8th grade

Here's a story that I have chosen to give God credit for that happened over a decade ago. I believe He had better plans for me than I had.

One thing about me that I’ve shared in earlier posts is that I’m epileptic. I started having absence seizures (sometimes known as staring spells) when I was 7. I started having grand-mals (sometimes known as tonic-clonic seizures/the convulsing kind/the kind that everyone thinks of when they think of someone having a seizure) when I was 11. That’s when my seizures started getting so bad that I literally couldn’t live life. I’ve heard that I had about 7 grand-mals a day that would pass me out for usually about 1-1.5 hours (the longest I’ve heard is 4 hours), and I would have between 25-30 absence seizures a day. One of the issues about that is that it completely destroyed my memory. My memory was so bad that I not only lost short-term memory, I also lost long-term memory. I don’t remember my childhood (which is honestly probably a good thing).

Having absolutely no memory made it basically impossible for me to be successful at school. When I was 13, we finally found a way to control my seizures enough for me to live life. I tried going to a private school. In order to do that, I had to test whether or not I should stay in 8th grade or if I should redo it. I was praying over and over again that I would qualify for high school. Sadly, I did not qualify. I was shocked and embarressed. I didn’t like the feeling of being a year behind what I had originally expected to be.

There was a time I was talking about it with my mom and she ended up telling me something that I was completely unaware about. When she was helping with hot lunch, she would be talking a lot with the moms of some of the 9th graders. Apperantly, the moms would be mentioning how sad they felt because their child was getting into drugs and/or birth control. I eventually started to ask myself if God was possibly saving me from a bad environment. I realized that I got along great with everyone in the 8th grade class. If I went into 9th grade, I wouldn’t been around bad company. The next year, when I actually did go into high school, I realized that I also got along better with the students in my grade than the grade above. There was always a portion of me that wished that I didn’t have to redo 8th grade, but a portion of me was grateful that I was in a class full of students that I got along great with.

I give that credit to God. God obviously knew the differences between the 8th and the 9th grade class, so maybe He wanted to give me the opportunity to have a better school experience. Either way, I’m grateful that God helped me get along so well with the kids that were in my class.