Miracles & Gumballs | Rabbi Gavriel Friedman

This past summer, my family and I decided to take a little bit of a trip. There were a couple of flights involved. We live in Eretz Yisroel, we had to go and take a stopover in Italy. Although on the way there, there was an unexpected change of events. We had to stop over in Cyprus. What's the problem with that? Very small connection time in Italy. We said: Maybe we'll make it. But things were taking their time in Cyprus, and I was, like: Uh-oh, I hope we're going to make it. And my wife is, like: What do we do? And we're calling up and sending emails and hopefully, maybe we're going to make it. I said to myself: You know what? A lot of these Vayimaen videos are pretty powerful ideas. Maybe I'll do that also. So I said: Hashem, listen, I'm careful. I try to be careful with my Shmiras Einayim, but I'm going to go overboard now, I'm going to do even more. I'm going to do above and beyond. In the zchus of that, can You please make sure that we make our flight in Italy? טרם אדבר, maybe a second later, I’m not even done, I get an email on my phone. And you have to understand, we were in the sky already. It didn't make any sense, I didn’t have any service. But I got an email that said: Your next flight from Italy is delayed. I said: I can't believe it, it worked. That is unbelievable. This is crazy. We're going to make the flight, after all. We ended up getting to Italy, but then we were stuck on the plane for an unexpected 45 minutes. We got off the plane, we went to the luggage. It was mayhem, it was pandemonium. People were going crazy, police were tackling people because they were trying to get behind to get their luggage. To make a long story short, we missed our flight. And I was thinking: What? What happened? Vayimaen! You know, I was careful. I tried to be more. And what happened to the fact that, you know, my business is going to skyrocket now, I'm going to win the lottery, what happened to all that? You know what happened to all that? It all happens, the question is when. Sometimes we see it over here in Olam Hazeh, and sometimes it's reserved for Olam Haba. Every מעשים טובים, everything that we do, we’re going to get Schar, we're going to get rewarded for it. But over here, this isn't a gumball machine. You put in a quarter, a gumball comes out, and sometimes I think it could be looked at like that. When we have a Nisayon and we overcome the Nisayon, and then we think to yourselves: Well, right now, obviously, we're going to have dancers run out and start celebrating with us. Sometimes it's not like that. And sometimes you miss your flight and you're stuck in the airport for like 15 hours, have to repay and rebook another flight and pay thousands of dollars. But at the end of the day, it's still all worth it. We just went through the Yomim Nora’im, we said Avinu Malkeinu, we’re ממליך HaKadosh Baruch Hu as the King, we accept the גזירת המלך, and we go through Yom Kippur, and now we make our way into the Sukkah, צילא דמהימנותא, that is the shadow of Emunah. We step into there and we say: Hashem, I'm walking outside, in the dark, I don't know what's going on. Things can be hard and complicated, they can be difficult, but I know one thing, This is the גזירת המלך. This is what You want me to be doing, I'm going to be doing it. So the next time we find ourselves in some pickle, sure, we should strengthen ourselves and do a little bit more. And even if we don't find ourselves in a pickle, we should strengthen ourselves and do a little bit more, because that's the גזירת המלך.