Angels at the Foot of My Bed

Do angels exist?  Yep.  Without a doubt.  In fact, I’ve had multiple encounters with them in my life, and yet I've never seen them. 

In this post, I would like to tell you of one such encounter that happened early one Saturday morning during the first week of February 2009.

Here's how things transpired...

At about three in the morning, I was awakened with the feeling that I was to pray for my friend, Ken.  For some reason, though, I was REALLY tired, so I said a very short prayer and went right back to sleep.  Perhaps “short” is a bit of an understatement.  My prayer was tantamount to, “God bless Ken.”

The same thing, though, happened about an hour or so later, and, because I was still so very tired, I responded with another “God bless Ken” prayer and, again, went right back to sleep.

Now, I ask You:  Does God hear and respond to “God bless Ken” prayers?  Yep…without a doubt.  I think, though, that in this particular instance, God desired more.  The situation at hand required special intervention by God and, as such, He desired from me considerably more than just a God bless so and so prayer.

As a preface for what I’m about to write, I need to tell you that I sleep on a queen bed and that when this particular situation occurred, I was living in a first floor apartment, where the floor underneath the carpeting was an 8” thick slab of reinforced concrete, and where my bed was propped-up on hard plastic risers, risers that I am convinced, as a civil engineer with some training in structural engineering, could support a small car.

Yeah, so my bed was like elevated on these plastic risers, and, having brushed-off the impressions from God to pray for my friend, something happened that I will never forget…

The riser at the foot of the bed on the side where I sleep collapsed, and my bed fell through to the concrete floor with a very hard thud.  This time, obviously, I got the message, got up from my broken bed, and began, immediately, to pray for my friend, Ken.  After a few minutes, I felt prompted to take a shower, get dressed, and head-out toward my friend’s house in Raleigh.  I continued to pray through out all of this.

If I recall, I arrived at Ken's house in Raleigh (I live about 40 minutes away in Durham) at a little past six in the morning, but no one was home.  Having brought something with me to give to Ken’s wife, Kimberly, I left it inside the screen door and proceeded to drive back home.

About an hour after arriving home—I think it was close to eight in the morning, I got a call from Kimberly.  She was at the hospital in Raleigh.  My friend, Ken, had suffered a heart attack earlier that morning and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

So…what do you think caused the plastic riser at the foot of my bed to fail? 

There are, perhaps, several explanations, but all of them, barring one, seem fairly unlikely to me.  As I wrote above, those little plastic risers could support a small car. 

Want to know what I think?  Well…here it is:  God desired me to pray for my friend Ken, and, when I failed to respond twice to His gentle proddings, He sent one of His heavenly friends down to push down on my bed in such a manner as to not just wake me up but make it pretty much a given that I would not be able to do anything but get up and pray for my friend.

NOW…whenever I feel a prompt to pray for someone, I do just that.  And, the really cool thing, too, is that I know that God hears me and responds in accordance with His glory and delight.

When I was out to dinner with a very dear friend last week, she was reminding me of this very occurrence and told me to write about it in my blog.  And so, my friends, that’s what I’ve done.  May it speak to you or encourage you in whatever ways you need.  :o)

May God’s holy angels watch over you throughout this night!

Bling

P.S.  Baptism—Part III coming up tomorrow night.  Lord-willing, of course!!

“Angels Watching Over Me,” Amy Grant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUKcUxnvHEw