Premonition

I really don't know what to make of this. Here's the story…

Last week I went up to camp evergreen to talk to kids from the front of the building. Anyways, I was up late Tuesday night with several of the staff discussing issues around the evolution/materialist debate. It was a good conversation with people who, to my surprise, had intelligent thoughtful questions and perspectives on topic. After being chased to bed for being too loud I promptly drained my bladder and crawled into the wonderfully hard double bed the camp provides for its speakers. I wiggled my ear buds down into the aural canal and proceeded to release my body in preparation for sleep. At that moment, a random thought entered my brain. "What if there was a fire?" I thought, "Do I know the escape route from my room on the second floor or this deteriorating lodge?" What was weird was that after reassuring myself that I could quite easily slip out my wind and down the roof to the ground, the thought about fire kept pricking my increasingly deteriorating consciousness. "What if there was a fire at home I thought?" Yikes – that perked me up! After thinking about what might cause a fire in my house and coming up blank I did something completely out of the ordinary. I prayed, "Please God protect my family from fire."

The entire next day brought no reminders of my late night inferno considerations. Even my post supper conversation with my wife did not spark any recollection of the 'fire' prayer from the night before.

It wasn't until the next day, in a conversation with my second oldest son that it came back.

"Dad, we had a fire in our dishwasher."

"What?"

"Yeah, on Tuesday night mom put the dishwasher on before she went to bed around ten. In the morning when I woke up I smelled smoke and told mom about it when we got home."

"That is really weird Jesse cause on Tuesday night (and it would have been close to the end of the dishwashing cycle) I prayed that God would keep you safe from fire."

"Wow Dad God's a pretty good firefighter eh?"

I'm a pretty sceptical person who does not put much stock in what seems like circumstantial occurrences like these. But I can't avoid the way this particular event haunts me. There you go!