Even at my lowest time financially--when I slept borrowed mattress on the floor of someone’s bedroom, a cardboard box for my “night stand”—I thanked God for a bed. I never went through the nightmare recently endured by family friends. Short on cash, they decided to buy some bunk beds at a yard sale. They didn’t know the mattresses had bed buds. The infestation eventually cost them $4,000 in cleanup.
Making my bed daily also recognizes that He is a God of order. It’s a marker for caring for my possessions and seeing them as gifts from God. How many millions sleep in despairing conditions?
In recounting her imprisonment and persecution under the Nazis, Corrie ten Boom also reminded us of the blessing of having a bed. From her book The Hiding Place, and the film based on it, we have chilling descriptions of not having what many of us take for granted. After her arrest, Nazis detained her in a dirty local prison. Then she, her sister and hundreds of others were crammed into filthy trains and transported to the feared Ravensbruck concentration camp.
They were first herded into an open-sided canopy with a straw floor full of lice. Then they went to Barracks 8, five women to a bed, where they heard the constant screams of women being punished in an adjacent building. Finally came Barracks 28, where 1,400 women were crammed into space intended for 400. They slept on square piers stacked three high, their foul straw mats full of fleas.
Upon her miraculous release (a clerk’s error), she traveled three grueling days by train home to Holland, a shadow of herself. Checking into a Christian hospital, she savored a warm bath. Nurses gently dressed her in clean clothing. Taken to a bedroom, Corrie delighted in its colors. “And the bed!” she wrote in her book Tramp for the Lord. “Delightfully soft and clean with thick woolen blankets.”
The simple, personal discipline of bed-making can go along with saying, “I’m checking into this new day, Lord. It is fresh and new, a gift from you. Yesterday, there were attitudes and actions that were messy and sinful. I am sorry for them and ask forgiveness. I ask for a fresh start. I thank you for my abundant blessings, including a bed to sleep in. I pull up the sheets and bedspread in acknowledgement of who You are, and Your interest in every part of my life today.”
Some people say it takes too long to make one’s bed. I timed myself this morning: 67 seconds. And as I made it, I found myself thinking of a good-morning song I learned years ago: “Good-morning, Lord, this is your day. I am your child, show me your way.”
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