by Stephanie Haile

 Oh no! My 7 year-old received another "N" on his paper. My older son gasped when he saw it. We have never seen such grades in the Haile house before. My mind starts racing... should we get him a tutor, test him for special needs, change his school, change his teacher, change his discipline, punish him? The list continues until my imagination takes over and I see him sitting in a juvenile court blaming his mother for not getting that tutor he needed. Unfortunately, the crazy doesn't end there folks. The next couple of weeks I observed that my son was not eating his lunch and would come home and gobble down treats all afternoon. He was grumpy and peeing a lot. My mind was made up. "My little fella had diabetes", I thought. (My dad has juvenile diabetes, so I guess it's not too far of a stretch). Well, before I know it, I have him at the doctor and he is sitting on the sanitary paper with a needle in his arm and a pee test and finger prick under his belt. Poor fella. I get a call a couple days later, and it's all negative. What! I was sure he had a real problem. This kid is grumpy, moody and steals candy from the drawer like a mad man. Nope, it was just a phase. Isn't that life? One problem goes and another comes like clockwork. We conquer a mountain, then we trip over an ant hill. We worry until God fixes it, then we worry about the next thing. It never ends. The other day I was reading Ecclesiastes 3 and saw how King Solomon spoke about the phases of life. Seasons came and went back then, just as they do now. People have always had a choice to trust God or not. Of course, back in Bible times they did not have as many resources. When a problem came, they could not send little Obadiah to the local tutoring school to get his writing grade up, but they could trust God back then, just as we can today. I really did not know what to do to help my 2nd grader succeed, so instead of relying on all the resources out there, I first prayed and asked for God to give me wisdom and help my little "Obadiah". I had to choose not to worry and remind myself that seasons come and go, but God is constant. He wants to help me with the big mountains and the little ant hills in life. All I have to do is choose to ask for help and trust he will do it. By the way, yesterday I opened my sons backpack to find a paper with a big "S" on it (for those of you who don't know, that's a good thing). Also, he has been eating like a horse. I guess I freaked out for nothing. 

"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end."Ecclesiastes 3:11