Faithful

The Lord is so faithful. My mom always told me that we operate under the favor of the Lord, and while I know that to be true, time and time again it's been proven, sometimes I forget how relevant we are to the Lord. I have been worried about daycare and my work schedule and going back to work for some time now. It's not been a secret, that's for sure! I have laid awake some nights, my mind too full for sleep, and sometimes the tears wouldn't stop. So, today, it was with a heavy, yet expectant, heart that I left my babies in the care of other people and went off to work for the first time since February.

The difference between the last few weeks and this week is remarkable to me. Because last week, most of the days were bad; really bad. I felt so heavy, so down, and generally sad. This week, when I expected to be a basket case, I was strangely peaceful. More so than I have ever been at the start of a school year. In a sense, I almost felt prepared. In church a few weeks ago, our pastor (my dad) spoke on living a blessed life. That really spoke to me. In that message, there were several scripture references about blessing and how to pray for blessing. However, in my prayers to the Lord, it felt to me that about all I was able to do was cry out and tell him how badly I felt. And even that prayer seemed helpless to me because I felt like words, of all things, are my strongest ability, and I couldn't even find the words to express my desires about my children to the Lord.

Then, last week, I was able to access my work schedule online, and I found out that I was supposed to teach 2 literature reading classes, 1 journalism writing class, and 3 general writing classes. If you don't know anything about middle school writing, let me just say that it needs a lot of help, and those 4 writing classes were equl to 114 students (no to mention the 60 literature students!). So my mom and I decided that we would pray for favor. I emailed my boss, asked if I could meet with him this week when we returned to work, which is the week before school starts, the week AFTER kids had already picked up their schedules. What I really felt would be manageable for me was to have 4 reading classes, 1 journalism writing class, and 1 writing class. I felt it was a long shot, really, but I decided to ask for it, expecting that I would be relieved of 1/3 of the writing classes, but not 2/3. When I got to work, it didn't look good for me. My boss stated that there were two other teachers with difficult Language Arts loads; one of them with the exact schedule that I had. He asked if we could meet later in the day, and so during that time, I simply told the Lord the problem was his, and that I knew I was in his favor above all else. The meeting was set for 11:10. I walked in a couple of minutes before, and my boss had already begun the meeting without me. In fact, they were almost done. It was the other teacher in question, my boss, the department chairperson, and then me. As I sat down, they announced they had moved the schedule around and asked if it would be okay with me if another teacher took two of my writing classes and gave me two of her reading classes. I am sure my face gave me away, but I was able to say, "If that is what you have worked out, then it will be just fine with me." I walked out of that meeting with exactly what I asked the Lord for, and it may not seem like a big deal to many, but when you walk away from a day of work in which you have collected more than 100 3-page writing pieces or projects, and then have another 60 reading book reports to grade on top of that, it is evident just how much the Lord was working on my behalf!

To top it all off, I picked up Scarlet from her first day of daycare. A day in which her primary caregiver (the one who knew all the details) had called in sick. Not only did she take 2 naps, she took two really good naps at the correct times, and her eating and everything else was totally normal. This was my other prayer...that there would be no interruption to her and that she would be able to sleep in a completely different environment than she was used to, without trouble.

Let me remind you how faithful the Lord is. He is always on time, and as humans, we seem to forget that our lives are not our own. I was able to tell two people at work today that the Lord had answered my prayer.