A Website 35 years in the making

As I was unpacking boxes in my new city school several decades ago, the principal ducked his head into my classroom and said, “How’s your Korean?” I looked up and admitted, “Not good.” As it turned out, a boy recently arrived in our city from Korea was going to be joining my classroom in a few days. Never having taught a second language student before, I was a bit adrift, but not as much as this young lad would be not knowing a word of English and thrust into our little room so far across the sea from his first home.
As it turned out, his stay with us was brief. At Christmas his family moved on to Vancouver and they left me with a generous gift bag which included, among other things, pantyhose from Korea, which you can just imagine came up to my knees on my tall frame. I know, I know, my brain remembers weird details.
Flash forward a decade or so and I used a coupon from a booklet our school was selling to get a haircut. That hair dresser and I would start a long client relationship and when she left that salon where I found her with a coupon to her own location, I remarked that her new place was close to where my school used to be. “Oh,” she said, “my nephew was in that school for a short time when he came to Canada.” Could it be the same boy? Yes it was.
I kept tabs on this boy – this man – this now owner of a media design company – from a distance, until 35 years after he had been in my classroom, I needed a website to sell my book. I tried on my own to create one with disastrous results and finally I reached out to the hairdresser who was his aunt and said, “Could he help me?” “Website design is small potatoes for him,” she said.
And so this boy, this man, this owner of the media design company and I emailed back and forth and still I hesitated to jump in until my brother finally said, “Joanne, God has sent you a web designer.” And that did it. I looked back on the steps that had started 35 years ago to get me to this place and I signed on the dotted line.
I actually think God has impeccable timing. He figures out in a his infinite wisdom that he is going to send a little boy from Korea to Canada and place him in a teacher’s classroom for a few months to get his start in Canada and then 35 years later he’s going to put them together again to meet a need for her. We couldn’t orchestrate those steps if we tried, but God does it all the time. In my life, in yours.
I highly recommend Seong at www.developmint.ca to you. He built a beautiful website for his past Grade one teacher.  If you visit his website you’ll see my Simple Words logo hanging out with many others.  Life is a mystery, don’t you think?