Tree Frog Sabotage

I was really irritated. Most of my friends kid me about being able to detect a mood change. Lori tells me that the best indicator to her is my eyebrows. If one eyebrow twitches, I've had a mood swing. If both of them have moved, watch out! On this occasion, I suspect both of my eyebrows were scrunched into an angry V over my livid eyes. Let me explain the cause of so great an emotion in my normally calm and controlled demeanor.

I suppose I was expecting some kind of a miracle. For the last two years, the heat pump that cools our house in the summer and warms it in the winter had been on the fritz. As winter approached in the Fall of 2017, I was hoping that perhaps the heat pump would miraculously heal itself. It was working just fine all during the summer. We enjoyed a pleasant 75 degrees in the house even when it was 102 degrees outside. I thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a clog in the pipes that managed to clear itself and the heating season would be as pleasant as the cooling season.

I had told the guy that comes to do a tune-up of the heat pump every year that it was acting up during the winter months. If the outside temperature ever dips below 40 degrees, the heap pump gets all clogged up with ice. Sometimes it was so bad that it looked like a big snowball sitting beside our house. The technician said we needed a new "defrost control board". It would only cost mere $450 to get it replaced. I was skeptical because they are just like auto mechanics. They can use a few buzz words from the mysterious HVAC language and convince you to spend thousands of dollars needlessly.

So, my hopes were up that this year would be different. I wouldn't have to turn the heat pump off every few days to let it thaw out. I wouldn't have to face $300-a-month heating bills that totally wrecked the budget. On the morning after the first night when the temperature had dipped below 40 degrees in late October, I anxiously walked over to the heat pump to inspect it. Rats!! It was full of ice. Hence my extreme irritation.

However, I was determined to avoid the killer repair bill, so I started doing a little research on-line. As luck would have it, I found a replacement circuit board on eBay for a mere 50 bucks. I figured it was worth the risk to save $400, so I bought it. A few days later the board arrived. It's a tiny little thing that probably cost some company in China 2 dollars to make, but I still had high hopes of winning this little personal war with "the system".

I removed the old board and set it aside for closer inspection later. After the repair was complete, I gathered up my tools and brought the old board into the house to take a closer look. The front of the circuit board looked totally normal, but when I turned the board over to look at the back side, I saw something remarkable that explained why I had endured so much misery and worry for the last two years. The board was discolored and stained. It was quite corroded and nasty looking. In the middle of the mess was a dried-up tree frog. His little body had shriveled up to about the size of a raisin, but his little legs stuck out straight like toothpicks with feet. I took a picture to enshrine the culprit for time and all eternity in my personal history.

I can just imagine his surprise when he crawled behind my defrost control board and caused a short circuit that cost him his life. The surge of electricity through his moist little froggy body caused his legs to fully extend and he has been frozen in this stance ever since.

After pondering over this little surprise for a while, I realized there are a few life lessons captured in the experience. I was mad at a lot of folks over the trouble and expense this little incident had caused me. I desperately wanted to blame someone or something for my troubles. I was ready to point the finger at just about anything that I could imagine. When I saw the toasted little tree frog, I realized he was not an evil saboteur who wanted to make my life miserable. He was just a poor little critter who wanted a warm place to spend the winter. There was no sinister plot to destroy my peace of mind. It was all in my head. I would have been better off to assume there was a perfectly innocent explanation for the problem and I didn't need to look for the guilty party upon which to heap my scorn and righteous indignation. I think this attitude would be a better choice for most of life's unpleasant surprises. Note to self.…

I also had a great reminder of the reality of the law of opposition in all things. The next morning when I went to check on the heat pump, I found that it was once again working perfectly. My elation knew no bounds. I was reminded of the scripture in Alma 36:21.

"Yea, I say unto you, my son, that there could be nothing so exquisite and so bitter as were my pains. Yea, and again I say unto you, my son, that on the other hand, there can be nothing so exquisite and sweet as was my joy."

So, there you have it. Another day, another truly amazing lesson. Who would believe it was taught to me by a lowly tree frog.