Reading Comprehension

We have a 13 year old daughter who, for the life of her, either passes one class or another but not both at the same time. This is due mostly to her stress in one area of her life and less stress in the other. This year it was reading comprehension, she failed her first attempt at the EOG under this catagory; something she has never failed before (it's usually math we have issues with). So after two weeks of reading and re-reading, selecting and pocess of elimination for answers on practice tests, she passed that section of the EOG. The thing that I found odd about this "failing", per say, is that she reads and gets the reading comprehension portion of school the easiest. It's something she loves to do, something she actually lives to do more and more, she has become our reader!! The problem is that she is also our wonderer, the one of our children who is easily distracted and easily disrupted from her train of thought. So, like most teenagers, she wonders from one subject to another, giving one more attention then the other, and inevitably we have to "put the train back on the tracks".
For me, this past two weeks, and really the past 4 years, have been learning experience. Learning - again - how to take tests, how to use the questions to find the answers without reading the entire story, and how to teach my daughter the best way to take a test. Yesterday, though, I was given something twice by God. You may not believe it or understand it but that's the best way I can explain it. I opened my bible to start to read (I usually just start wherever it opens) and it opened to the "parable of the tenants". Ever heard of it? I hadn't. I read this in Mark (Mark 12: 1-12), this just happened to be where it opened and when I read this section, it was very confusing, very hard to decipher, hard to comprehend. I am learning how to work through Jesus' parables and how He used parables to get the Word across to the ones He was leading and those He was warning. This one however was a conundrum, to say the least. So I pondered ( I just like that word-pondered) over these scriptures for a little while, prayed for a second or two and thought "maybe I wasn't suppose to be here" and went to turn the pages for another direction of enlightenment. Well, I was enlightened alright, right to Luke 20 versus 9-19, the parable of the tenants. Ok, so I looked at the versus, I didn't read them and I closed my eyes and asked God to lead me through this area of confusion. Then I re-read the parable...still nothing. I had no idea what I was reading what the parable meant, I researched the Word that Jesus uses in this parable-nothing. I mean nothing.
This morning, and because I have this now bookmarked (Luke that is), I reopened it and re-read the parable...and "taadaa" the light switch went on. I have been battling for sometime to make God my Banner. Something that I wrote about a couple of days ago and something that this parable hits directly on. I had never heard this parable, never read it before (or at least I don't remember it being in the gospels before), and this was no accident. I given up on accidents and coincidences, there's no such thing. This parable is Jesus talking about God sending prophets, men of His direction to the people, Isaiah, Caleb, Joshua, John, Zacharia, and the list goes on, to tell the men of the world about God and to change their direction. In each case, both before, during and after His Son's worldly life, the tenants beat, killed, and destroyed, God's messengers, even His most precious child, Jesus. I hadn't read this before, I have never heard this before, it's not something that I have "discovered" lurking in some book that a man wrote, I found it in God's Word, I was enlightened by the Holy Spirit to comprehend it, and I feel like I should share it. We are just a whisp of wind, we hear, we get and we do nothing with what God gives us. We cast it down and beat it to death with reason and logic, common sense and worldy views, even His Son, our Salvation, Jesus. Our reason, logic, common sense are the tenants; the tenants of God's vineyard, our souls and bodies. And when God comes to reap a harvest in us, through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the tenants beat and kill those sent, whether it be a person or a thought, we destroy it with our reason and logic and how the world will see us.
I am suppose to be sharing God with those close to me, a very hard thing to do especially for me, I'm not an open up and share my feelings kind of girl. But I know now, and I probably always have known, that I am being visited each time by God's servants and His Son to collect a harvest, and I am beating and killing those servants. It may not be in the physical for me, but it is for someone I am suppose to be sharing and leading to God. I am loosing the harvest and the time is now. God is suppose to be my Banner and He is giving me all the opportunities to allow that to happen, all I have to do is turn the harvest over to Him. Reading comprehension was always my strong point in school, how odd is it that this week it took 24 hours for me to figure out 10 little versus.