Operation Inspiration
When my wife and I, as a relatively young couple, purchased our home, it was pretty much all we could afford. For that reason, we didn’t begin to do any work on our house for several years, and it took even longer until we were ready to redo our kitchen. When we were ready, though, we made sure to do it right. We hired a trustworthy contractor and a fantastic kitchen designer.
She was amazing. She knew how to maximize space, where appliances and counters should be placed, and how to create cabinets that would work for our needs. From pullouts to drawers, to cabinets over appliances, she planned it to perfection. Some of those cabinets are not used often, as they aren’t as accessible as others, and that’s what prompted my column this week.
One of the cabinets is over our stove. Since it is rather tall – and I am not – we keep things up there that we don’t use often. Well, I had gotten a portable grill out of it the other week, (before Betty Crocker became queen, George Foreman was the king) and now it was time to put it back. I stood on my tiptoes and maneuvered it in. The cord kept falling out, and the plastic drip tray I kept tossing up onto the shelf kept falling down no matter what side I tried to get it onto.
Defeated, I sheepishly walked the eight feet to the pantry cabinet with a great little space for a broom, and got out a step stool. As I climbed up on it, I had a better vantage point from where I was able to place everything in securely. In a moment, I was finished and nothing came crashing down on my head as it had previously.
What hit me at that moment was not the black plastic tray, but the realization that often we try to do things without the advantage of seeing them properly. Looking up at the cabinet, I didn’t see all the details of what else was in the cabinet, what pieces of wood might be framing it out, or what could have been lying on the floor of it, obscured from my view. When I stood on the stool, and was able to see things from the top, I was able to make better decisions.
So often in life, we make judgment calls without sufficient knowledge. We think we see the big picture but don’t realize we’re missing something. A friend mentioned to me that he had to return something to a store and went to bring a wagon to his car. Walking back from the store, he noticed a fellow walking alongside him with an umbrella. The thing is, it wasn’t raining! He eyed the man with the umbrella as some sort of loon. He noticed the guy with the umbrella giving him the same sort of look. You are walking with an empty cart! Did you forget your bags in the store?
However, my friend was armed with knowledge the other guy wasn’t, specifically that he was using the empty wagon to bring something INTO the store. Therefore, he didn’t care what the other guy thought because he knew the truth.
When he got to his car after the return, he found a weather alert on his phone that warned of a quick-moving thundershower that was expected to pass through his area in the next few moments. He realized the umbrella fella had information he didn’t have. He, also, was doing what he saw as proper, armed with a perspective and knowledge the person right next to him didn’t have.
All of this underscores the silliness, then, of people who complain about what happens to them in life. They try things and get smacked in the face by their own actions backfiring. They complain about Hashem intervening and making things happen differently than they should, or not making them happen as they should. What we forget is that we don’t have the benefit of seeing things from above as Hashem does. We can’t see the obstacles clearly, or realize that they are not obstacles but guardrails. We forget that we’re looking up from below and can’t see things with the clarity Hashem has.
And it’s not even just Hashem. Sometimes there are people who know better than we do; our parents, teachers, rabbis. But we think we’re on a level-playing field and see things as they do, but we don’t really. When they say something, we believe they’re mistaken, not that the mistake might be ours.
Perhaps that’s why Hashem made sure I wasn’t able to put these items away where I knew they belonged until I expended the effort to get the stool and climb up for a better look. Only after I’d seen the view from above, and been able to safely secure the items on the shelf, did the truth of my error finally hit me.
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