God is so Good

Don't you love when God comes quietly and fixes something before you even knew it was broken? He did that for us recently. OK - He probably does it for us every day, all the time. But this time it was in such an obvious physical way that I couldn't blow it off as coincidence. We went out of town a couple weekends ago and needed a house/dog sitter for the weekend. So we found a young college gal who later told us that it's like being on a mini-vacation at our house (Really??? But I digress...) and of course I wanted the house to be reasonably clean before we left and she came. So... I decided to clean the oven. It had been hanging over my head for a while, the lumps of overflowing popover batter resting black as coal on the bottom of the oven a constant reminder of my less than stellar housekeeping skills. I scooped out the largest crumbs (a word that makes me feel better than lumps or chunks), wiped the inside down, hit the clean button, opened the windows & went to bed leaving the oven to busily bake away all the grime. Fast forward to the next day. I bake some bars for our small group. The oven will come on, at the default setting of 350 degrees, but when I try to raise the temperature it goes down. If I try to set the timer, the light comes on... it's definitely hosed up. But the bars bake just fine and we decide we can live with it for a bit until we can afford to repair it. Day two, the oven won't come on, every button we push just beeps like a Volkswagen car horn. Beep! (Not doing that!) Beep! (Nope, not that either!) Beep! (What do you need the light for? I'm not baking anyway...) Beep!... Dead, our oven is dead. The intense heat of the oven evidently fried the computer chip in the oven. The even worse news? It may be one of two parts; one for $260 which we don't have lying around as we are still on one income at this point and one that is no longer available which is super helpful. Our oven is a wall unit and replacements are around $450 & up. The good news? A friend who remodels kitchens & bathrooms had recently gifted us with an oven he pulled out of a kitchen, still works great, is white like the rest of our appliances, and fits perfectly in the hole in our cupboard. We intended to have this as an extra installed in our garage for the few occasions when an extra oven would come in handy like Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas cookie time... Our old oven has a few extra bells & whistles & might be a smidge larger inside, but I am keenly aware that the 'new' oven came at this specific time because the God of all creation even cares about whether or not we have an oven. We will probably still try to get the part and fix it (send donations to... just kidding!) and part of me thinks that this is a great opportunity, now I can get the convection oven I've always wanted! But in the quiet places in my heart & mind, I know that God has once again provided exactly what we need, even before we knew we needed it! God is so good!