One week ago, we were anxiously awaiting the refrigerator repairman to come finally fix our fridge. We were ecstatic at the prospect of having food in our kitchen, and not needing to shlep down two flights to our basement fridge.

As was well documented in these pages, the fellow came, innocently claimed he was not, in fact, qualified to repair the fridge, abruptly left, leaving us befuddled until receiving a text that we were rescheduled for next week.

Well, next week is now well upon us, and we —shockingly— still don’t have a fridge.

The more senior repairman came yesterday, explaining to us that the fridge is broken beyond repair, and we will be receiving a full refund for the fridge we purchased a year ago. At first that seemed pretty nice and reasonable, until we realized that due to the intense inflation going on right now as a result of our government printing trillions of dollars and giving a bunch of them to us, a family of 9, the equivalent fridge model has now climbed $600 dollars.

Resigned to our fate, and armed with the philosophy that any problem that can be solved with money is not really a problem, we slowly began accepting that there was nothing left to be done, and the time had come to go ahead and purchase another fridge— one that, unlike it’s predecessor, would hopefully last more than a full year.

But a funny thing happened as The Better Half was feeding the 8-week old baby— whom we will henceforth refer to for anonymity’s sake as Joe—at 4:00 AM

Rather than scrolling through my blossoming TheRealTikTokRabbi TikTok feed as per usual, The Mrs. was shopping for refrigerators online. To her absolute delight, she observed that the cost of the same fridge she saw not more than 10 hours prior had dropped by $600 for the annual Memorial Day sale.

Her squeal of delight awoke me from my deep slumber, and we celebrated joyously together as we completed the big purchase.

At the time I was too groggy to realize, but she later explained to me that if the company that I so eloquently eviscerated in my previous post had displayed any modicum of competence, and a) show up when they said they would, and b) diagnose the problem correctly the first or even second time, we would have paid a costly $600 for their solid business practices.

Fortunately they messed up repeatedly, fixing their mistakes right in time for the blessed Memorial Day sale.

This is a staunch reminder that G-d is actively running the world. We often get frustrated at things that happen to us. We scratch our heads and ask, “What do You want from us?” We think we have all the answers, and that we know best.

And then, through a broken refrigerator and an incompetent fix-it company, we are humbly reminded that G-d is running the show, and that He loves us dearly.