Am I Going to get Kicked off Uni?
I did not know I was going to get married that weekend, although God did give a pretty strong hint. The night before I headed over to Vil’s, at the beach, beneath a huge orange moon, my son said to me ‘mum, I had a dream that you got married last night.’ That was two nights before my surprise marriage happened. On top of that, a couple of weeks prior, during my journaling God had said to me ‘when you go back to uni your breakthrough will happen.’ You do not get much more specific than that. (Insert slapping your own face emoji here.) I have no idea why I was surprised. It happened just like He said it would.
The problem is, I had started (or re-started after taking a year out) year two of my degree. On top of that Covid had struck and I was not making any money, yet somehow needed to keep a roof over the heads of my children. And, on top of the that that is on top of the this; I lost half a week every fortnight due to extreme mental fatigue when my children return to me after their week with their dad. (Adjusting from being a single person to a single parent is no small feat, I’ve experienced something like a mental breakdown twice a month for the past six years). All these things were challenging enough without an intense life change slapped on top.
Before Vil was my husband he was a good friend. I would travel to Bristol to visit him now and then and he would talk to me non-stop for the entirety of the time, morning until night. It was intense. I didn’t mind, his brain is a fascinating creation I loved exploring, just exhausting. Being married to Vil meant that I went from spending most of my time in Kent (with the odd Bristol visit) to spending 50% in Kent and 50% in Bristol. I have no idea what happens when uni lectures are back on campus because I will still be going to Bristol half of the time and the other half will be confined to the restrictions of my children’s school hours. I digress.
For the uni compartment of my life, this life development was bad. The sudden change had left me disorientated. Vil was still holding the majority of my attention during the Bristol half of my life, I began to miss lectures and fall behind. When I did find time to study it was in short bursts. I was just scraping by which is sad because I was only getting a fraction of the benefit of the course. I was unable to keep up with the background reading, so I was missing out on a lot of learning. I could not seem to organise myself. With so many other things going on my brain felt like it was in a constant state of being scrambled. It was difficult/impossible to maintain any sort of organisation to the point it actually scared me. I felt like the foundations of my life had turned to scrambled eggs and everything was sinking. That is scary enough in itself but when there are children involved its terrifying.
There were times when the disciples found themselves in terrifying places. Storms, while they were on a boat. Severe storms, in which they feared for their lives. They were hardened fishermen. If these men were scared on the water, it was bad. Jesus was always at hand during these storms, either in the boat or coming to them on the water. During one storm they woke Jesus up (he was asleep through a mad storm, this man had some serious peace). Jesus was annoyed that they thought they were going to die. “Don’t you trust God?” He asked them. (Matthew 8:23) A bit harsh? I mean, they were scary times, surely he understood their fear. It is a matter of trust. Do you trust that Almighty God is able to protect you from the scary things that surround you? It is easy to say so when life is good, people sing about it in church, ‘You take what the enemy meant for evil and you turn it for good’ (Elevation Worship, 2019) but stormy times when life is terrifying, reveal if people actually believe what they say. Jesus did, that is how he was able to be asleep during an intense storm. He had such trust in God that he was not afraid; more than that, he had total peace. Despite very real scary things happening around him, things that he could see and feel and that threatened to kill him, he was at peace. In those days if the boat went down there would have been no coast guard to call on, no helicopter to come and air lift to safety, just God or drown. I say just, if you understand who God is, you will also understand that He is more equipped to save than any man-made device.
I feel very much like I am in a storm right now, possibly the fiercest storm of my life. I have no income yet my children need a home, the limits on my time have just tightened dramatically, for a quarter of the time by brain is incapable of basic things, let alone degree standard work and I’m adjusting to this new life. My mind feels like a rubber dinghy being buffeted around on a stormy sea. It has no direction, just wave after wave of demands with no idea how to meet them. Do I trust God? Absolutely. I’m not sleeping in the boat like Jesus, fear is something I fight against from time to time; yet beneath the stormy chaos there is a baseline peace, like God is whispering to me: ‘its going to be okay.’ I’m not happy that I have not been able to do all the reading for the course or that I have missed so many lectures (mostly because my brain was too scrambled to remember there was one) but I will fight on, knowing that God is in control. The storm is so severe I can’t see the path I need to follow, I’m in a fog; all I can see is the next step, but I trust that God knows the way. I honestly don’t know if I will be able to maintain this degree, but I do know that God is in control and I will end up in a good place.
If I do (by some miracle) finish the degree, all I will be able to say is it was an act of God, because I don’t even know how I’ve got this far. My brain is mush. It’s not physically possible. Actually, the next time I have a moment of ‘what on earth am I going to do’ panic, (like right now while when I’m writing this, which was not set, when I have so much set work to do) I will come back to this piece and remember all over again, (hopefully) that God is in control.
Works Cited:
Mathew ‘ Good News Bible’ (2009) Harper Collins Publishers: China, Chapter 8 Verse 23.
