Timing

Back in the Spring Semester of 2024...

    College sucks, especially when you're still in high school. It only gets harder when you're homeschooled, like I am. 

    I never imagined there would be so much paperwork! Not to mention the fact that, at the moment, I feel like I have less control over my grades than ever before. 

    See, back when I was still a full homeschooler, if I didn't do well on a test or an assignment, we'd just go back through it and clear up any concepts I didn't understand, so I always had top marks at the end of every school year. 

    But that was back when the teacher/student ratio was something like 2/14 at worst. Nowadays, I'm part of college classes with up to two or three hundred students spread across twenty locations, with one professor and a few IAs to handle us all. One-on-one help doesn't exist the same way. Everything I've had to ask professors I've had to do theough email, which is not the best way of working out issues with the class. 

    All of this to say that I've been struggling over the last few weeks. Though my Philosophy grade is doing great (and I actually have over 100% in the class on the whole), my English grade is suffering. Last night it dropped down into the A- zone, and as someone who desperately wants to keep her scholarship, that's scary. I'm not even in college, but I really don't want the relative humiliation of losing my scholarship before I even make it to the college campus. 

    This morning, my mom encouraged me to keep pushing through and trust in God's timing and plan for me. We already knew this English class was going to be tough for me--as a fantasy author, I don't usually write formal papers or essays, because all I seek to do is tell a good story. In this class, there's a lot of conventions and formatting rules and other, little, stupid things I keep losing points for.

    Eventually, though, I just got to the point where I couldn't even think about it anymore. I've got an email to send the professor about a mysterious drop in my grade, a college advisor with whom I need to schedule a meeting, and at that point, I had a class to get to. So I told Mom that I'm just going to focus on keeping my scholarship for as long as it takes to get my Associate degree, and no longer.

    I'm sick of having to worry about my grades. I'm tired of stupid, senseless homework assignments that exist just to fill time. I'm done with classes that teach things that directly contradict what I believe and say that there is no such thing as God and that the earth is a ball of randomly assorted space dust hurtling theough a universe created by an explosion. I'm sick of GEs, I hate all the paperwork and hoops to jump through. I'm done. 

    But I still had a class to go to, so I got in the car and went to turn it on so I could leave for it. 

    Oh, wait, my manager just texted me. Better look at it. 

    When I put my phone down and turned on the car, the first words that came over the radio made me pause for a moment.

    'Always reaching, always climbing, always second-guessing the timing...'

    In that moment, I knew God had been listening to my mom, because He poked me in the ears with a repetition of her advice to trust Him and His timing the instant I turned on my car. 

    'All right, Jesus, fine. I get your point!'

    Then I drove to school.

    From that point on there's been a weird sequence of events. First, I got a drastically better parking spot at the school than usual. Then my English professor never showed up for today's class. Then I went to my grandma's house to hang out for a couple hours before she teaches seminary to my cousins and I--only everybody else is sick and seminary is cancelled.

    It's like God has completely cleared today's schedule. Why?

    I don't know yet, but I'm starting to feel more like He's doing something with me today, because He keeps hammering home His point about His timing. I guess I'll see what He's got planned. 

    Maybe He is helping me figure out college, after all. 

    Many months later, in October of 2024, I am revisiting this blog post that I think I first wrote back in February, and remembering that day. I don't actually remember what happened after I plunked my phone down from writing out this post--I spewed out my brains and moved on with life. I don't think anything really Big happened. I was kind of just a normal day.

    But this has been a good blog post for me to reread, because here I am, actually at college, taking a bajillion education classes and wishing I was done. It's kind of like a repeat of all of this. But I think the biggest thing I've just learned from my own blog post is that I got through it last time.

    English 2010 is by far the toughest class I've ever taken. Not even my health class this semester (which is my current Big Struggle class) compares. But I got through it then, which means that even now, taking 15 credits this semester and working about 10 hours a week and going on dates semi-regularly, I can get through it. Objectively, my workload this semester has been bigger. But I'm handling it okay, somehow.

    God has got to be guiding this. I don't know what He's got in mind. But I know He's got my life in His hands, I will make it out the other side of this (lovely!) college experience, and all will be well. I just have to trust the timing.