Flashback: the Saga of the Mattresses & God's Unending Goodness

Before I jump back into the travelogue I want to share some of the miraculous events that felt like personal acts of love from a Father who knows us intimately and who delights in reminding us of His power and goodness. 

Story #1: The saga of the mattresses
I have already written about the time restraints on this road trip out to Alabama--if we did not leave by x date we would not physically be able to get eldest daughter Sunny out to her camp in Georgia on time. Or at least not without being miserable from an exhausting, non-stop, no-time-for-fun haul across the US. 

But despite my advance planning (see previous post about too many circumstances being outside my control), the mattress foam we needed for making the beds was not in our hands until the very week of our planned departure. It was a custom cut order from the Natural Mattress Store in the San Jose area, which we had to make a couple of weeks in advance. We were planning on driving away on Sunday, and I think it was Wednesday when I picked up the foam in Los Gatos. That was ok, I just threw myself into making the mattresses immediately, and knew I would have them ready with at least a day to spare.

I checked the measurements written on the packages when I picked up the foam, checked the invoice, and all looked good. But when I got back to Scotts Valley, where the trailer was temporarily residing, I realized that two of the pieces had been cut incorrectly--fortunately too long, so I could cut the foam myself to remedy the problem, which resulted in enough extra foam to make a nice back pillow, so that was fine. But it did add one extra step to the bed-making process. (See the previous post on bed-making if you are interested.)

And maybe because my attention was initially caught by the odd size of two of the foam pieces, or maybe because I was focused on the travel deadline, or because I had not been the one to place the order and so didn't realize what we were supposed to get compared to what we did get--but while the foam I picked up matched the invoice, it was not all the foam we needed. We were short several vital pieces for the children's beds. Which I did not realize until Friday at lunchtime. Oh, no. This could be bad.

And this is where a non-Christian reading the story will say, well the way things turned out just show the results of your own efforts combined with good luck. I don't see it that way; we had a big problem, and it looked like the solution (custom ordering more pieces) would take longer than we had. But instead, everything fell into place so quickly it felt like a string of little connected miracles, like lights on a string. 

I called the company headquarters in San Rafael and the person still in the office answering the phone on a Friday afternoon was the owner, the person with most authority to make things happen. And because we had wanted to talk with "the boss" when we initially made the custom order, he had been the person to take the original order. He still had his notes from the phone conversation with Mr. Incredible, and apparently what he wrote down was not what Mr. I thought he was telling him.  So there had been some kind of miscommunication with the order itself--which the owner was not accepting responsibility for. So if the problem was our fault, it was going to be super expensive, if it was even possible, to fix in just one day. 

But. The owner was awesome, and worked all kinds of logistics behind the scenes to solve the problem. He had the foam cutting guys come in early Saturday morning so that the pieces we needed could be cut in time to get them on a delivery truck that was already scheduled to head even remotely our way. I was told to be at a certain address in the Santa Cruz mountains at 1:00--if I was not there to meet the truck, they would not wait for me. So I did, getting there early and of course the truck was late so that I had to wait about 2 hours total (on a day when of course I had a long list of things to do!). The mountain location was so remote that there was no cell service so the truck and I could not contact each other to check on status. So I just sat and tried not to fret. And oh, the relief! when I finally heard the truck rumble up the steep and narrow mountain drive. I got the foam, and headed back, praising God for how that had all fallen so well into place. 

We had to pay for the foam itself, of course, but the owner did not charge us for the rush. Because there was a delivery truck already coming out that I could meet, I did not have to pay delivery fees. My time was the only extra cost. And then I had just enough time to drive the foam back to SV and cut and pin the covers, so that by Saturday evening we had beds ready for all the children and were ready to start loading for the trip!