College Graduate!

Ahh Wednesdays... I'm not really sure what it is in my life that makes Wednesdays so different from other days. Every day is pretty much the same nowadays! But nevertheless, it is Wednesday, and thus it is. Amen.

As some of you know over the past few years I have been going to ASU pursuing my degree in Music Education. I was all set to graduate this last May and be done forever with ASU! Yeah! However... since I've been pregnant this last semester, I got really sick while student teaching (and I've still been really sick all this lovely while) and I wasn't able to actually finish it all. So here I was, sitting on just a few weeks of student teaching shy of graduating and there was nothing I could do. So... I spent a couple months wrangling with ASU and various big-wigs and important people and such trying to work something out so I could salvage my degree. Things were just so complicated what with me going to have the baby in September, the middle-ish of the fall semester there; and then Thomas got accepted to BYU-Idaho and we were headed north to be up there and ASU wouldn't let me try and do student teaching up there. Anyway- long story short- they went through a number of options with me, and continued deliberating on what should be done.

So a few weeks go by and I hadn't heard anything, and so I emailed all these important people and asked them what was going on. I got a reply from Karen Kimerer, the head of student teaching there at the College of Education telling me to call her as soon as I could, that she had "the best news". I'm figuring- ok, they worked everything out, and I don't have to do any more paperwork. Great! So I called her, and she told me that after working with my teachers and people from both the School of Music and the College of Education, they had decided to reduce the number of credit hours that my student teaching was worth from 12 to 10, and then they felt they could give me a passing grade for it all. This meant that I could still receive my degree! She said they almost never do anything like this- but they felt that I was really deserving of it and they really wanted to help things work out for me. So... I still have a hoop or two to jump through before everything is completely set and done, but I am a college graduate. Hooray!

I had already gone through all the emotions and all of not graduating, and I had accepted the fact that I was going to have to finish some time later in life. I didn't like that, I would have rather had my degree done and move on with things, but I had accepted it as what needed to be and I was ok with it. But being handed this back with almost no effort on my part- that really spoke to me as something the Lord is blessing our little family with because of our faithfulness. We didn't know what was in store for us when we decided it was time to have children, we were just acting on what the Lord told us to do. And He blesses us every day because of that choice! It is an amazing feeling to get to see that, and to have something tangible (like my degree) to know that we are doing all right, and that everything will be just fine.