As August rolls around each year, the craziness hits—as predictably as the triple degree temps of August in Texas. Perhaps this year I am finally wise enough to spot the cyclical theme. And it isn’t just a theme of heat or busy-ness.
August normally involves closed doors for me. Often those closed doors have kept me awake at night, wrestling with a panicky feeling that the earth is not going to continue to rotate at the proper speed or angle.
That sounds silly, like an exaggeration, yet it is honestly the physical reaction my body has had to some of those closed doors. Like one of my old bosses used to say, “Terri, you have the Dallas syndrome, every crisis is the biggest one yet.” (I might add he said it with a smile and love.)
I want to change, and like our President, I want change I can believe in. (Although he and I might not agree on what change can be believed.)
My change begins by thanking God for two of those specific crises that hit me in past years. Both involve teachers dropping out of THEO during August, right before classes would start. Both crises leave me holding the bag on classes I am not capable of teaching—Biology or Beginning Writing. In both cases, I had the wisdom to stop, drop and roll. Oh, I mean stop, drop and pray, but that was after I wanted to roll on the ground in agony wondering why I was being tortured so cruelly.
Looking back, I can see with sparkling clarity that God used those moments to provide for my needs–beyond all I had asked or imagined. He was taking my “fine” teachers and replacing them– in both cases—with His excellent teachers. His expectations for THEO exceeded my own. He wanted more for our homeschooled students. He just didn’t want fun ladies who would cover the material; He wanted kind, Christians who would love the kids as they pushed them to excel, who would seek His ways and plans before their own ideas of right.
This August is the same but I am different. I no longer stop, drop and pray. I pray and keep walking, leaving the latest crisis with the Lord. He has provided beautifully again and this time, I didn’t lose one step, a moment of sleep, or one breath worrying over the situation.
He can be trusted.
If you pray for Him to change you, then He will honor that prayer and send crisis—in all shapes and sizes. Use them to build faith muscles that trust Him. He won’t “just see you through;” you will come out on the other end richer than you ever.
This is my testimony and reminder, my rock in the desert, to remind me of His provisions, His faithfulness. His love is everlasting. His refining effect on me is change I can believe in.