It was the worst thing that could ever happen, or so I thought, moving all the way from the cool, lush Redwood Empire to hot, dry Southern California the day after 11^th grade was over.  Sixty-five degrees to a humid one-hundred-and-eighteen in one day—I felt like I’d died and gone to you-know-where.  But that wasn’t even the worst part, because my senior year would now be spent at Indio High School and I would not be able to graduate with my friends from our beloved McKinleyville High.  The fact that my parents were about to lose their house because my dad couldn’t find steady work in Northern CA and had now found a great job out in the middle of nowhere between Indio and Blythe seemed secondary to my misery.   Plus, all of my plans to apply to a nursing school in San Francisco  went right out the window because it would now be too far away from home.

But surprise, surprise, surprise; as Gomer Pyle would’ve said at the time.  I enjoyed my new friends as well as my senior year; the Los Angeles County Hospital School of Nursing turned out to be a much better fit that the other school would’ve been; and I eventually landed back near the ocean in Santa Monica.  There I met my husband, who God had brought all the way from Alabama just for me.  And without Jack there never would’ve been Kevin, and I can’t even imagine that.  And without Kevin there wouldn’t have been my adorable grandson Casey, and, and, and…

My LORD certainly knew what He was doing then and He still does now, even as I face new “worst things that could ever happen.”  God knows best, and I choose to trust Him even when I just don’t get it.

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9