Christmas Miracles

A good part of this year, my kitchen was in shambles. Over the summer we lived with out a dishwasher and oven. On the same day, way back in May, my dishwasher started doing funky things and quit working and my oven blew up, literally. I saw it with my own eyes as I as attempting to cook dinner. (Read about my bad day here.)


When our fridge quit on us in August, I decided it was time to pull our kitchen back together. We scrimped and bought a new dishwasher. For the past two years we have been storing a fridge (and not using it) in our garage. We knew the friend we were storing the fridge for could use the money so we purchased her fridge and hauled it into our house so it could be put back into commission. Lastly we called out a repair man to fix our fried oven.


I found the guy off Craigslist. He was expanding his business and setting up a new shop. He offered to fix our oven free of charge in trade for our broken fridge. My first thought was, “Are you kidding me, heck yeah!” It turns out he could repair our fried board and use this fridge to test other GE boards when he is repairing them. (By the way, GE’s tend to need a lot of repairs according to this man). He had a spare board for the oven that he was willing to replace for us. So he got a broken fridge he could fix and I got a fixed oven for no charge…. I had already replaced the blown element, so it wasn’t exactly no charge that cost me $70. When the element blew, my whole control board blew too. I am lucky there wasn’t a big fire!


A couple weeks ago the hubster was craving some brownies and we decided to throw some in the oven. The timer went off and it was time to indulge in fudgy goodness. He went to take them out and asked me how long they had been in. I told him they were in for the full 22 minutes. He called me over to take a look and investigate our uncooked brownies. I knew we were in for some trouble. When I opened the oven it was warm, but not hot like it should be.


My first feelings were anger, “Why do I have to have a broken oven again!! This one is only three years old and I have already repaired it once.” My second thought was, maybe when I was cleaning it out the day before I disconnected the element when wiping out the bottom of the oven, it did seem a little loose. I took out the uncooked brownies and decided to just turn off the oven and not think about it for a couple of days. Christmas is approaching and I was looking forward to doing some holiday baking. I just couldn’t think about getting the oven fixed again. The hubs even mentioned maybe we should splurge (again) and get a new oven. For the night I just had to walk away from the situation.


A couple days later I decided to face my broken oven. I had high hopes that if I just tried turning it on, it would work again. I was hoping for a Christmas miracle. I pushed the magical buttons and waited…. After lots of clicking and peeking in to check if it was working I soon came to realize that my Christmas miracle wasn’t going to happen, well not going to happen with out a little bit of “works”. Faith with out works is dead, right? I had faith, but I wasn’t doing anything enough for my miracle to come through.


The hubs turned off the power to the oven, then I pulled the oven from its cubby and got to work. Unscrewing screw after screw until I got to the back of the oven where all of the wires are. Alleluia, one of the element wires had come loose. I hoped that this was my Christmas miracle and I would be able to re-connect the wires and we would be on our way.


Before I knew it was back in business. Our oven wasn’t broken, just poorly built, I should have cramped the wires down tightly so they don’t come undone again. A wonderful simple fix.


I sometimes wonder if the Lord throws curve balls just so we will humble ourselves and ask for help. As silly as a broken oven is, I was about to call quits on all cooking for a while. I didn’t really want to go back to cooking in my toaster oven. I am grateful for my little Christmas miracle as insignificant as it might be.


Merry Christmas and keep believing in miracles, because they will keep happening if you believe.