My son had a very difficult time adjusting to 7th grade. He was very sad every morning before school. Almost daily he begged us to bring him back home to homeschooling. This persisted for 5 weeks.
We inquired with the school and his older sister to make sure he was not being bullied. He had some trouble with math class, but literally it was handled within days of the start of school. He just needed a quick primer in some terminology we had not covered in our math curriculum at home. But the sadness continued and seemed to grow worse.
One day we got a call from the school that he was in the nurses office and had gotten into trouble. Immediately I thought "He hates school so much that he is going to just be bad and get himself kicked out!" But as the asst. principal explained the situation, I grew madder at God. The story goes my son was in shop class when he and another boy started sending escalating mean notes back and forth to each other until the other boy pulled out a pencil and stabbed my son in the leg with it. They sent him to the nurses office to tend to the small wound, but it was clearly a violent act.
In my heart the dialog with God went like this "So this is how you are going to help the scared boy? Let him get stabbed in shop class?" I was very disappointed with God's plan to help my son through his fear. But the truth is, it worked.
He came home after school, almost chipper. That was surprising. The next morning, he was cracking jokes as I drove them to school. What? I was so confused. So I finally said to him "What is up with you? Didn't you just get stabbed yesterday?"
His response defied his age. "Yeah I did. I was so afraid something bad was going to happen and then it did. But I handled it and now I feel more confident that I will be ok."
Clearly, my plan and God's plan, are not the same thing. But perhaps I should just trust His plan considering He is standing on a much higher mountain than I am and can see exactly where this train is going. So God cares for my son's fearful heart by having him stabbed. Yes, that is truly another homeschool success story.
