The Beauty After the Disaster

Have you ever had a day when everything seemed to go wrong, and you realized your plans are not God’s plans?  That was me a couple of weeks ago. My family and I were getting ready for vacation, finishing up school before our break, and trying to get ahead on our chores so we could enjoy our week off…when we sat down for lunch.

All of a sudden we heard a loud

CRASH!

We turned our heads to see our entire school room floor covered with books that had previously been organized on a bookshelf bolted to the brick wall.  One of the mounting screws had popped out of the wall and sent our shelves tumbling to the ground.  It was a mess!

Yesterday…during lunch. Thank God no one was in the room at the time. Ugh. #messyroom #disaster #thankgod #noschool

A photo posted by Kathy Gossen (@cornerstonekat) on Aug 25, 2016 at 9:25pm PDT

Forget finishing school. Forget finishing that blog post for vacation. Forget cleaning the house. We couldn’t even see the floor to clean let alone find our school books in the rubble. Thus, instead, we prayed many prayers of thanks that no one was in the room at the time, and then began to re-organize.

And re-organize we did. It took two days to sort through all our books and make some sense of it all again, but we did it!  And we really like the result too.

What’s different?  No more high bookshelves.  Instead we have several lower ones, that the girls appreciate because they can now reach everything.  Books. Art supplies. PE supplies. The globe.  They can reach it all without my help.  Talk about a self-esteem booster. They feel so much older.

We also have a little more wall space!  With nearly three solid walls of windows this is BIG!  It gives a great space for our American History timeline too.

Even our book reading nook is back up in order.

What is the conclusion from it all?  Sometimes things happen in life that you don’t understand or that seem, at the time, to get in your way.   When those times happen, don’t give up or give in to depression, anger, or negative thinking. Maybe God has something better in store, and He just needs to give you a stop sign for you to regroup or re-organize His priorities in your life.  Just like some bookshelves on the floor that helped me to spend some fun time with my girls, that stop sign in your life may be just the thing that will bring joy later on down the road.

Have you ever had a time when God gave you a big stop sign, and down the road you were so thankful He did?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

To see even more homeschool room ideas, check out the 8th Annual Not Back-to-School Homeschool Room link-up on the iHomeschool Network.