Summertime Stories: The Night It Was Too Cold

Summer nights - warm, restless, too full of energy and wonder nights... As a way of trying to settle the boys down, one evening I started showing them pictures of when they were babies, and making small funny narratives about each picture. It was fun, and they loved looking at pictures and hearing stories. But I didn't want them to be looking at either my phone or my computer right before they went to sleep.

All smiles - my first week as a sister!

So, I pulled the picture box where I have pictures of my childhood and started telling them stories. Soon it became part of our bedtime routine, so I'll be sharing here a few of my favorites.

My parents were both professors at a Bible Institute in Guatemala, and we lived on campus. I was an only child at the time. I must have been two when we moved there, and around five when we moved out. The front door of the house led straight into an open space that was first living room and then dining room, right in the middle of the house. To the left were two rooms and a bathroom - my bedroom and my mom's office. To the right was my parent's bedroom, another bathroom, and the kitchen. The house had a fireplace, and being fairly chilly with no central heating, that was always a good thing to have. I remember we also had an electrical portable heater that sometimes would be in my room to keep me warm. I also was a mix of a heavy sleeper and a kid with night terrors, so I would often make it to my parents' bedroom either because of a nightmare or because I had wet the bed.

Cuteness overload at two years old

My mom used to tell this story: The Night It Was Too Cold, she got up around midnight, as it had become her custom, to take me to the bathroom on a preemptive attempt to minimize laundry (I so get it now!), and after we were done, she thought it was just too cold to take me back to my room. As she held me asleep in her arms, she just felt sorry for me, sleeping alone in such a cold night. She thought it was best to let me snuggle with them for the rest of the night. So, she took me to their room, got in bed, and closed the door. Not too long after, both my parents heard a loud noise. Because my mom's office window faced the street, they both thought someone had smashed the window and broken in. My dad said, if that was the case, the best thing was to wait inside their room and if there was actually a thief inside the house, to let them take whatever they wanted.

As they laid in silence, waiting to hear anything else, they both fell back asleep. (I now always shake my head at this part, because we're talking about the worst years of the Guatemalan civil war, living in the countryside, and these two blessed folks in their late twenties with a preschooler heard a loud thud in their house and FELL BACK ASLEEP!)

Anyway... The next morning I remember very well. I remember getting up, walking out of my parents room to find my house as a white Christmas vision - albeit completely out of place. Everything was white. The floors, the furniture, everything was covered by a layer of white dust. As the three of us walked through the house, mouths wide open, we walked into the source of all the dust: The entire asbestos ceiling in my bedroom had caved in. The major breaking point had been right over my bed, where now a huge plank sat over my pillow.

"Do you see how God saved me that night?" I tell the boys. "But how did you mom know?" asks someone. Well, she didn't. She didn't hear a loud voice from heaven saying 'take your daughter with you, as the ceiling in her bedroom is about to fall.' She just felt a tug in her mama's heart, felt she needed to take me with her, and she did. And quite often, God speaks to us that way - we feel we should call someone. Someone comes to mind. We don't know why but we know we must go out, or come home, or say no to that job or that invitation. It's a mystery to me, this movement of the Holy Spirit within us, but I do want to constantly remember that He does love us and wants to guide our lives. May we constantly have ears to hear and eyes to see.

The Lord directs the steps of the godly.
    He delights in every detail of their lives. 

Psalm 37:23