Some days your best bet is to snuggle back under the covers, and never put your delicate little foot on the floor. It’s safer there.

Consider the poignant story of Chippie the parakeet as a warning for people who risk getting out of bed.

Chippie’s owner got the brilliant idea to clean his cage with a vacuum cleaner. She took off the attachment at the end of the hose and attacked the nastiness in the bottom of the cage.

Just then the phone rang and as the preoccupied lady turned to answer it, Chippie fell into the line of fire of the sucking air current.

Sluuurp!

The horrified bird owner stopped the vacuum cleaner and to her relief discovered Chippy, like a feathered Jonah, shaken but alive in the interior of the machine. The poor creature was covered with dirt so his mistress grabbed him and plunged him under the faucet of the sink into a stream of cold water.

Then when she realized how cold the poor bird was, she set upon him with her hair dryer! Poor old Chippie.

Someone asked her a few days later, how her parakeet fared after his traumatic adventure. “Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore,” she reported. He just sits and stares.” (Story told by Max Lucado in his book, “In the Eye of the Storm).

I understand. Been there, done that.

Have You Ever Been Sucked Into A Vacuum Cleaner?

Has life ever sucked you into its vacuum hose? Then doused you with cold water and blasted you with its heat waves? Most of us can answer with an emphatic, “Yes!” because in one degree or another we all experience the hard slam of life’s skillet in our face at times. Continue reading →