Counting My Blessings in the Cold. A life lesson about learning.

“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.” — Willie Nelson

I’m sitting here watching the Super Bowl in the comfort of my warm home in Minnesota. Currently it is -3 F outside. I took this screenshot of temperatures last night in Minneapolis. For those of you who have never experienced cold like this count your blessings.

Counting my blessings and what lessons can be learned is the focus of this blog. I have lived in my current home for 8 1/2 years. When I purchased my home, all the mechanical in the house was relatively new. Every time there are extreme cold temperatures, the furnace decides to stop working. During the night last night, I heard a strange bumping noise. I couldn’t figure out what it was. This morning when I let the dog out, I did a little investigating and discovered where the noise was coming from. It was coming from the the outside furnace vent. It was making a sputtering noise and there were icicles hanging down from the pipe. I had a bad feeling.

Friday night on the news, it was reported to keep house thermostats at a constant temperature between 68 –72 degrees farenheit to make it easier on furnaces. I followed the advice and did that. This morning, after taking the dog outside, I felt a chill in the house. Due to the furnace issues over the years, I have developed a keen awareness to the temperature in the house and when the thermostat sets back. I have a programmable thermostat that adjusts the temperature in the house based on how I have programmed the temperatures. I went down to the check the furnace and my fear was warranted. The furnace was not working. I did NOT want to have to deal with calling a repairman on a Sunday, but that is what my day had turned in to. It was one of those frustrating interruptions.

As the day unfolded I came to realize that it was actually full of small little blessings if I took the time to notice.

Blessing #1, I was able to schedule a repairman to come today. The repair window was from 10:30 am until 11:00 pm.

Blessing #2, the house has a gas fireplace and I have several space heaters from being without heat many times previously so the house was going to stay warm until the furnace would be running again.

Blessing #3, I only had to wait a few hours until the repairman arrived.

As I mentioned, this problem has occurred every winter when the temperature gets this cold! One winter it was a couple days of withstanding brutally cold temperatures with no furnace. A part had to be ordered and then I had to wait for it to be installed.

Blessing #4, Patrick arrived to repair the furnace. I had never met Patrick before, but immediately he discovered what had caused the furnace to quit. There was water in the furnace fan. Having water in the fan is a bad thing I learned. Remember, I bet there have been fifteen different repairmen that have come to fix the furnace. Water in the fan was the effect of improper outside venting of the furnace. When the furnace was installed, the installer did not install the venting pipes correctly. There is too much angle in the venting pipes and the force from the furnace is not strong enough to push out any condensation that gets into the house from melting.

Blessing #5, Patrick was able to get the furnace running again enough though he did not have the materials to repair the venting problem. He also, took care of scheduling a venting specialist to come and fix the cause of the furnace shutting down in extreme cold weather.

Once Patrick diagnosed the problem, I said, finally someone discovered the actual cause of the problem. I immediately started thinking about all the times repairmen have been here to fix the furnace without actually finding the root cause. They got the furnace working again but were not able to discover the actual cause. A couple times it took several different repairmen until the problem was corrected and heat was restored. Patrick, however, was able to discover the root cause in addition to fixing the immediate problem of no heat.

Blessing #6, there was no charge for the repair call due to enrollment in Center Point Energy Home Service Plus. That service has paid for itself multiply times over the years.

Today got me thinking about life and learning. Sometimes when things aren’t working, we need to dig deeper to find the actual cause of the problem. The problem that is being exhibited is sometimes only a mask for the deeper, underlying problem. I was also reminded, that uncovering these deep rooted problems can take a long time, maybe even years. Don’t give up, persevere. What is getting in the way of progress? What is interfering with learning? What habits or behaviors are having a negative effect or impact?

Stay alert, and watch for the little lessons that show up daily. Life is always giving us opportunities to learn and grow if we pay attention. Today for me it was learning about digging deeper to uncover the root cause of an issue rather than focusing on the short term, immediate fix. It might take more work and more time, but if you don’t focus on the real issue, you are going to have to deal with the frustration over and over until it is ultimately fixed.

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“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

― Frederick Douglass

The joy is in the journey!

Blessings and Peace,

Mary

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