When a Bad Night's Sleep is an Answer to Prayer

I didn't intend to post today, especially not to post about our old and defunct central vacuum. But given that it factored rather large in the events of last night, and given that there was a rather huge answer to prayer, here it is.

For some reason it took me a while to get to sleep last night. Maybe it's because Papa is in California right now, and he's presenting at a church this morning, and he's sick, and we're missing him. So I was awake praying for him.

But I was also awake because I was thinking about house fires (I know, I know, not something you want to think about before bed, right? :), and I was trying to decide what valuables I would grab first, and how we would all escape in time. I don't know why fires were so strongly on my mind, but because they were, I was praying about them.

Unbeknownst to me, Mums was also awake and praying about fires. She too was thinking about them as she tried to get to sleep.

I awoke at 12:30 in the middle of the night, with a prickly fear that told me something was NOT right. I had woken out of a strange dream in which there was a strange noise, going on and on and on... and then I realized that the noise was not in my dream, but in real. In the house.

I sprang out of bed and ran to the boys' room to wake them up. By now I could hear that there was a high-pitched whining scream of something mechanical coming from somewhere downstairs. The guys grabbed their flashlights and we hurried down the stairs and opened the basement door. The noise (which was steadily increasing in intensity) was coming from somewhere down in the basement...

At that point we realized that our old central vacuum unit, located under the basement stairs, was roaring full-blast and sucking away powerfully against itself (if the hose isn't connected to the vacuum via one of the wall outlets, then the unit doesn't get any air). The sound was super loud and not a little scary, heard in the dark of night in the basement. Augs ran to the furnace room and found the applicable breaker, and as soon as he flipped it, the vacuum noise finally died away to silence.

Then we investigated what in the world was going on. A word about our central vacuum... it is very old, and very dead - has been ever since we first rented this home. I LOVE central vacuums when they work (saves so much effort!), but sadly, this one has seen better days. The main unit downstairs gets super hot and makes loud dying noises whenever you switch it on, and the hose upstairs, which is supposed to be vacuuming industriously, only sighs weakly and spits out dust. So... we don't use the thing at all.

But for some mysterious reason, it turned itself on last night. I have no idea how long it was going, but if I had not woken up and heard it when I did, we probably would have had a house fire. Which would not have been pretty, because the unit is in a small, closed room two floors below where we sleep; also, we use that room as a storage compartment for really good fire-starters like bags of fabric scraps and cardboard boxes of craft supplies. It could have been a very, very bad situation.

By the time we got to the vacuum, it was dangerously hot, so hot we couldn't touch the motor. It was also exuding smelly fumes. In the end, the boys disconnected the wires and actually brought the entire motor section upstairs where it could reside safely in their room as it cooled down. We went back to bed not a little shaken, trying not to think of what could so easily have happened.

Prayer - what an incredible gift. God answered our prayers last night, and as a result, I'm still sitting at our kitchen table, in our intact home, our lives undamaged. It could have all been gone last night - that fast. But it's here, we're here, and I'm grateful. God is SO GOOD!!

Wishing y'all a prayer-filled day and NO fires, :)

Ems