As my friends know, I adore home design. I’m constantly moving around paintings and refinishing furniture, and I’ve long wanted to make some changes to my kitchen, which was at least 25 years old.
The challenge was that my husband built the kitchen counters and cabinets himself. They are technically works of genius, and he was VERY attached to them. However, he built them to the specs of his late first wife, and let’s just say that our tastes do not match.
After extensive negotiations my husband finally, reluctantly, agreed to new countertops. We also agreed to eliminate a cabinet or two to create a slightly different layout.
I gave up on many other potential improvements – new floors, oven, etc. – it just wasn’t worth the fight, er, I mean, negotiations. Frankly, I also wanted to honor my husband’s craftsmanship. I’m really proud of his work, and I was content with this compromise.
So, taking a very active part in the proceedings, I manifested new countertops. (Who says you can’t help with your manifesting!?) Woo hoo! My vision for the kitchen was finally materializing!
When the men came to install our new countertops, I remember idly thinking to myself, “It’s kind of too bad to have such beautiful new countertops and such an old, funky-looking stove.”
It was a fleeting, wistful thought, as I had no intention of taking up that particular battle (ahem, negotiation!).
Cut to the end of the installation.
The countertops are installed and the stove is pushed back into place. My husband turns on a burner to test that it is connected correctly and…
“BOOM!”
Gas explodes on top of the burner and smoke is pouring out of every crack and crevice in the oven.
Mayhem!
My husband runs to the basement to turn off the gas, I find the fire extinguisher, the kids are whisked out of the house, the workers spray the extinguisher and the house is quickly engulfed in a thick cloud of smoke from the fire and chemical smoke from the fire extinguisher.
A few seconds later, the house is coated top to bottom with a film of dust, but the fire is out. The stove is clearly unusable; its pipes had melted! Out to the curb it goes.
When people heard that my stove exploded they said “What a disaster! You must be so upset!” I say it was the Universe’s way of getting me my new stove…
…without having to battle it out with my husband. All I had to do was a bit of cleaning.
It was perfection. No one was hurt, and nothing was hurt… except the stove!
And when I think of what might have happened (the bigger explosion if we had waited another 30 seconds to test the stove, or if we hadn’t been home, or…) I just feel so grateful for such evidence of divine protection.
Sometimes we just need to let go.
Sometimes we just have to do our part, let go the rest, and the manifesting will take care of itself. I let go ‘trying’ to get my new stove, though I still honored the truth that I desired it; I didn’t do the sour grapes routine: “I didn’t want it, anyway!”
As silly as this may sound, I had to work hard to get those countertops. My husband, bless his soul, is stubborn, er, I mean ‘tenacious’ (he would say the same thing about me), and HE DID NOT WANT TO CHANGE THEM!
As many married couples know, it’s not always the ‘important things’ that spark the biggest tussles, and we certainly battled it out on this one. Of course, as is always true of these type of things, we were really wrestling about much more than just countertops.
On some level, it would have been easier to give up the new countertops, in the name of peace at home. But concession is not the same as peace, and concessions are not always the route to peace; I knew that conceding on this would not have been good for me or for the family as a whole. And so I insisted upon the new countertops.
I did my part, and I released whatever was more than I could do. I guess I did enough for the universe to take my effort seriously and ‘lend a hand’ with the stove.
Final word: everyone in the family loves both the new countertops and our lovely new stove!
Final Final Word: Get this: while I see these events as the Universe’s way of helping me manifest a new stove, my husband thinks that my whole campaign to renovate the kitchen was really the Universe’s way of saving us from a disastrous fire that might have occurred had we not been there doing the renovations we were doing. The stove’s connection was weak and – because we were working on the kitchen – we discovered that weakness in a safe way.
As Peter Elbow put it: “Meaning is not what you start with but what you end up with.” Which ‘Final Word’ is true? Maybe one, or maybe the other, or perhaps both, or it could be neither!
We do not always understand the grand plan behind what is happening in our lives, but we can see connections and relationships, if we look.
Was the explosion a ‘disaster’?
Personally, I just give thanks.
