I pretty much know it's from God when it is the last option on earth I would consider. That's how it was with a crazy idea that began to form in my heart when I was at the height of conflict with my eleven-year-old son.

I was praying about what boarding school to send him to. I was desperate and hurting. I loved my son, but he seemed more and more unmanageable and unreachable every day. He was only eleven, but I knew without a major change I might lose him in the teen years. He was not a bad kid; in fact everyone outside our immediate family thought he was well behaved. Our home, however, had become a battleground.

It was about two years after my oldest son had been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Our world had been turned upside down by the diagnosis, but we were finally finding a new normal. As the new normal set in I realized two things: One, my younger son had sort of faded out of the picture while we coped with my older son's diagnosis. Two, my younger son's behavior problems that had existed before had gone underground in the early days of dealing with his older brother's illness but were now resurfacing with a vengeance.

My husband, my older son and I felt like we were walking on ice or broken glass most of the time. My younger son was miserable, angry and felt isolated, even unloved. In the height of a conflict he would scream, "You don't understand me or, I hate you." None of us could see exactly what was wrong or see a solution. I finally resigned myself to the fact that I was failing as a parent to my younger son and that in order to get him some help and the rest of us some peace I needed to consider sending him to a boarding school. I was hoping that they could teach him the discipline and respect that I had failed at.

Then God intervened and whispered something very strange to me in my quiet time. The words from God seemed to be, Draw him near. I felt God calling me to pull my youngest son out of school to home school him.

I wanted to send my son away, get him out of our house - not spend more time with him. To me, more time meant more fights, more tears, and more pain, more of me letting him down and failing. I could not understand why God would want that. I knew God wanted a change and my hearts desire was to love my son. I wanted to love all the conflict away, but nothing was working. Getting up to go to school was a battle, school work was a battle, going to do anything as a family was a battle. My son complained about everything, disliked everything, nothing made him happy. Everything became a battle of wills and in every battle we were all losing. Spending more time with my son, home schooling my son, seemed absolutely impossible. Of course impossible is God's favorite word.

God brought two men into my path. Both of these men were very successful, popular and respected. Both men had younger brothers who, even as adults, struggled and made more bad choices than good. Both men shared with me that they had always felt that their younger brothers did not get something they needed when they were young. Neither man could define it, but both expressed a belief that the outcome of their younger brothers' lives could have been changed if their parents had seen what was happening and done things differently.