Pause and Attend

Several weeks ago, I can’t even remember how many - maybe 8?- we started noticing that our freezer was opening and closing with some hesitation. Our refrigerator is the kind where the freezer is a drawer at the bottom, and there is a long bar to pull it open. At first, I thought the resistance on the door was my imagination. Some days, it seemed okay, and others, it just needed an extra tug to open it.

After a few weeks, it seemed to be getting worse. My husband grabbed a flashlight, pulled the drawer as far out on the track as it would go, and looked under it. He noticed a small box of Applegate frozen sausage had fallen out of the drawer and was stuck behind the freezer. He grabbed a tool to try and pull it out, but it didn’t budge. It seemed frozen in place. We didn’t have time to mess with it that day, so we just closed the freezer and moved on.

We knew that to fix the problem, we would need to take everything out of the freezer and then take the freezer apart. It would be the only way to get to the root of the problem. Not the most fun project in the world, so it kept getting put off. After all the freezer was still closing and the food was still cold.

This past week I went to open the freezer and realized that the smaller drawer in the freezer was having a hard time rolling in and out thus preventing the whole freezer from opening. I noticed a layer of ice on that smaller drawer and condensation covered everything. It was about 8:45 in the evening, and I figured we could deal with it on Saturday. But my husband decided we should go ahead and fix it that night.

We quickly unloaded everything from the freezer, disassembled the door, and removed all the drawers and compartments. We could finally see into the back of the freezer, and sure enough, the box of sausage was encased in ice. There was at least a 1/2 inch of ice on the ground. We grabbed a blow dryer, a towel, and a large metal spatula and got to work melting the ice. Eventually, we could break it up and remove it in pieces.

Since the freezer was taken apart, it got a good cleaning, and then everything was quickly put back together so we could load the groceries inside. The first time I opened the door after we fixed it, I about ripped it out of the refrigerator. For weeks, it had been getting harder and harder to open the door. I had been unconsciously adjusting to it not working well and by the time we finally fixed it I was using two hands to pull the drawer open and slamming the drawer so hard to get it to seal.

Fixing the freezer didn’t take long, but we’d been putting it off, mainly because it was inconvenient. The truth is that the drawer not working correctly for two months was far more inconvenient than the 40 minutes it took to fix it.

This happens in our walk with God, too. Something gets off-kilter, and we keep going, thinking it will sort itself out. Maybe we get out of the habit of reading the Bible, and we don’t think much about it until God suddenly feels so far away. Maybe we’ve filled our days so full that there is no room to slow down and rest, but we keep pushing, thinking it will get better. Maybe a prayer wasn’t answered the way we hoped, and so we’ve abandoned the practice altogether. Maybe … You fill in the blank.

It took weeks for the ice build-up on the bottom of our freezer to get to the point where it impeded the operation of the drawer, and yet there were clues leading up to that point that something was wrong. We discovered the problem weeks before we fixed it, but knowing the problem wasn’t enough to solve it. We had to pause and attend to it.

As we wrap up the first quarter of the year, I wonder what things in your life need you to pause and attend to them? 

~  Melissa