I have a friend who just shared on her blog about all the blessings that surrounded her daughter poking a pencil in her eye. Now, she was not thankful that her daughter poked a pencil in her eye or not joyful about having experienced it, but thankful that there were many things that made the experience easier and she felt blessed because the situation could have been much worse. (Her daughter is doing great, just in case you are concerned)
But last Friday, I had a similar experience - even though it was a much less serious situation.
On Friday, I had plans all day and I left the house at around 9:30 and didn't return until when the kids got home at 3:30. Before I left that morning, I got a few pieces of ice out of the freezer part of our side-by-side refrigerator to put in a glass of water. It looked a a little odd, like it was slightly melted. But since the water dispenser in the door had begun to leak a few days before, we had turned off the water leading to it and the ice maker, so I thought maybe the ice looked different from sitting there for several days with no new ice being made.
I got home and the kids were buzzing over a sock hop dance that they had at their school that day. They were wearing glow necklaces from the dance. Elias decided that he wanted to try to keep his glow necklace glowing until Monday for trick-or-treating, so he opened the freezer door to put the necklace in to freeze (supposedly it keeps it glowing longer).
When he opened the door, there were huge icicles hanging from the ice tray to the bottom of the freezer. As I investigated further, I discovered that everything above the ice tray was refrigerator temperature, but no longer frozen. Everything below the ice tray was still frozen, but definitely beginning to thaw. Luckily, because the entire bottom half of our freezer door was full of our ice packs we use in our coolers, the 2 bottom drawers stayed completely frozen, because the ice packs had created a cooler effect. The fridge was still cool, but definitely not the temperature it was supposed to be.
So the kids and I started packing up bags of food to carry downstairs to our refrigerator that we kept from our old house. I called Josh to tell him that we were going to need to go to the store to buy a new refrigerator and we just met him at the store on his way home from work.
Now here are all the things I am thankful for in this situation:
1. Obviously, for the huge blessing of having two refrigerators in the first place. Even though we had to throw away a couple things and cook a lot of the meat that had thawed, we were able to save most of the food.
2. Elias opened the freezer door. I had planned on having left overs for dinner and had no need to open the freezer, so I may not have noticed until it was too late that there was a problem.
3. We didn't have any plans for the evening and could easily deal with transporting the food downstairs and going to buy a new fridge. We had considered going with some friends to a costume party at the local library that evening, but at the last minute I decided to just stay in that evening and hadn't told the kids about the party yet. So they were happily helping me transport the food downstairs and didn't complain about going to the store. But, if they would have expected to go to a costume party, they would have been in much different moods.
4. I had planned on getting groceries that day, but ran out of time. Since the refrigerator downstairs is much smaller than the one upstairs, it was packed by the time we got everything into it. If I would have gotten groceries that day, there is no way everything would have fit.
5. We had already been planning on getting a fridge in the near future. Even though the ice maker had given us a few problems and I didn't care for the side-by-side style or the almond color, I still felt guilty over using money to replace a functional fridge. So because the fridge actually stopped working and it is really too old to put a lot of money into repairing, it took away all guilt over getting a new one.
6. Since we had been thinking of getting a new refrigerator for a while, we had already looked at them several times. We had narrowed it to 2 that we liked best. And, amazingly, one of those we had liked best was 50% off. Not only was it 50% off, but it was the only one that was 50% off, and it is the same brand and style as the dishwasher and stove we bought last year. It wasn't like they were having a store-wide sale, it was just that particular refrigerator in the sales paper - and we hadn't even known about it. It was almost unbelievable.
We had previously thought about getting one on black Friday, but after we bought the refrigerator the salesman said he doubted that we would have gotten a better deal on that refrigerator.
7. I was able to use it as a teaching moment for my kids. I told them how thankful I was to God for how things had worked out and that we had refrigerators and enough food and enough money.
So, even though the refrigerator quitting made for a hectic weekend, I feel tremendously blessed by how things ended.
And it was an opportunity to remind myself to be thankful that we have enough money to fill a fridge with food in the first place...
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