Coincidence and the possibility of the divine:
life-changing moments in the life of Mike Enos

“We’re putting this math book in the trash,” said Mr. Enos to his students in his first year of teaching at Keyes Elementary school. That was the moment, continued Mike, now a member of our church, “that opened my eyes to what it means to be a teacher.”
Mike now teaches the high school Sunday school class with Patty Yandell, and Mike manages two online study groups for various adults in our congregation. To make a living, Mike and his wife, Sherri, run the Enos Family Childcare out of their home. So, Mike is now a teacher in a broader sense than he had imagined that first year.
“I had always wanted to become a computer engineer,” Mike said, while recalling his early years in college. “But one day in my computer engineering class, I came to the realization that I didn’t want to sit in a large room with lots of people day after day for my whole career. I dropped the class and became an education major.” Mike dropped the class, unfortunately, the day AFTER the deadline to drop classes. “So, I got an F. It’s the only F I ever got.”
But Mike went on to get a teaching credential, and began teaching fifth graders in public school in Keyes. His first class consisted of the most troubled students in the whole school, ranging in age from nine to fourteen years, as some students had been held back multiple years. The students fought and insulted each other, and little, if any, learning was occurring. The moment of truth came when Mike actually threw his teacher’s copy of the math book into the wastebasket, with the pronouncement that all instruction would stop, until the students would get along with each other in peace.
“I realized, at that moment, that what really matters in teaching, what really matters in life, is loving each other.” Although Christ commands each of us to love our neighbor, Mike found that love sometimes starts with a more basic form of love: “We just had to tolerate each other!”
Mike Enos (continued)

The new approach worked, and by the end of the year, amazing things were happening in the class of this beginning teacher. Mike grew to be so successful with the troubled students that the school even asked Mike to take into his home a child who had just lost his parents. But Mike and Sherri were not ready to take all four of the siblings at once, which was the requirement. Mike went on to teach at Denair Elementary School, for a total of six years of public school teaching.

Born and raised in Turlock, Mike met Sherri, who had moved here. After they married, “Turlock seemed like a good community to raise kids in, and Mom and Dad were here to guide us.”
After teaching several more years, in 2007 Mike felt a calling that caused him to take a big risk, to start a private preschool. “This was a huge leap of faith. With a private business, there is no retirement system to rely on. Shortly after we started the school, the economy collapsed. When money is tight, people can’t pay for their children to be taken care of, and we were not really making expenses.”
But, after some frightening months, “things started happening. That’s when I knew! People from our church sent us kids to be tutored. Mrs. Julien (Becky) was an enormous help, along with Bonnie Stinson. I thought, ‘All of this could be coincidental . . . or divine.’ That’s when my faith started to grow. I started noticing.”
Now Mike and Sherri’s business seems on solid footing. “Owning your own business is great, but it’s more work. We’re open year round from 7-5:30, officially, but we’re there longer as needed, for the parents. The daycare serves up to 14 children per day. We treat it as a preschool. We do academic.”
The instruction is not Bible based, but Mike feels that the values that are modeled and practiced in the school are Christian. “If you have to show people a cross on your chest to let them know you’re a Christian, you’re not really there. People should know what you are by how you are in your day-to-day life.”
Mike shared a little about the group online for Turlock FUMC. “We currently have two study groups using the YouVersion Bible app. Both are year-long studies, one OT and one NT. The OT is called The Bible Project-Old Testament Covenants. We are finishing reading the Book of Judges. Talk about a violent book!” (One might wonder how such violence might connect in Mike’s mind to that first year at Keyes Elementary School!)
“The NT is The Bible Project-New Testament in One Year.” We are currently in the middle of Luke. Studying these concurrently, some of us have noticed that here are many parallels between OT and NT.
After coming out of Asbury Hall on Sunday morning, Mike talked about the high school age Sunday school session. “We talked about leadership today. We decided that if leadership is important in our world today, we should build each other’s leadership qualities. Who’s going to take the first step? What am I willing to give up? Give something up to coach? Let someone else go first.”
In discussing the concern about how Christians might be seen by non-Christians in America today, Mike said, “We’re having to correct our image. There are lots of [non-Christian] people in the world today who are doing good things, important works that conform to the teachings of Christ, but who would perhaps not recognize their own work as Christian. As Pastor Dave said a few years ago, ‘You pass by a road and you may not know the name of it, like Berkeley Avenue, but you know you’re on that road, that it’s going the right way.
“One of the things I like about our church is that we encourage being open to listen to others, no matter what their viewpoint is. Why not have a conversation? How might something I hear from you help me to develop?”
In addition to all the teaching he does, Mike finds time to spend with his immediate family. “I drove up to Rockland to watch Bradley pitch. I did the Covenant class with him while he was recovering from his shoulder surgery. Megan will be a freshman at U.C. Davis next fall. At this point she wants to major in bio-psychology, work with the brain.”
In regards to who he considers to be family, Mike stated, “The daycare kids, and their parents are kind of like family. We want them to feel they’re part of my family. If I just watched kids, I probably wouldn’t enjoy it. I’ve always worked with kids. We had our own kids early. We do child care out of our home, but my ‘occupation’ is loving others through what I do. My ‘job’ is a reciprocal relationship: My personality and my profession are the same person.”