jumped on the altar and pinned the guy to the ground. Tim was trying not to pay attention to the ruckus I was causing, but it was hard to ignore a six-foot-tall, long-haired blond man sitting on top of another guy. I reached into his pocket and pulled out a four-inch knife. I yelled for security.
I asked the guy what he was doing.
“God told me to stab Tim Storey,” he answered. He was there to kill the pastor.
“Security, get this guy out of here,” I said. Tim Storey was still preaching while the guards carried his assailant away.
After the service, Tim asked the local pastor if he knew who I was, because he wanted to meet me.
The pastor said, “That’s Dog the Bounty Hunter.” I’m not sure if Tim had any idea who I was, but he was eager to say hello.
One of the security guards came over to me and said, “Preacher wants to see you after the meeting.”
I walked up to Tim and shook his hand like I was greeting an old friend.
“How ya doing, brotha?” I asked Tim.
“I’m fine. Let me tell you what that guy was going to do.”
I interrupted the pastor and said, “I know, I heard.”
“That was the second time he tried to kill me,” Tim said.
“And if I’m ever sitting in the congregation, my brotha, he ain’t getting past the first row ever again.”
Suddenly, the pastor jumped up from his chair and started pacing, rubbing his hands on his head and firing questions at me, one after another.
“What do you do for a living? What do you know about the Lord?”
And then, he stopped cold in his tracks.
“Oh no,” he said.
I knew what was coming next. God was talking to the preacher. I’d know that look anywhere, because it’s the look someone gets when he hears the voice of the Almighty.
“Something big is going to happen with you. You’ve got to remember to put every bit of your faith, every ounce of it, your reserve faith, your mother’s faith, in God’s hands. He will see you through. You’re going to be one of the biggest in the world, friend, but you’ve got to trust in God.”
Whoa. “Where do you want your offering?” was all I could think of saying. When an average Joe tells you something like that, you might believe him. But when a preacher says it, you can bet he’s telling you the truth.
Two weeks later, MidWeek, a Hawaiian weekly newspaper, ran an article with a photo of me on the front cover. We found out about the story on a Sunday afternoon, three full days before the first copy was expected off the press. Anxious to see the piece, Beth and I decided to bounty hunt down a copy before it hit the newsstand on Wednesday. We went to the warehouse where they distributed the paper. Luckily, we caught the foreman just as he was lifting the last load onto a pallet. He recognized us right away.
“Hey, you’re the guy on the cover this week!”
“Yeah, that’s me. I was wondering if you could find your way to letting us take a look at an advance copy?”
The guy invited us in to see for ourselves. We stood inside this massive warehouse staring at thousands of copies with me on the cover. I looked at Beth and said, “That’s a good preacher!”
The next time I spoke to Tim, I told him the story about the paper. He shook his head and said, “No, I don’t think that was the big thing God was talking about, Duane.” I had no way of knowing it at the time, but he was right.
It wasn’t until I was standing in a jail cell in Mexico that I fully understood what Tim Storey told me about faith and placing my trust in God. The district attorney came into the cell to tell the boys and me that the judge was trying to decide between the deprivation of liberty charge and kidnapping. I walked to the corner of my cell and wept. That’s when it occurred to me that Tim had warned me that I’d be in a situation that would take all of the faith I had. This must be what he was talking about, I thought.
Earlier that week, before the arrest, the boys and I had visited a place in Mexico where the