Homeschool

Homeschool Myth #1: You Need Limitless Patience

~ Heather Davis ~ 4 Comments

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.

4 More Reasons to Homeschool

~ Heather Davis ~ Leave a comment

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

G. K. Chesterton

In the previous homeschool post, I discussed the #1 reason to go for it if you sense the Lord leading you to educate your own children. Today I want to look at four more solid reasons to homeschool. After this post, I’ll begin diving into more advice, hoping you can learn from my mistakes as well as glean wisdom from those things that, by God’s grace, I did well. 🙂 So without further ado, here are four more reasons to homeschool:

TO Equip the Next Generation of Christians

One key reason to homeschool is to truly equip the next generation for service to the Lord. Homeschooling puts one in a unique position to model a walk with God because your children will see you both at your best and at your worst. Thus, you will get plenty of opportunities to model not only diligent service to others, self-sacrifice, and humility; you will also have the chance to model repentance.

Trust me on this.

Also, the 24/7 nature of homeschooling means you get to walk out your faith in front of your children. They will see you prioritize your own time in the Word (which also gives you built-in accountability). You can point out to them the ways you see God at work in and around you, helping them to see Him as living and active and real.

Additionally, when your kids ask difficult questions from the Bible (and they will), you have the distinct privilege of clarifying your belief system in tandem with passing it on. It’s good for them to understand it’s OK not to know all the answers; it’s equally good to dig in together – researching and wrestling out those tough theological points with the Lord. Not only will your kids learn and grow, you will as well.

Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus

2 Timothy 1:13

To Raise Functional, Godly Adults

A modern parenting myth is that parents should strive to raise happy children. I respectfully and vehemently disagree. Parents should raise God-fearing adults who are capable of resilience and stamina in a fallen world. Happiness will come and go, but “godliness with contentment is great gain” and actually assures eternal happiness that will far outlast the temporary highs and lows of physical life.

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

1 Timothy 1:5

And to be frank, you do not really want your sweet ones to be permanent children. You want them to learn to do things for themselves; to try and fail and learn that failure is not the end of the world; to step out of their comfort zone and experience difficulty so they can see God really is with them in the valleys of deep darkness – and that the darkness has an end.

This means the goal of homeschooling should not be to coddle and shelter but to equip and prepare. Keep this thought in the back of your mind when you’re tempted to just give an A or let deadlines become negotiable or negligible.

Sure, your second grader may be sad if you mark a big red X on her math problem or your fourth-grader may have hurt feelings from your constructive criticism of his book report. But learning that their value is not derived from their performance is more important than temporary feelings. Not to mention how learning accountability, working to achieve goals, handling feedback, and dealing with deadlines and expectations will prepare them for things like jobs and bills and marriage and ministry and life.

And again, if I may be frank? God does not call His children to soft, pleasant pastimes. He calls us to take up our crosses daily and follow Him. It’s OK to teach this to your children. In fact, it’s recommended.

To Teach Your Kids to Think

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…

Mark 12:30, emphasis mine

Let’s face it: our public school system has gotten so caught up in bureaucracy, it’s long ago lost the mission of teaching a generation to think. Instead, I would argue most schools nowadays teach kids WHAT to think instead.

Thinking is becoming a lost art. Don’t let it happen. Your kids need to learn to love God with all their mind, and you are in a position to help them become good stewards of those minds. When your kids ask for help with a problem or have a question, whether about school work or anything else, resist the temptation to tell them the answer. Instead, ask follow-up questions to help them think through it and arrive at the answer themselves.

Invite an attitude of exploration with the divining rod of God’s Word as your center. Dive into other worldviews and dissect them according to biblical truth. Dig into tough questions about faith, culture, or even the biblical text itself. Help your kids see that God is the Author of truth and that all truth leads back to Him.

Prepare them to think so when people spout memorized anti-Christian sentiments or cultural confusion (such as the current gender chaos) at them in college or the workplace, they will be ready to address them without fear but with confidence in the Lord who gave them a mind they are already accustomed to loving Him and others with.

Is this harder and more time-consuming? Yes. But it is absolutely worth it.

To Develop Lifelong Learners

A final reason is to develop lifelong learners, not just box-checkers. You can infect your kiddos with the joy of learning about this immense and fascinating world God made as well as the depths of the Infinite God who made it.

In a homeschool, learning isn’t confined to a classroom but seeps into every aspect of life. Children can participate from a very early age in caring for the home, learning skills like laundry and cooking, and even being a part of shopping and other mundane tasks.

Car rides and the lunch table become places where ideas are brought out and discussed. In fact, some of our most incredible teachable moments happened in the car. So resist the easy button of handing them a device to entertain and anesthetize them when you take that hour drive to a field trip. Instead, engage your kids in conversation even when they are little. This pays out big dividends in the teen years and beyond.

My three are in college, and I have THE best time talking to them still to this day. They are intelligent, articulate, and fascinating people, and I’m glad I stuck it out and engaged with them through endless trivia about Thomas the Tank Engine and friends or the battery of ten thousand questions before noon each day. Now when I talk to them, I’m often the one learning – especially in their respective fields of study (structural engineering, cellular & molecular biology, and kinesthesiology).

As Tim Hawkins says it in his “Homeschool Blues” song, “They say, ‘You think you can school your kids better?’ Pretty much!”

Homeschool Blues

Why Homeschool? Reason #1

~ Heather Davis ~ 4 Comments

Before I get into the reasons to homeschool, let me start by setting the record straight: I am not one of those girls who grew up dreaming about having kids or homeschooling. Quite the opposite. I was more of a Moses type, answering God’s call with, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else (Exodus 4:13).

And while I know homeschooling was the right choice for my family, I know it because it was not my idea; it was God’s. Not everyone is called to homeschool, and not everyone who homeschools should be doing so – or at least, they should be taking it more seriously than they do.

That being said, there are SO many good reasons to homeschool, some of which I touched on in a previous post. But of all the excellent reasons, the most important one is given straight from the mouth of the Almighty. The biggest reason to homeschool is to equip the next generation to truly love, obey, and serve the Lord our God.

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Deuteronomy 6:5-7

The original Hebrew of this passage brings out a richer context, especially in the first sentence. The Hebrew word translated heart (לבב; levav) was understood a little differently in the culture and context of the time. Nowadays, we think of the heart as the seat of our emotions; i.e. we feel with our heart.

But the Hebrew word connotes not only the idea of emotion, but also of will & desire or determination, of our thinking & reflecting; the seat of intent and understanding.

Depending on the translation, the same word (levav) is translated as mind in Deuteronomy 30:1 & Jeremiah 51:50; as understanding three times in Job (see 12:3, 34:10, 34:34), and even when translated as heart often carries implications of the seat of reasoning, pondering, and decision-making (such as seeking God with all your heart as in Jeremiah 29:13 and others). In 1 Chronicles 22:7, some versions translate it as intended to or wanted to (build the house of God). And these are a mere handful of examples.

Loving God with all our soul is probably more straightforward, though it could be noted the Hebrew (נַפְשְׁ; nephesh) can be translated as breath. Thus, we are to love God with the very breath in our lungs!

Finally, we come to loving Him with all our might. Once again, the Hebrew is a bit different and even translates rather awkwardly. It literally says to love God with all our meod, our very. This word is used in such phrases as tov meod (very good) or gadol meod (very large).

How does one love God with all one’s very-ness? In my mind, I am to love Him with EVERYTHING that is me – all I am and all of it. Thoroughly. Verily, if you will – or one could say with our muchness, to borrow from Tim Burton’s take on the Mad Hatter.

“‎You’re not the same as you were before,” he said. You were much more… muchier… you’ve lost your muchness.”

Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 1999 movie

And so far, I’ve not even unpacked how all this ties into homeschooling. That bit is in verse 7: “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”

And that, my friends, is homeschool in a nutshell. The most significant reason is to give our lives to discipleship of the children God has entrusted to us, knowing full well where they spend eternity is more important than any other lesson. Thus we talk about it throughout the day – an easier task when homeschooling.

Will it mean making temporary and material sacrifices? Yes.

Will it cost you a career? Possibly.

Will it be easy? No.

And will you see guaranteed results, rewards, fruit? Not necessarily.

But if you are called by God to do it, obedience is still the best decision you can make. The results are up to Him. Your job is to do the job He gives you to do with all your will, all your breath, and all your very-ness. Be muchy for Christ, talk about Him incessantly, and let Him do the rest.

Next time, we’ll get into other very practical reasons to homeschool. I look forward to sharing them with you. I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to comment, like, or share if you found this post helpful!

Tanstaafl and Education: A Homeschool Resource

~ Heather Davis ~ 4 Comments

“Oh, ‘tanstaafl.’ Means ~’There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ And isn’t,” I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across room, “or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless.”

“An interesting philosophy.”

“Not philosophy, fact. One way or other, what you get, you pay for.”

-excerpt from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Free Public Education

My nation has a free public education system. And by free, I mean paid for by tax dollars, which means it is not technically free. It also means whatever agency or group handles the funneling of said tax dollars into our education system very likely has more clout than the taxpayers when it comes to policy-making, curriculum choosing, and other ways those hard-taxed dollars are used.

And this is a problem inasmuch as too few of our officials know what a child is, much less what is good for one. Most of their time seems to be spent in an abstract political universe with only brief forays into reality.

And thus, the sorry phrase, good enough for government work now applies to the shaping and curation of many young minds across the USA. The word tanstaafl pops into my mind most often alongside thoughts of the American free public education.

A Brief History of Public Education in America

It wasn’t always this way. In the early agrarian years of this nation, children most often learned incredible amounts of information just by living and working alongside their parents. Survival was the reward, and I’d argue it was a better one than a paper degree. But that’s another topic.

In the earliest days, wealthy families often had tutors while poorer families taught their own kids what they needed to survive and run the family business or farm. The farther from a town or village one’s family lived, the less likely one was to have access to formal education of any sort.

Formal education was pretty haphazard, seasonal, and utterly dependent on a wide variety of factors foreign to the modern lifestyle. Basic math and reading were often taught at home through the normal course of life – items bought or sold in town, the reading of the Scriptures, and keeping up letter correspondence with family and friends far away.

By the 18th century, towns and villages might have a small common school – often doubling as the church meeting place on Sunday and as often staffed by either a preacher (if the town was lucky enough to have one in residence), itinerant teachers, or just someone who was willing, whether or not he or she were trained. These early schools were often tuition-based or funded by the generosity of the townspeople, though not always in dollars and cents. A parent might provide housing for the teacher, and bartering for goods & services flourished in those days.

It wasn’t until the 1830s that a more systematic public education system began to form. Even then, it barely resembled our modern schools. There were no minimum ages, children came if and when they could, and training in morality was seen as an imperative to producing good citizens along with an almost-secondary focus on the “Three R’s” of reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic.

Factory Model Learning

By and large, our current educational model was shaped by the assembly-line mentality of the industrial revolution. Today, its shape is maintained more by politics than by professors. Ask any public-school teacher today, and he or she will tell you how much time is spent collecting data points on students, preparing for standardized tests, trying to enforce discipline without tools, tweaking lesson plans for IEPs, and so on.

The complaint I hear most from my teacher friends is that they don’t get to actually teach. They’re too busy dealing with the latest policies and trying to find the kids lost in the cracks of the ever-fluctuating standards.

Tanstaafl. You get what you pay for, and I can tell you first-hand that you are NOT paying to adequately compensate the teachers who now have more hoops to jump through than a circus lion. The public school system of today is profoundly broken, and it is not the fault of the teachers. Most of them are like the children of Israel in Egypt, being told to churn out the same number of bricks and supply their own materials to make them with – or else.

So the taskmasters and the foremen of the people went out and said to the people, “Thus says Pharaoh, ‘I will not give you straw. Go and get your straw yourselves wherever you can find it, but your work will not be reduced in the least.’ ”

Exodus 5:10-11

Now What?

In the post-COVID19 world, more and more people are choosing to homeschool. Private school is simply not always affordable. And if I may be frank? Neither is public school. There are always extras – sports fees, supply fees, keeping-up-with-the-joneses fees. Not to mention the non-financial costs of policies driven more by adult political games than by concern for the wellbeing of human children.

When the world closed in 2020, more and more parents saw that their kids learned as much or more at home than they did spending several hours a day in a classroom full of cell phones and weary teachers staggering under the weight of the “thou shalt” agendas of the modern educational system.

This is not the world I began homeschooling in, but it is the one we live in today. And please hear me when I say: I don’t believe everyone is called to homeschool, nor do I believe everyone should. But if you find yourself thinking about homeschooling, please allow me the privilege of sharing the journey with you. I am planning on several posts to share what I learned in my years of homeschooling.

Stay Tuned

Stay tuned, and you’ll get the benefit of hearing what I did wrong and what I learned through those mistakes. You’ll also get to see where God led me to do something right quite despite myself. I hope you’ll be encouraged, challenged, and maybe even entertained. But most of all, I hope to honor God by taking what He has given me and pouring it into the generations coming up next.

How many posts will I write? Well, that depends. It depends on varying time demands, health considerations, family financial needs, and things like that; but mostly it depends on whether or not my scribblings prove helpful to others. Because what I learn, experience, feel, or endure was never meant for me alone. It is meant to be shared so that you may be strengthened and God glorified.

So I invite you to “listen in” as I recap this section of the race I’ve run, and I sincerely hope it helps!

For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.

2 Corinthians 1:5-7
References

/https://www.americanboard.org/blog/11-facts-about-the-history-of-education-in-america

/https://edtechbooks.org/effective_teaching_in_the_secondary_classroom/a_short_history_of_education_in_the_united_states

/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

/https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf

Assassination of Self

~ Heather Davis ~ 13 Comments

For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh…
…For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
(2 Corinthians 4:11, 17-18)

The call to homeschool is a call to sacrifice.

No, wait. It’s been on my mind lately as I’ve found myself advocating for a troubled young lady. But there’s more to it. Hmmm, maybe –

The call to be a parent is a call to sacrifice.

No, no. Not there yet. To be married? Single? To work? To stay home with your kids? Be a missionary? Be a friend? Be alone? Write? Eat? Breathe?

Ah, yes. It’s all of those and more.

The call to follow Christ is a call to sacrifice.

Or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated it:

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our  lives to death… When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.  (from The Cost of Discipleship)

Let me speak frankly here, my friends. The more I walk and talk with my King; the more I read His word and put it into practice, the more I surrender to Him and learn to trust Him, the more I see the beauty in sacrifice. In death.

Last week, I wrote to you about a confession of my own sin and of the good which came of being hurt by church. Today I can tell you I still feel free from the taint of bitterness. But it was not a process either quick nor comfortable. It was long and terrible, for the root of bitterness was wound tightly around not only my heart, but around everything else as well. And it did not begin with confession – it ended there.

In some ways, it was nothing short of spiritual open-heart surgery. Or, if you will, circumcision of the heart. It was painful. It was bloody. And it was completely worth it.

And there’s the thing – no matter what the King of kings calls us to give up in this life – even if it’s hurt feelings or pride or selfish ambition – it is worth it. Not only will it be worth it for the next bazillion years, it will be worth it here and now.

An image comes to mind here from one of my pastor’s sermons. He spoke of putting to the sword any temptations, selfishness, envy, pride – literally anything which distracts you from the Lord.

Guys, let’s be real here. These are not vague words encompassing ideas of “bad stuff” to avoid. These can even be good things. Praise music. Family visits. Fun times. Entertainment. Anything which has become an idol for us and merits more attention than the God who gave them to us must go. Anything. 

(…and a quick aside for the record, I am not advocating putting your family or your movie collection to the sword! Just the idolatrous misplacement of our own affections…)

Whatever it is which entices us away from the Lord’s best, from growth and humility and Truth, we need to put it to the sword – the Sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God.

Let’s think about the use of a sword for a moment. To put anything to death by the sword, there’s a necessary intimacy. A gun is cold and impersonal; the slight pressure of a single finger and the deed is done. I can shoot from the relative anonymity of a passing car or a window. I can put a neat bullet hole right into a skull without ever seeing the face of the one I robbed of life.

Not so with the sword. To put a person to death with a sword takes proximity. There’s some degree of effort involved, as even a sharp blade will not penetrate far into muscle, bone, and tendon by accident. There will be pain. There will be blood. There will be screams of agony and it is likely I will see the eyes of the one I destroy – the windows to her soul.

Look in the mirror, Soldier. There’s your target. It’s time for the assassination of the old self. But it has to be personal. You have to mean it.

Even when it hurts. Even when it’s embarrassing. That’s just the death throes of our pride, friends. Bloody, messy, agonizing, horrible to endure, but so, so worth it in the long run.

Lord, may we all be willing to let You show us what must die, then give us the strength and trust to put it to death. Forgive us for clinging to what we believe are good things when You truly do know best. No matter how painful or shaming, expose them in us. We yield them to You to rip out, and we take up the sword in cooperation and obedience to You, our King. 

We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin.
(Romans 6:6-7)

 

Mom to Mom Encouragment

~ Heather Davis ~ 2 Comments

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will,
Ephesians 1:11

Hello.

It’s been awhile; I know. To be honest, except for some few matters that weighed heavily on my heart, I have basically taken this summer off.  After 15 years of the intense parenting  and educating process that is so innocuously referred to as”homeschool,”  I took a few weeks and did some serious resting at the Lord’s feet… with an strong emphasis on rest.

As part of this,  I slept… and slept. As far back as memory stretches, I remember being tired, and so this summer I did not stick to my normal early-morning routine as in years past. I slept as long as I could as often as I could. That is not to say that I went to bed late – in fact, I was often in bed by 9:30 – but for the first time in memory, I did not set an alarm every day.

It was a luxury, and one that I was only able to afford in part because of a tremendous change that is happening at the Davis household. You see, I have less to prepare for this school year.

For the first time in our family history, I will only be homeschooling one of my children; the older two will attend a private Christian school. This is our family’s very first venture into an institutional-style education.

It’s pretty big change.

For years, we have prayed about how long we would homeschool, and this year the surprising answer was to provide the older two with an opportunity to attend a private school in a neighboring town.  I have always known that if my Lord wanted my children to attend private school then He would provide for it.

And He has. And here we are, just days away.

But some things never change. The same questions that have risen at the beginning of each school year still surfaced this time, some with even greater savagery.

Have I done enough with them?

Have I been too lenient, too strict, too careless, too rigid?

Have I gotten so caught up in teaching Bible that I have forgotten to share my love of the Bible? 

Have I impeded their growth spiritually, socially, academically, emotionally, intellectually?

What if I have made a tremendous, hopeless mess out of everything?

These questions and others like them are the particular haunt of homeschool moms, although I am certain they affect all concerned parents in some degree. However, the homeschool community is such that, if you spend even thirty-five seconds on some form of social media, you will be bombarded by other homeschoolers who have just plain done it better. 

They have successfully shepherded all of their children’s hearts to the effect that each one has an obvious love for the Lord that overflows in a passion for some area of ministry. These families have raised prodigies in violin or dance. Their children are mini-geniuses who are fluent in 4 languages, have mastered Algebra by fifth grade, can map their own DNA, have written a successful novel, have formulated a very promising cure for cancer,  whip up five-star restaurant quality meals from scratch for dinner each week, rescue babies from runaway cars as a hobby, made a 36 on the ACT exam in eighth grade, and have once or twice saved the world from imminent disaster with a combination of pure ingenuity under fire and infallible communication skills. They are done by noon. Every. Single. Day.

When I consider all this, it’s not difficult to see why I no longer look around at other people’s Facebook posts  nor why I have studiously ignored Pinterest.

However, all my sleeping and resting at the Lord’s feet did bring about a positive change. For the first time, even though the same old crazy, fear-induced questions did rise up on cue, they were quickly put to rest by one single encouraging thought: It really doesn’t matter.

You see, even if I have made mistakes, there is no such thing as a hopeless mess. Of course I have erred; I am human. However, I have also prayerfully, diligently, even tearfully tried my utmost to obey what I believe my King has told me to do. In years past, that meant fighting battles I did not want to fight. This year, it means letting go a little.

Naturally, I have asked myself, “What if you are wrong? What if you only think you’re doing what God wants you to do?”

And that’s where this gets good. Because, the thing is, my Father does know if I am truly and with my whole heart trying to obey. And He isn’t expecting perfection; perfection is squarely His territory.

But the best part of all of this is that even if I do misunderstand Him, even if I do make huge and heinous mistakes, as Ephesians 1:11 says, He “works all things according to the counsel of His will.”

Oh, there are other verses I have collected along the same lines, but my fellow Christ-loving moms, as we start this school year (whether homeschool, private school, or public school), I pray that you are as encouraged by the Word of Life as I was this week.

So instead of worrying, let’s rejoice! Our God is truly the Almighty, and He works all things according to the counsel of His will. Even our sincere mistakes.

“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
Job 42:2

Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens. Your faithfulness endures to all generations; you have established the earth, and it stands fast. By your appointment they stand this day, for all things are your servants.
Psalms 119:89-91