“Then let us arise and go up to Bethel, so that I may make there an altar to the God who answers me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone.” Genesis 35:3
My friends, oh my friends! Some days I have to just shake my head at how the Lord works; in mysterious ways! Awhile back I was praying and God showed me a vision of how He works. It was like one of those really early arcade games where His blessings were falling from the top of the screen and I was the player at the bottom of the screen catching the falling blessings in a BIG basket. God was holding the joystick guiding me in the right direction in order to catch the right prizes at the right time.
Since I’ve been working on starting this school, that is precisely how it has been! Only the farther I’ve gone, the more and more the “game” has turned into sometime akin to Pac-Man. Do you remember that game? Where you start out the game in the middle of a maze, surrounded with ghosts that will kill you if they touch you. And all along each part of the maze there are these little dots that you eat up and gain points. Then in each of the four corners of the maze are larger dots that are worth more points. If you eat all four of these dots you move on to the next level.
With Grace University I started in the middle with what I knew; I needed a building, kids and teachers. Kids came quickly and so did the teachers, but the building has been an amazing maze filled with little tid-bits of new knowledge and advice, each apparent “dead end” then changing into a turning point where God was letting me know that I had traveled far enough in this direction and collected all the necessary little dots along that path and it was time to turn in a new direction and start picking up more little dots of knowledge and wisdom all leading me in the direction of the bigger dots along the path. All the while the deathly ghosts are chasing me trying to stop me from getting any farther down any of the paths.
It’s been an adventure to be sure; but a fun one nonetheless. Especially since I know that at the end there is a school waiting that will be filled with kids to love and teachers to befriend and parents to help. Your prayers mean the world to me, you have no idea how much I value them! My goal for this school is to use it to enrich our community as much as is possible. It is a school, but it’s so much more than that too. It’s a home and we’re a family – we just haven’t all met yet. And as long as I keep going in the direction God is leading me, we’ll be there before we know it!
Tamar Knochel 