I was planning on another song for today, but my sister called me and said I should do the Bee Gees song we were talking about yesterday. I told her that I was going to have the Bee Gees song about the coal mine cave in, and I would write about Papa (our granddad) working in the coal mines. But today’s church service changed my plans. first lets talk about the Bee Gees song because as it turns out that’s a interesting story. Back in 1967 the Bee Gees were recording an album in England at Polydor Records , in the middle of their recording session the power went out. For some reason Barry and Robin went and sat in a dark staircase. It was dark and quite except for the sound of a distant elevator. One of brothers asked the other “Isn’t this like being trapped in a coal mine?” Well those two were after all the brothers Gibb so they sat in that dark staircase and wrote a song which turned out to be their first hit song in the United States.
In the middle they sing something I always thought was unusual; Don’t go talking too loud, you’ll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones. How can a cave in cause a landslide? Well it turns out that just a few months before they wrote this song back in Whales there was a cave in at a mine that was on top of a hill the cave in cause a massive landslide burying the town below killing 144 people of the dead 128 of them were children who were in school at the time. It’s known as the Aberfan mining disaster.
In our church service today we had a speaker from the Gideons, their the people that place Bibles in Hotels, jails, schools anywhere they can leave the Word of God. The Gideon speaker told the story of this little girl who receive a Gideon New Testament in her fifth grade class at school. The Gideons hand out New Testaments in any school they can. The girl read her little testament all the time and through we reading God’s Word she gave her heart to Jesus. She tried and tried to talk to her daddy about Jesus but he would tell her that he didn’t want to hear anything about Jesus. One day as her daddy was going to work in coal mine she hugged him and as she hugged him she slipped her New Testament in his pocket. Later on that day there was a cave in at the coal mine. When they finally recovered her daddy’s dead body in his hand was that New Testament, when they opened the testament inside her daddy wrote “I now know your Jesus I will see you in Heaven” he sighed it Daddy and below his name was the signatures of the other 12 men with him. This story is not much different from the story in this Bee Gees song, except for the love of one little girl.