You know how when you read Genesis you can look back and see how God was planning to redeem humanity through Jesus even back then, and you see how step by step He guided it and put it into place. Well looking back at my life I can see how He has been planning and shaping me to become what I am today, and I’m sure He still has more in store.
So if you don’t know this about me already I graduated a year early. I would actually be a senior in high school under normal circumstances. There’s a lot of things that played into this. Where I’m from it’s mandatory that you take a class online before you graduate high school. So my junior year I was placed into a class where you can work on that online class as one of your electives. You have a wide range of choices. At towards the end of October/ beginning of November I think it was I was finishing up my class and was wondering what I should do with that class. I could’ve switched out into another elective I could’ve taken another online course or I could have just goofed around in that class for the rest of the year. Briefly I wondered if it was possible to take the rest of my high school credits online and graduate early since I felt like school was limiting my time and ability to do anything else, like I was just literally sitting around all day in most of my classes, and just overall making me a lot grouchier than I was in the summer when I had as much time to do what I wanted. It was just a thought back then, but once I realized that I had taken a high school math class in middle school, and that I worked faster than everyone else at the online courses it became a real possibility, so I looked into it. As it turned out I needed to credits. English IV for one credit, Government for half a credit, and economics for half a credit. One full year course and two semester courses. I decided that while it might not be easy I could and wanted to handle it and so that’s exactly what I did.
But wait it goes deeper. Remember that extra high school math credit I got in middle school. It wasn’t my choice to take that class. In sixth grade you could take a test to see if you were good enough to take Algebra I in seventh grade, I passed the test, but knowing how much pain I would be subjecting myself to with that, and having summer homework, all just to start college early? There seemed like there was no good side to that so of course I didn’t do it. In seventh grade though at the end of the year my math teacher gave some of us who were exceptionally good the option of taking it and told each student. When she got to me she said she wasn’t even giving me a choice which I was fine with until I realized that she meant she wasn’t giving me the choice of taking anything else but the high school class. I was extremely furious that I would have to do a summer math packet taking time out of my short break when you already take over my life on the everyday. Get this though, this teacher mentioned a few times that she was a Christian who followed the Jewish law which looking back this is all crazy. I would not have opted for graduating early if I had to take a math class on top of all of those classes online but because of this one moment God made the opportunity the most desirable path for me.
But wait there’s more. Because of math and the pain it brought me I had a terrible time in middle school. When it was time to start looking into high schools the options I saw seemed even worse to me than the middle school I went to. That was until I stumbled upon Manatee School for the Arts, or MSA. This school was lax on the homework and busy work which I still despise almost more than anything else in the entire world. Besides that though it stood above the rest because it had so many choices for electives that I had a hard time choosing whereas the other schools had such poor choices that it was the opposite problem. Now it wasn’t entirely homework free or easy but it was definitely a relief compared to middle school. Junior year which became my Senior year was the easiest year in all twelve years I had gone to school. The lack of homework that my teachers assigned that year, especially in the math department, was an environment that I thrived in because of the gift God has given me to retain information quickly and easily. This environment allowed me to have relative ease completing these online courses and eventually led to my graduation.
There’s even more. MSA is also a middle school which I heavily considered going to but because my dream at the time was becoming a zoologist and taking care of animals, and because the science fair sounded fun to me, both of these things MSA didn’t have, I opted to go to Haile(notice how it sounds like hell) Middle School because of it’s agriculture class and science fair. If I hadn’t done this I wouldn’t have realized how much I hate the maintenance that comes with animals or how much I hated school.
Another thing. You know how God lured me into MSA with it’s large choice of electives, well by Sophomore year the large list of electives no longer had enough choices to appeal to me and in junior year I wound up with electives that I didn’t really like. That raised concerns for senior year since the classes I had taken only went up to level 3 meaning I couldn’t take it the next year. And I didn’t have an online class to fill and elective spot, and I would have even more elective spots that usual that year since I didn’t need a math or science. This gave me plenty of reason to graduate early before I had to cross that road. God both motivated me to go to MSA and leave MSA with the electives.
Also notice how God didn’t put me in Algebra in Seventh grade? He only gave me as much pain as was needed to get his purposes accomplished.
