I don’t Have the Patience
“I could never homeschool. I don’t have the patience for it!” Thus goes the most common refrain I heard from other parents when they first learned I homeschooled – back in the day, of course (my kids are all now in college).
My reply never varied. “Neither do I!” I would exclaim.
Homeschooling has been called “parenting on steroids,” and it’s true. A homeschool mom or dad is with the next generation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no weekends, no planning periods (at least not in my case) and you’ll often boast an entourage when you visit the necessary room. You’ll have every button you own pushed (including many buttons you didn’t know existed), you play the roles of both parent and teacher, and you will have every grain of patience tried, tested, and expended – often before 9:00 a.m.
Yet you do NOT need a limitless amount of patience. What you DO need is a vibrant relationship with the Most High God. He is the Giver of all good gifts, and that includes patience. Instead of needing to be able to rely on your own strong & stalwart patience, you need to live in surrender to His Holy Spirit daily, hourly, so the fruit of patience can grow in you.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience... (Galatians 5:22a, emphasis mine).
Patience Is a Fruit
Don’t miss this: since patience is a fruit, we must remember fruit takes time to grow and mature. Patience is not a prerequisite for beginning a home school; it is a fruit cultivated as you walk through the process. And it is worth the labor to cultivate.
Will you fail? Absolutely. But I would argue it is actually good for you children to see past a carefully-curated, self-reliant, perfect-but-false image and instead watch the process of sanctification unfold in a real human being.
In fact, I see it as an advantage to homeschooling that your children have a front-row seat to watching you deal with your emotions, frustrations, and become impatient with them. It’s good they get to see you deal with stress inappropriately and repent, get back up, and keep going. It’s a lesson like no other when your young ones watch you lose your cool and learn that the world does not shift off its axis and career through space like an oversized ping-pong ball when a human being fails to respond to stress in perfect patience.
It is also good for children to learn that patience is developed over time so they know that they, too, will be afforded the opportunity to develop patience rather than carrying the weight of being expected to handle every bump with perfect composure the first time around.
When they see you fail, get up, dust yourself off, and keep going, they learn to do the hard work of moving through failure and sin to a place of repentance and renewal. Not to mention perseverance; that gem of a virtue which is so lacking in modern society.
Impatience Is Human
But of course, we are a notoriously impatient species. Just think of what happened to the fledgling nation of Israel when their leader Moses took a bit over a month in meeting with the Almighty and bringing back the tablets of His covenant. Rather than taking it as a good sign when they saw God’s glory remaining on the mountaintop, the restless horde decided to chip in their varied jewelry and make a trinket to worship. Impatience isn’t a modern problem; it’s a human one.
When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, they people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him: (Exodus 32:1, emphasis mine).
Would it be convenient if God called us to do hard things like homeschool and just bestowed upon us a wealth of patience, wisdom, and genius right off the bat, making us supernaturally perfect at the job at hand? Of course it would be convenient. But it wouldn’t build our relationship with Him as we learn to come and ask for our daily bread – or daily patience – and rely utterly on Him.
Trusting God to Fill our Lack
My friends, more than God wants perfectly patient little children, He wants children who understand our aching need of Him and who depend on Him in relationship. The psalmist writes in Psalm 81:10, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.”
This is what He wants for us in anything we lack – a heart that understands its own fallibility and a desire to ask our Father for what we do not have, trusting Him to give it.
In my homeschool days when my patience was tapped (as it often was), I learned to cry out to the God who always showed such patience with me. And more importantly than anything else, I learned that my God’s grace truly is sufficient and His power is made perfect in my weakness – just as He said.
Watching the Fruit Grow
So what is the fruit of this daily struggle to learn patience, to fail and get up and try again? For one thing, I am a far more patient person than I was when I began this journey.
Perhaps more compelling is what I see in my kids, all in college as of this writing. They did not turn out perfect, nor did I expect them to. But at the ages of 23, 21, and 19, they are absolutely amazing young people. They are delightful to be around, they make me laugh and we have real fun together. Really. I enjoy my adult children, and they astonish me with their wisdom, their grit, and their willingness to do hard things.
And would you believe it? Each one of them has more patience in their early 20s than I did even in my 30s and 40s. They are not perfect, but they are exponentially more impressive and enjoyable than I was a their ages.
Patience, it seems, is not only taught through personal trial but also passed on to your young as they participate in the process. Our God is just good like that.
So if you are thinking of homeschooling but fear you don’t have enough patience, allow me to set your mind at rest: you don’t. Instead, you have something far better – 24/7 access to the Father of Lights who loves to give good gifts to His children and is there with you through the painful parts of acquiring those gifts. And you also have my testimony that it is worth it.
I hope that helps in some small way.