Pay attention to signs. They're all arond us.

I am not someone who just gives in to the hands of fate and thinks that everything is predetermined. But I do think there are some things in life that you need to make happen and some things you need to let happen. The trick is finding a balance between the two. I sort of follow Oprah's belief that luck is merely when preparation meets the right moment.

I recently saw a job posting for a teaching position at the school I attended from 5th-12th grade. At first I tried to resist the temptation to apply, but something kept nagging at me to do it. So after many hesitant reaches for the computer mouse, I finally clicked send on the email I wrote to the principal with my resume attached.

The very next day I received a call to come in for an interview.

When I went to the interview, I was amazed at how easy and right it felt. I didn't feel like I was being grilled for a job, I felt like I was just talking with two colleagues about teaching. Next thing I know, I'm being offered a job to teach 8th grade English.

I didn't know how to feel at first. I wasn't expecting it all to happen so fast. So even though I accepted the offer, for the past week or so, I've had doubts about whether this was a good idea.

But then yesterday I walked to the mailbox and noticed there was an envelope addressed to me with the return address from a former student. I opened the envelope and immediately began to weep.

The letter this student wrote was telling me all about how she had just read my favorite book, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and she wanted to share her thoughts with me. She wrote it just like the letters they used to write in their reader-response notebooks in my literature class. She poured her heart and soul into this letter and showed me just how much she understood and pondered the book. It looks like she even tore it out of the same composition book she used in my class.

If I had any doubts about going back into the classroom in the fall, this letter just squashed them. God or the universe or whatever you happen to believe in really does send us signs. We just have to be observant enough to notice them. This sign was hard to ignore. It came at just the time I needed it, and if the letter weren't sign enough, this student will also be going into 8th grade. The grade I'll be teaching in the fall.