{"id":5577,"date":"2026-07-14T08:35:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T12:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5577"},"modified":"2026-07-14T08:35:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T12:35:45","slug":"unexpected-gifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/14\/unexpected-gifts\/","title":{"rendered":"Unexpected Gifts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>

A melted candy bar revolutionized your kitchen.

At the Raytheon Corporation in 1945, during the final year of World War II, Dr. Percy Spencer was tasked with improving radar technology. He was working with magnetrons \u2013 vacuum tubes that generated powerful microwave radiation.

One day, while standing near a magnetron, Spencer noticed the chocolate bar in his pants pocket had become a mass of warm goo. Instead of being irked, he was intrigued. Was there a potential application for microwave radiation and food?

Spencer placed some popcorn kernels near the magnetron. They popped almost immediately. He then tried an egg. It exploded in a colleague\u2019s face. By this time, it should be obvious that Percy Spencer was kind of a fun guy to have around the workplace.

Gradually it dawned on the researchers at Raytheon that microwaves \u2013 which heated food products from the inside out by vibrating their water molecules \u2013 could become a food preparation technology. Their initial effort, introduced in 1947, was the Radarange \u2013 a six-foot-tall, 750-pound prototype of the microwave oven.

At a price tag of $5,000 (around $70,000 in today\u2019s dollars) that behemoth probably wasn\u2019t going to show up in your best friend\u2019s kitchen. But ever since a company called Amana (a Raytheon subsidiary) introduced a compact model in 1967, cooking and reheating have never been the same.

It was an unexpected gift from a melted Hershey\u2019s bar.

According to an oft-repeated story \u2013 probably more urban legend than fact \u2013 a cook named George Crum, who worked at Moon\u2019s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, was irritated by an unhappy customer in 1853.

The diner, who had ordered French-fried potatoes, kept sending them back to the kitchen. They were too thick. And too soggy. And not salty enough.

Fine, thought Crum. I can fix that. He sliced a few potatoes as thin as possible, fried them up, then salted the living daylights out of them. What did the customer think now? Actually, the customer thought these \u201cpotato chips\u201d were awesome. Thus, according to the story, a billion-dollar industry came into existence because a disgruntled diner and recalcitrant cook tried to one-up each other.

In 1938, a dietician named Ruth Wakefield was experimenting with variations on a popular butterscotch pecan cookie recipe.

Unfortunately, she ran out of baker\u2019s chocolate. On a whim, she substituted some fragments of a Nestle semi-sweet chocolate bar, expecting them to blend into the dough.

They didn\u2019t. They retained their integrity and created small islands of delicious chocolate. Thus was created the first chocolate chip cookie. Wakefield named her invention after her place of work, the Toll House Inn.

While her expectations had been mistaken, more than a few people would say that life is not worth living without regular access to Ruth\u2019s \u201cmistake.\u201d

Some of the world\u2019s happiest discoveries come about when we aren\u2019t looking for them.\u00a0

They are serendipities.\u00a0That word comes from The Three Princes of Serendip<\/em>, a Persian folk tale that dates back more than a thousand years.\u00a0According to the fable, three young men from the island of Serendip (now known as Sri Lanka) experience one happy adventure after another, even though they\u2019re always hoping for something else.

Such things happen to us, too.

You may be hoping for a life partner.\u00a0Or your dream job.\u00a0Or the healing of a nagging illness.\u00a0

In the process of working and praying for those good things, God surprises you.\u00a0You receive the serendipity of a faith you never thought you could have.\u00a0Or perhaps the gifts of courage and patience.\u00a0Or maybe even the discovery that your life can still be complete without that partner, that job, or that healing.\u00a0

\u201c\u2019For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,\u2019 declares the Lord. \u2018As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts\u2019\u201d (Isaiah 55:8-9).

In a world governed by a serendipitous God, there are no accidents.

But there are countless unexpected gifts.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here A melted candy bar revolutionized your kitchen. At the Raytheon Corporation in 1945, during the final year of World War II, Dr. Percy Spencer was tasked with improving radar technology. He was working with magnetrons \u2013 vacuum tubes that generated powerful microwave radiation. One day, while standing near a magnetron, Spencer… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5578,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[229,101,1147],"class_list":["post-5577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gifts","tag-grace","tag-serendipity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5579,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5577\/revisions\/5579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}