One recent evening, my wife and I received a tornado warning alert on our phones. Normally, I give such warnings due consideration, but I typically don’t get too worried because of the rarity of touchdowns where we live. In the back of my mind, however, was the fact that just a few days prior, another tornado did touch down less than an hour from where we live, and it destroyed the houses of two people we know. With this in mind, we decided to play it safe. We headed downstairs, gathered up the kids, and prayed the rosary together. The storm was intense but short, and fortunately, no damage occurred.
This episode got me thinking about how much timing plays into the life of faith and the work of grace. When we are nudged in one direction or another by the Holy Spirit, when something stirs in us to consider a change or make one decision instead of another based on something beyond just what makes sense on paper, we often see in retrospect that the Lord closes some doors or opens others for our good. Sometimes we get caught in storms, and other times, we are prompted to move out of the way at just the right moment, at times for reasons we might not even be cognizant of.
As schools around the country are grappling with how to handle educating students during the COVID outbreak, many parents are finding themselves scrambling to make arrangements with work and childcare to compensate for the changes. And yet we as a family have found ourselves more or less in a ‘business as usual’ situation.