Last December, two weeks before Christmas, I started to leave home one evening to teach a computer class. Decorations moved gently in the breeze, and I was opening my car door when the weather siren sounded. It was a tornado warning; I delayed leaving for my 30-minute commute until the severe risk had ended.
The near-tornado in the Christmas stocking should have warned me my classes in computers were about to become adventures in weather.
That night, my class was full of gas and utility linemen. The storms continued, and we kept a computer in the lab set to local radar. Several of my students carried work pagers.
Ten minutes before the class ended that night, we heard a crash. A strong gust of wind had caught the glass front door of the office building and ripped it off its hinges. My boss held the door in place as we listened to the storm roar.
When the door blows off the building, class ends early. My students glanced at the door and said, “We’ll fix that. Our tools are in our trucks.” They repaired it in less than 5 minutes. I should have realized it was the beginning of a roller coaster ride in my classroom.
Two months later, we were hit with a record-breaking ice storm. Colleges and businesses shut down for a day. Everything was covered with two inches of ice. I teach only when businesses request classes, and our class was scheduled the morning after shut down day. I suspected no one had cleaned the satellite office’s walks yet, so I took my 11-year-old son, 2 snow shovels, and salt.
When we arrived, my students were there. Nothing had been cleaned. The steps into the building were coated with three inches of ice that looked like a bunny slope gone mad. The ice was so thick neither my son nor I could budge it. My students, son, and I got into the classroom by using the wheelchair ramp and scooting carefully up. When we got to the door, the ice on the stoop was so deep the door was hard to open. My students got it open. But then the door broke and was stuck open, with a 12-inch gap. I called maintenance on the main campus, and they were there within 30 minutes. The maintenance director was astounded at the terrible condition of the steps. After he fixed the door, he spent 2 hours, with a pick, to hack out a 1-foot path down the building steps for when we left.
Then I got the flu — the real flu that puts you in bed for days if not weeks. I lost my voice. For the third time in eleven years, I had to delay a class. It’s impossible to teach without a voice.
We returned the next week. I had two different classes two different mornings when the floods came. On a Tuesday morning, it rained nonstop all morning while I taught. When the class took a break, I saw water spouting a foot in the air out of a sewer, across the street from where I worked. One of the two roads to the building closed with flooding while I taught that morning. Would the next morning’s class be cancelled?
I tried to call the college to ask, but got no answer. I later learned there had been a fire in a transformer outside the administration building, which knocked out electrical and phone service to the campus. When I left at noon that day, there was one unflooded lane open on the street. The road closed within hours after I left, and we had to delay the next morning’s class.
Last Thursday, my boss commented we had had a wild semester of tornado warnings, ice, floods, and illness. That Friday morning, we woke to a small earthquake. Again, I had to go teach. In the middle of the class, one of my students said, “It did it again.” I thought she meant I had messed up an Excel formula, but we were having aftershocks.
Friday’s aftershock was hard for me. Both my kids were leaving that afternoon — my babies are venturing out of the nest, one overnighter at a time. I would not see my daughter for two days, and would not see my son for one. This was the first time they were to be gone overnight, and I wasn’t there to take them to their drop-off points. A phone call good-bye is not the same. Radar showed a rainstorm coming, and I worried for their safety. What if they needed me or my help?
My first prayer was for God to care for them. Then I prayed that if they needed to stay home, something would happen so they did. That didn’t happen. I finished teaching just as they were leaving, except I was a 45 minute drive away.
So in my car, on the way home, I prayed for their safety. I hated not being there. Then I heard a still, small voice, “I gave you your children so you could raise them. Not so you could keep them.”
I realized then that I might want to watch over and protect my children from every possible danger — like tornados, floods, blizzards, earthquakes, and illness — but I can’t. Instead, I must trust God to do that and to teach my children to trust Him by my example. He can care for them far better than I can.
When I have done my job right, when my children are raised, they will be okay — even when the wind blows and the ground rolls. He’s got my children in His hands.
