my kids and crisis

I am so proud of my kids! Okay...so maybe I am biased. However this week I watched both Heidi and Karisa face crisis and handle it well.

Heidi graduated this spring with a special ed/elementary ed degree. She will work for the Philadelphia School district. On Wednesday she had a meeting in center Philadelphia at the district office to get her placement. When she got there, she was informed that they were placing her in a high school special ed position. In her words - "I had a moment". She has no experience or education dealing with high school students.

Here is where I am so proud of her. After a bit of panic and several phone calls, she arrived at the point where she assumed that God must want her in this specific high school. In spite of her fear, she began to look for the opportunities...maybe she could help coach a girls soccer team...maybe God had something that she did not see yet.

The next day she got called in for a second meeting. At that meeting they reassigned her to a K-4 school where she will teach in an elementary class!

Karisa spent three weeks in India. Her arrival date back in the states was this past Friday, the 17th. The beginning of the week she called us to tell us that she may not be able to get out of the mountains. There was a good deal of political unrest and there was an indefinite strike. In that part of the world, a strike shuts down all transportation, businesses, and markets. In other words, life comes to a standstill. Her response to the strike was that if God wanted her to stay indefinitely, then she would do so.

Incidentally, an influential leader in the town pulled some strings and she got to Delhi on Thursday and we picked her up in Newark on Friday!

Both girls faced crisis. Both responded the same way. After the initial fear and panic, they immediately began to look for the hand God. Both were fully aware the God orders their steps, that He is good, and that He could be trusted with their future.

If we are going to partner with God in his redemptive and transformative work, we must have this kind of attitude. Obstacles become opportunities. We look for the hand of God in the midst of crisis. (Crisis is our perspective not God's.) We must be fully aware of God's goodness. In spite of our emotions we act from the perspective that God is good, that He knows better than I do.