Chairs, Quizzing and Contentment

You never lose when you settle on being content.  That has to be one of the biggest lessons I've learned in life.  Discontentment only leads to discouragement and misery.  I saw this yet again in our home just yesterday.

We've been living with the kitchen chairs we currently have for our whole married life.  We bought them at Home Depot a hundred years ago, assembled them, stained and varnished them, used them and then went on to break at least two of them (who takes kitchen chairs to the barn or to the side of the pond to put on skates and then leaves them there all winter?????).  But, our family multiplied so we had to add a few mismatches here and there including desk/rolling chairs...it was the shabby chic look, but not quite so cool.  Kind of ugly really.

But I had stopped caring a while ago.  What could I do?!  But then we started Bible Quizzing.  It's funny what makes you start looking for chairs - Bible Quizzing!  The thing about quizzing is that you have to have firm chairs to sit on that are all identical.  The kids sit on quiz pads that are highly sensitive to movement.  If you have a soft chair, they don't work.  When kids would come over, often each child would have a different chair, some were broken, and occasionally we just wouldn't have enough when we joined up with other teams.  I just kept thinking to myself, if we need them, we'll worry about it then.  We kept making it work.

The funny thing was, this entire Fall, our quiz pads didn't work!  Somehow over the years, our quizzing console that lights up when a kid would "jump" stopped working.  It didn't matter in some ways about the chairs because nothing worked anyway!  But then, necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and our quiz team was starting to suffer.  If you don't practice your jumps, the other teams with working quiz pads are bound to win.  We tried borrowing from a couple other teams, but that wasn't sustainable as they needed their own working set and it was complicated to keep borrowing.  Good thing my husband is an engineer (I'm getting to my cool chair story....)

We had sent the broken console to the makers in the U.S., but they said, "Unfixable".  Harumph!  RM knew they were fixable.  He decided enough was enough.  He was going to start his own quizzing console business!  And just like that he designed a control board, wrote the program, soldered the resistors and and capacitors (or whatever those things are called) and voila - a working set of quiz pads and a working console with lights and beeps and everything!  Take that!  He's actually hoping to take over the quizzing world by storm and sell millions to the Bible Quizzers of the universe!  Ok, perhaps a little overboard, maybe just to locals!  We'll see....I'm his greatest sales person, so.......

The problem now was the chairs - ah yes, the chairs.....now it mattered that we had a matching set of chairs for all the quizzers in order for everything to work the best.  In the olden days, when we were dumb, we would have bought new (that's how we always did things), but now that we are more clever, we immediately looked on-line for used.  We thought we were going to buy what the quiz league uses (old stacking church chairs - kind of ugly but functional!).  So we searched for "stacking chairs".  Up came the classic ugly ones, but then (play awesome exciting music.....) there were these really cool, kind of modern yet could-work-anywhere-type of chairs, for, get this, $5 a chair!  We got in touch with the seller yesterday.  They had been listed for a month about 45 minutes from us, so fairly local.  We couldn't pick them up easily, so he offered to drive them out (no charge!) and threw in a free chair!  How is that a deal for him?!  Didn't matter - we took it!  He really wanted to be rid of them (makes me wonder if they're haunted!)

This is the cool thing - they are the exact colour of our table in the kitchen.  They are slim so they fit around our table and there is a chair for everyone with even an extra!  They are new looking, they are stackable, they are perfect for quizzing......and basically free.  As soon as they arrived, I grabbed all the old chairs and all the kids, all the mismatches, and said, "Get these out of here!"  So they took them to their "clubhouse" which is an old room behind the barn and now they have a little room full of chairs for when their friends meet.

It all boils down to contentment.  I needed to be content in this whole process.  The entire Fall I knew our console wasn't working.  I actually knew for over a year.  But we had used someone else's set, so we had made it work.  I knew RM had the ability to make it all along, too, but I also knew he was quite overwhelmed with his workload so couldn't push.  To design a working board, he needs hours and hours of thinking time let alone manufacturing time.  It seemed fast to all of us once it was done, but in fact, it took quite a while in the behind-the-scenes working out.  I had to wait until he knew he had the time.  I also knew for some time how much I detested our chairs.  Well, maybe detest is a strong word.  I disliked strongly.  I had started looking on-line for my dream chairs.  No joke, the ones I really wanted were $1200/chair!  I had "settled" on $125/chair, but even that was way out of our league.  So then I started looking for "vintage" chairs, but no one sold a set of ten.  They were always sold in sets of two or four.  And they weren't free either.  I hadn't thought to look for "stacking"!  That was the genius moment.  And, I should add, when God stepped in and just blessed for the sake of blessing.  We didn't deserve it, He just did it.

So, it's really great - the quizzers now have matching chairs.  We now have matching chairs in the kitchen (for everyone!), complete with gum on the bottom.  We tried to look them up to see if by chance we had purchased some well-known chair, like Herman Miller, but can't prove it.  But, to us, they look like a Herman Miller chair which wouldn't surprise me at all if we found that out to be true. 

We sat together at dinner, the younger four and me, and we just thanked God.  Can you thank Him for chairs?!  Yes.  I'm also so thankful for a super genius husband who can pretty much do anything.  He's amazing!  I am in awe of his technical abilities.  We were going to have to buy another quizzing console/set of quiz pads which was going to cost over $600.  By having him develop it, we cut our costs down to nearly nothing. 

We tried them out this past Monday and it was a big success.  This Monday will be our first practice with the chairs.  Very exciting stuff for a quizzing family!  I suppose this makes no sense to people who don't quiz, but to us, it's huge!  Anyway, just another great story for us and how contentment led to blessing.....