The Miracle of the Bed

When I was in 3^rd or 4^th grade, we lived in a little 3 bedroom, 1½ bath house in Huntsville, AL. 

I shared a bedroom with my sister, who was and still is 18 months younger than me.  We each had a twin bed on opposite walls of the small room.  One day while jumping on the beds (which was a no-no), a slat under the end of one of the mattresses slipped out and the mattress fell with a loud bump onto the wood floor.

We had broken the bed.

But we didn’t know it was just a displaced slat.  All we knew was that we had broken the bed and Daddy was mad about it.  He didn’t really say much anyway, so if his words were in anger, we thought the crime especially bad.

My dad got down on all fours, looked under the bed, did something, and healed it in the process.

“No jumping on the beds,” he said sternly.  My sister and I clung to each other and nodded.  Boy, that was something to steer clear of, for sure.

Sometime later, my parents invited a family to eat supper with us.  This family had one son, and he was about our age.  We knew them from our church, so it didn’t take us kids long to run to our room to play.

I don’t want to point any fingers here, but I believe it was our guest who suggested we jump on the beds.  Linda and I said, “No, no.  Last time we did that, we broke the bed.”

Our guest’s powers of persuasion were strong and our weak minds soon agreed that the forbidden fun would not result in another broken bed.

Wrong!  After some robust bouncing up and down, we heard a loud bump, and, to our horror, we realized we had once again broken the bed.

Amazingly, the adults didn’t hear it hit the floor.  They were in the living room having coffee and visiting.  We had some time to cover our tracks.

We tried fixing the bed; but, having no idea what the problem was, we had no idea how to repair it.  Our guest, who, of course, wanted to blame the bed for this awful turn of events, suggested we pray about it.

We all jumped (no pun intended) on this idea and started praying mightily.  We even prayed out loud – probably the first time any of us had done that.  We pleaded with God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost (as He was known to us then, way back yonder in the previous century).

Well, it seemed that God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost were not responding to our desperate prayers, so we decided to pray to anybody we could think of that was in the Bible.

We prayed to Moses and Noah, Samson and Delilah, all the disciples we could think of (similar to naming all Santa’s reindeer in that there’s always one or two you can’t remember).

When we ran out of names (which we did rather quickly), I sneaked out of the room to retrieve my Sunday School book for additional people to pray to.  We picked out the names we could pronounce, further lessening the number available to us.

We were sure the bed would miraculously be healed, and that would be the end of our troubles.

The wounded bed was not healed miraculously that night.  After our friends had gone home, we told Mom what had happened, hoping she could fix it and Daddy wouldn’t have to know.

Unfortunately, Mom didn’t know how, or didn’t have the strength to wrestle with the mattress, or just didn’t want to fool with it.  She called Daddy in and told him our pitiful story.

Daddy just sighed, got down on all fours, did something or another, and the bed was restored to its original state. 

And then he left the room.

No stern warnings, no anger, no nothing.

Linda and I climbed into our beds, breathless with the wonder of it all.  We didn’t get our miracle, but Daddy wasn’t mad so it didn’t matter.

Took me 40 years (and I mean that literally) to figure out that our miracle did come that night so long ago, it just wasn’t the one we were looking for.  We just hated to make Daddy mad at us, and he wasn’t mad at us, so there was our miracle!

I’m telling you, it’s a good lesson to learn.  Pray for a miracle and then keep your eyes open to everything.  Maybe it won’t take you 40 years to figure it out…