Gaining Access

The message from my student said it all.  As she turned in an assignment she wrote “Good evening, Mrs. Berk, I hope the rest of your Thursday was uneventful!  Have a good evening.”

I appreciated the sentiment but interestingly she hadn’t been involved in any of the events of the day, so I assumed her classmates had told her.

One classmate had one client refuse therapy, while her second client after an evaluation turned out not to need therapy.

Immediately after that meeting I headed to my next zoom meeting to find that zoom had deleted it from my schedule!

I only had a few moments to recover the link, so I went to my e-mail found the link I had sent to my student and her client, clicked on it and entered the meeting.

I waited a few minutes and as time ticked by the student did not appear.

I checked my e-mail to find that zoom was not allowing her to enter the meeting as it gave her an error message that the meeting had already occurred two days earlier!

Indeed, it had, but it was a twice a week meeting so it still should have opened.

What was I to do now?

The client would be arriving soon, and the minutes were ticking by.

I went directly to the zoom webpage and immediately edited the meeting to occur for that day.

I told the student to try again and waited but still nothing.

I then saw a message in my e-mail that a participant had entered my meeting and it gave me an option to start the meeting from my e-mail with a “start” button.

I clicked to start, and thank God it worked!

The student appeared one minute before the client was scheduled to arrive.

Zoom is great when it functions properly and a headache when it doesn’t.

But all went well.  The client arrived and we continued.

Afterward I edited the meeting link and it’s back on my schedule for next week.

Later I talked myself through the event. What had I done wrong?

When I had gone to the link I had sent to the student and opened from there, zoom only recognized me as a participant not the host.

That was a problem because as a participant I couldn’t give access to other participants.

What I needed was to find the “start” button to make the meeting accessible to all.

As the host I am the person who has set up the meeting and as such I can choose to admit people or not admit people.  When people log in a blue button appears on my screen to alert me and then I can admit them.

There’s power in being the host because the host controls the meeting.  However, I can give that control to others.  Once they have been admitted to the meeting, I can make them a co-host which allows them the same access to the meeting as I have.

In the heat of the moment, it can be confusing to know what to do when you’ve lost access to a scheduled meeting and my immediate thought was, I just have to find the link and I’ll be able to get in.

And while yes that was true, I was in the room alone because I went in the back way and not through the front door.

I kind of get a picture of heaven from this zoom experience.

If you are a Christian, you know you can’t get to heaven by finding your own way in. 

The way to heaven is through Jesus.

He’s the door.  We can’t hop over a fence and try to bypass Jesus because Jesus is our way in.

There is no other name under heaven by which we gain access.

God has established His kingdom and He controls it, he pushes the “start” button.

God sends us an invitation.

If we choose to accept God’s invitation He can choose to admit us at the right time but we have to have the link for admittance.

That link is Jesus.

God admits those who are covered by the righteousness of Jesus.

Those who have believed in Him, who was sent to die for the sins of all people.

Once God give us admittance he also gives us the Holy Spirit.

We gain full access to God once we are given the Holy Spirit.

And the Holy spirit works in our lives an allows us to do all things through Him.

The Holy Spirit give us self-control.

So, while last Thursday was going down for me with all these events the Holy Spirit gave me the self-control to stay in the moment, solve the problem and not get freaked out about it.

And God gave me this message as well.

God cares about all things that affect us, even the small things that in the moment appear as big things.

God is in control and because He is in control, we can rest assured He hears us when we call, and His response is timely.

“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. John 10:1

 Therefore, Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. ⁸ All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. ⁹ I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out and find pasture. ¹⁰ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the fullest. John 10:7-10

Slow and Steady

While I was sitting in a zoom meeting yet once again, rather bored, I looked down as he came into view. A stinkbug was crawling along the edge of the table directly in front of me. Usually when I see them, I scoop them up and put them outside. But not this time, this time I decided to see if there was a lesson I might learn from this creature. He was making pretty good time for a stinkbug, almost as if he had an actual destination.
But as he came to the corner he stopped in his tracks. Hmm. I wondered what his next move would be. The clear choice was to make a left turn, but do stinkbugs really know what the clear choice is, I thought? He could just as easily have chosen to go down the table leg or under the tabletop.
I waited, he waited. It took a while but slowly he turned to the left and was once again moving at a pretty good pace for a stinkbug down the other side of the table.
It was treacherous up ahead though. My husband had mounted a clamp on the edge of the table to hold a woodworking project. What would the stinkbug do when he got to the clamp? Now, I was really intrigued. I thought sure he would bump into the clamp and then go around it but no, the bug started right up the clamp, and after only two steps he fell!
He fell a great distance for a little bug and landed on the floor below.
That’s when the dog noticed him.
I was afraid the dog might eat him, but he just raised his head slightly and then went back to sleep.
The stinkbug lay there dazed and not moving, but at least he had righted himself.
After waiting several minutes, the bug was off again, moving as if nothing had happened.
At that point I kind of lost interest and thought I should probably get back to my meeting anyway.
But I couldn’t help but learn a lesson from this little bug.
He kept going.
He could have stopped after his huge fall, but he didn’t.
He had a tough outer shell. I don’t know if the fall even hurt him at all.
When faced with an apparent dead end at the corner of the table, he was uncertain but not undone.
When faced with an obstacle he chose to climb it and although he fell, he righted himself and continued to move past the experience.
Isn’t there a lesson for me to learn here as well?
There are no dead ends in life, just new roads to travel.
There’s no obstacle so insurmountable that you can’t find a way to climb it, and if you don’t succeed there will be other opportunities.
When you hit rock bottom the only thing left to do is pick yourself up and begin again.
The moral of the story is to always keep pressing on, not looking behind you.

Believe you have a destination, and you will find it.

As the apostle Paul said,
Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:13-14