An Act of God

Shortly after I had returned from Boston, I had received a long-awaited (or was it more long-dreaded?) email from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. My unofficial CSET math score was in.

"That was nice of them to notify me after my trip to Boston," I had thought. "They spared me a ruined vacation."

The email was one of those computer generated messages with lots of impertinent words. My eyes had scanned the content for the key word and it was going to behin with either a "P" or an "F".

I had found it. Right in the middle of the message.

SUBTEST STATUS: PASSED

Yippee! I had passed! I did a dance and let out a hoot. Then the awful thought struck me: they had sent me the wrong test results and I, in fact had not passed.

"Who cares?! I'll taken an accidental pass!" I wasn't going to notify them of their mistake. If they didn't catch it, oh well. I guess I'll have to settle for slipping through the cracks. I instant messaged Air Boss who was still in Boston and he congratulated me. I did mention that the pass status may be an email error but who cared. For now, I had passed.

A few days later, I received the official results of my test in the mail. Like the email, I had no score but simply a "PASS" status. So . . . I did indeed get the right email. My name was printed right there. I couldn't believe it!

Well, I wanted to share this great news with you all - many of you were praying for me before, during and after the exam. I can truly an honestly say, I am humbled by this experience and passing this exam was not something I did through hard study. It was truly an act of God and he takes fully credit for my pass status. Although I had studied months for this test, mentally I just wasn't there. I hadn't taken a math class in almost 20 years and my thinking skills were so rusty, I had a hard time doing simple math (like my times table).

I felt like Gideon who was about to fight the Midianites. God had whittled down his army of 32,000 down to 300. The Midianites had so many soldiers that they resembled a swarm of locusts. Just their camels alone were like grains of sand on the seashore. It was like 300 against infinity (a conceptual quantity 'Shroom and Lolli use to describe how much they love us).

Yup, so even though I didn't have to face an overwhelming army, I did feel I was taking on an overwhelming task with insurmountable odds. A 15-20% passing rate - not as bad as 300 against infinty but still dismal. God wanted to make sure that if I passed, it wasn't because of my superb math skills or inexplicable talent for working numbers and equations (and for those of you who know I didn't even taken any college math, you're laughing 'cause you know this is so not true!).

Wow. I'm still amazed.