Aggravating, Awesome Life-Detours

When I was in middle school, my family was doing a local revival and someone invited me to a football game and a dance on Friday night.  I REALLY wanted to go.  I was at that age where friends and social events were everything, and since I traveled and was home-schooled, these opportunities were rare.  I begged my parents, but we had revival on Friday night, and after much deliberation, with heavy hearts, they had to say “no” because they just didn’t feel right about it.

I went to church that night with a defiant attitude and I was determined that I would punish my parents by sulking and staying mad at them for the entire weekend.  I was about 13 years old at the time and convinced that I had mean parents whose decision was sure to wreck my life forever.  (Don’t worry, I’m getting paid back for all this drama – we have already had one teenager and we have three more coming along quickly)

Well, as fate would have it, that night at church turned out to be an amazing night – a night that would change my life in ways I couldn’t have predicted.  That night, my brother went forward at the end of the service and trusted Christ.  There were others who also had a transformative night and there were lots of tears and joy.  Turns out, after all my sulking and drama, I was GLAD my parents said “no” to me that night because I would have missed my brother saying “yes” to God.  If you have never experienced it, I have to tell you that there is something really special about being there when someone makes the decision to let God in – I can’t explain it but it’s like your heart gets a little bigger (like the Grinch) and for a moment you get to see God a little clearer.

Even at the ripe old age of thirteen, I knew that God had taught me something that night . . . about trusting my parents and trusting Him, about things in life being bigger than football games and dances and boys.

God continues to say “no” sometimes, but I’ve learned that this usually means that He has a bigger “yes” in store.  He loves to mess with my plans and shake things up.  For a control freak like me, this can be irritating, but I’ve learned to step back and take a deep breath, and walk with Him to see what He has to teach me.  Although I still question Him (often!), I have continually been blessed by God’s life-detours and things always turn out better than anything I could have planned, so I have learned to go with Him (even if I’m still grumbling a little).

God’s latest shake-up is that I am going to be home-schooling Carlie this year.  I was home-schooled back when it was just plain weird.  For many years, the only people (that I knew of) who home-schooled their kids were celebrities and crazy religious people who apparently had a secret denim jumper dress code requirement (it’s MUCH different now – home-schooling is commonplace, people choose it for a variety of reasons and that secret dress code seemed to die at about the same time as perms and oversized shoulder pads).  But I was home-schooled because we traveled and, although I had a great experience, I never intended to home-school my kids.  We live in Massachusetts, with the best public schools in the US (although we have had the kids in a Christian private school – another unplanned path, but that’s another story).  And my Mom was wired to be a teacher – she was awesome, and had incredible patience and discipline – those are NOT words I would use to describe myself.  So let’s just say this whole home-schooling thing is not something I ever envisioned myself doing.

I had plans to send the kids off to school and catch up on writing and reading and photo projects and all the other things I’ve had to put on the back burner for so long.  I wanted to go to the gym and have coffee with friends and paint the sunroom.  But just as God taught me at age 13 that there are more important things than social events, He is still teaching me at 41 that there are more important things than photo projects and coffee with friends.  I only get a few short years with these precious kids that He has entrusted to Keith and me, and I need to make it count.

Carlie struggles with reading and writing – it’s exhausting for her.  She is very bright and has made good grades in spite of her struggles, so we could have sent her along to the next grade.  But since she has a June birthday and falls in the middle of the age range for her grade, we decided to give her the gift of time.  And if we are going to give her time, we want to make the extra year count, and make it special.

I can always tell it’s a “God thing” when I have peace that doesn’t make sense.  I didn’t intend to home-school, but since we began exploring the idea, I’ve had an odd sense of peace and calm.  Along the way, God has given me many affirmations and, even after receiving the giant boxes of curriculum and perusing the fat and intimidating teacher manuals, I still feel peaceful, and surprisingly excited.  I get to spend a year with my daughter – what a gift.  The twins will be in three full days of preschool, so I will have Mondays and Fridays with all three kids, making the whole endeavor even more challenging, but also more fun.  This year will be a grand adventure!  (Ahem, could you just please put me on your prayer list and ask God to not let me screw it up?)

So here we are again, headed off on another one of God’s life-detours, where I can’t rely on my own GPS and I am totally dependent on His random road signs.  But God’s directions are always more accurate, more reliable, and more interesting than my own navigation system.  So . . . as my Dad used to say about the unpredictability of life . . . “Just hang on and enjoy the ride.”

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.  Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.”  Proverbs 3:5-6

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