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Category Archives: Family
Houses may be bought, built, or borrowed.
But homes can only be made.
And only with bits of ourselves.
The kids and I sit together close in a house with dishes on the counter and read about painters and artists and look at a flock of ducks, preened and nestled, a painting, oil on canvas.
The children press in close for a better look at the open book, at Alexander Koester’s “Ducks“ , and I read aloud the caption under the painting.
“Mother ducks pick feathers from their chests to line their nests.”
I look around at the house. I pause.
And the children gaze thoughtfully at a clutch of plump white, blizzard of feathers fallen down.
But it’s those words that mesmerize me: “Mother ducks pick feathers from their chests, to line their nests.”
I lay my hand on the page, on a duck breast puffed, mother plunging beak in deep, and I say it out loud: “How else did you think nests were lined?”
With leftovers.
That’s what I thought.
With feathers discarded, the molted, the not-so-necessary feathers.
I thought mother ducks picked feathers up from what was laying about, scraps, lining nests with what simply could be mustered after the fact.
But no. No, a mother duck plucks each feather out from the heart of her bosom.
She lines the nest with bits of herself — the best of herself.
A mother cups her brood not with leftovers — but with her own sacrifice.
The kids pull at the corner of the page, anxious to see the next painting.
Reluctantly, I turn the page. But for weeks, I’m the one turned.
For weeks, part of me lives among Koester’s ducks.
I scrub out the arches of muffin tins after breakfast on a misty morning, the clock ticking insufferably loud in my ears, time running down.
Children need books and learning, and I’m tuned for the expected chime of the doorbell, a service personnel’s scheduled visit.
And the words rise like this lava, “I don’t have time for this! No muffins tomorrow morning!”
Pluck.
It’s like I can feel it.
Like I can feel this tugging.
The service man meets me with muffin tins still in the sink. He meets happy kids. Could I meet needs with a bit more of me?
There are times, too many, when they call, “Read me a story?” “Wanna play a game with me?” “Can you come help me?”
And this mother refuses to pluck.
Something, some task, someone (me?), rates as more pressing, more important. I deem our nest acceptable just as it is. I don’t want to sacrifice more of me.
Then it comes: the pecking, the scratching, the squawking. When the feather lining of the nest wears thin, the nest chafes hard. We feel it. We hurt. Life gets hard.
Nests need feathers deep.
Someone must pluck.
When will I learn: The down we sacrifice from ourselves — this is what settles and soothes.
Scraps won’t suffice.
Not mere snippets of time, leftover me, a trinket, a diversion, tossed.
Mother ducks don’t line nests with feathers, dirty and trampled, the molted and unnecessary. Why would I? Nests need feathers fresh, warm with mother’s life.
The pain of the plucking can linger long.
The parts of oneself sacrificed, this can hurt.
But was it really sacrifice? Or was my skin just too tender? It’s done, it was necessary, and it was for something better.
Some nights, when all sleep, I feel along the hidden bald patches.
Come evening, I ask a boy to vacuum up popcorn and paper remnants and bits of the day.
Dinner needs making, laundry needs rescuing, math needs marking. My head aches. Popcorn crunches under the feet.
The boy hauls the vacuum cleaner out of the front closet. I should have noticed how his eyes had this glint. He plugs in the machine and it grumbles loud and he recalibrates that vacuum cleaner —- to fire socks.
He’s firing sock cannons across the kitchen.
His brothers dive in. Socks fly. Brothers howl and whip and it gets loud.
Caught in the cross-fire with a pot in hand – a mother can either erupt. Or Pluck.
This old mother, she tosses the pot and chases down future men, wrestles them down and pins them in tickles. It feels good, wild and alive.
We warm here in laughter.
Us close, one atop the other, nesting down into sacrifices, soft and small, a solace.
Night descends. Kids crawl into beds. I read stories, stroke hair, say prayers.
Prayers to Him who plucked hard from His own heart.
A sacrifice, staggering and true, for love of His very own.
We learn love from His laid down.
Tired heads nestle into pillows, into these pillows of down.
We rest on all these feathers plucked…
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edited from the archives
This post is part of The 1000 Moms Project:
Oh, do read the posts below for all the excitement about The 1000 Moms Project!
Thank your Mom for her sacrifice?
I wrote mine for my mama here: What all the Mothers Need to Know
And if you thank your mama on your blog and link up here — you will help support a mothering educational project in Haiti just through your gratitude.
The 1000 Moms Project is about 1000 people standing up and thanking their mom publicly (what mom doesn’t want a gift like this for Mother’s Day?) – and we’ll match your honoring of mothers by funding a Maternity/Child Survival Program in Haiti for a whole year. (You can read all about it here)
Thank your mother publicly — & we’ll join you in honoring her by helping a Haitian mother in need!
It’s a way of passing on the loving legacy of your Mama — her sacrificial love going on and on and on
(And you can print out a free Mother’s Day card for your Mother, sharing with her what’s been giving in her honor, in this post here. }
So — what important gift or sacrifice did your Mom make for you? Link up with your story/letter of thanks (May we humbly ask you to please grab the button or the banner for your post, and link back to The 1000 Moms Project? Thank you! We can’t wait to read your thanks to your Mom!):
The day after Resurrection Sunday, day after the world stopped because God had risen up and walked out of the earth —
his father came and sat at the table, and we hadn’t seen him in four months.
We served the last of the lamb and the first of that spinach.
And the Farmer sat at the table with his dad and they sit at the table and talk dirt and wheat and land and horsepower.
Opa Voskamp remembered how they never went out to the barn and the cows in the morning dark until they’d all kneeled as a family at the door and first prayed.
Who can expect to make sense of a loud world when they haven’t made quiet space before God?
Life is only noise until you’ve been quiet before God.
When one consistently chooses cyberspace over holy space — life becomes a hollow place.
I tell Hope to get berries to pour over the brownies.
We listen to two farmers at a table, a man and his son.
After dinner, the Farmer and his father walk out across the farmyard, through the shed, look at the tractors, stand at the edge of the field.
I watch how their hands move when they talk, like trees moving in wind, like when the Spirit moves and there is no standing still.
Opa’s older hands, the gnarled ones, arthritic and scarred, they touch the son’s shoulder now and then.
Those hands have come across an ocean of waves with a bride dated only three weeks, have milked cows by hands and picked rocks off fields by the bucket and held six sons and three daughters and a Bible after every meal for more than seventy years.
When he talks, his gesturing hands, they have no Dutch accent.
When he plowed, his hands folded over the wheel like in prayer. It’s true, anyone in workboots or an apron can be a hymn.
The Farmer, the younger one, his hands respond to his father’s, gestures of his own, and it’s like the passing of a torch.
In the morning, when the father is long gone, when the father has been hugged and kissed and has driven on to the next son with his farm and his son and fields to the north, the Farmer and I lay in the dark not yet day-broken and talk of four sons and two daughters and grief.
“It’s hard to think the window’s closed, that the boat’s left and it’s too late already.” That’s what he says before the day has even begun.
I close my eyes in the dark, like I can shut it all out, shut out the way the economy has barred us all out, how, now with the rising prices, it’s too late now to think of any of our kids finding a field of their own.
“Investors. Foreign, urban, they’ll own the land. And us here in workboots, we’ll be tenants, working the fields and growing food for owners far away.” His voice is so quiet in a house sleeping with all these kids and hopes.
I turn towards him.
“How could part of me think they’d go get degrees and not always have a bit of earth under their fingernails? What part of me ever stopped hoping they’d be brothers working the earth together?” I lay my hand on his cheek. “I think I just wanted them to be like you.”
Him like his father before him, like my father before me, like the way the wind blows and the Spirit moves and the bending over a row and praying for rain, bending to pray before you ever begin.
He takes my hand in his.
I can feel what we’ve weathered.
Will any of the kids ever know this?
“Should we move, try somewhere else?” I know my voice is pitched too high. Caleb will be 17 this year. How did we get here already? Is it ever possible to pray enough?
“Did we do this all wrong? Did we fail? Should we have been more focused in how to make a way for the kids? ”
And he turns to me, his grit grooved hands covenanted and holding mine.
“The only thing worth ever being focused on — is walking in the ways of the Lord.” The light’s moving up the window.
The whole room is lighting.
The Farmer says it about his sons and his daughters, about us:
“Whether you have much or little, the truth will just tell you plain: the only wealth you’ll ever have is God.”
Do any of us need more than that?
“The things is… When we think about what we want to leave for our children — Less is more.”
I nod slow.
Less goods can let there be more God.
Whenever you think you need more of this world, you lay out a welcome mat for the enemy.
When it comes to our legacy, to our lives, to our longings — less is always more.
We get out of bed and do what comes first.
We bow our heads.
And the emptiness of surrendered hands can fill with God.
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A gift given to our family reminding us Who our treasure is: “Redeemed” wooden letters on our mantle
{This is part of a series this week on preparing hearts for Easter.
Part 1 of A Holy Week can be found here}
Dad always did that after the meat and potatoes, after the plates were cleared and stacked.
He’d ask for a toothpick.
Him in his plaid flannel shirt and Levi’s, looking for a bit of a tree to right everything again.
That’s what he’d do before he left the table: He’d snap the wood between his fingers.
He’d snap the brittle wood right between his fingers.
And he’d say that to us women.
To us at the sink when he passed through the kitchen, when he went looking for his work boots again, for his sun-frayed hat and his honest earthy work.
He’d say, “A woman can be a dry and brittle thing, ready to snap.” Then he’d wink and dodge his way out of the kitchen, dishtowel snapping loud in his direction.
I have no idea why it took me twenty years to know it:
The days that are dry and brittle, ready to snap — these days are perfect kindling for a burning bush.
The days after Psalm Sunday, we eat figs.
Because the day after Palm Sunday, Jesus, hungry for fruit, he sees a fig tree and
“He went to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only.
And He said to it, “May no fruit every come from you again!”
And the fig tree withered at once” (Matthew 21:18).
The first act after the fall, it’s the first Adam come looking for fig leaves.
The last miracle before being nailed to the Tree, it’s the Second Adam, Jesus, come looking for figs.
Ask Adam: The authentic Christian life has got to be more than leafage.
Faith has to have fruit.
It’s the fig-bearers who live a faith that bears fruit. And it’s the leaf-wearers who just live this front that wears thin.
Ask me.
I can’t even remember the last time we’ve sung that hymn in the pews:
For thou art our salvation, Lord,
our refuge and our great reward;
without thy grace we waste away
like flowers that wither and decay
Forget the fig tree withering.
Whole family trees wither away without a grace that produces fruit.
Without thy grace we waste away.
When the boys eye that plate on the counter, when they ask if they can have more figs, I say yes.
I say yes.
And Christ? He inspects our lives for more than intentions; He intends for intimacy.
He searches the limbs not for leaves — not leaving for conferences or for meetings or for front seats. He looks along the the leaves for the love.
For the seed that swells with the Spirit, the faith that unfurls, the flower that unfolds into fruit. Can belief ever be barren? Doesn’t belief always mean living in the Beloved? Living like the Beloved?
Shalom breaks her fig open and I can see all the seeds, all this possibility.
“They’re so sweet.” She eats her’s slow.
I clear the counter.
What if you’re the one feeling dry and brittle?
What if all you feel like you ever bear is…. frustrated kids and edgy words and a whole string of “grin and bear it days”?
What if you’re the one who feels like you’re withering right up?
I move the plate of figs off the table and it’s there.
The silhouette of the the Bent Beloved, all tenderness.
Him leaving the withered fig tree to lay down on the worn Tree so all the weary can revive.
And me, this woman too often like Aaron’s rod, dry and brittle, who just has to lay everything about before the Lord —
I lay out a bowl of almonds too.
Because Aaron’s dry -as-death rod, that rod budded and blossomed, white almond flowers unfurling this impossible faith by grace.
These brittle, dry days — they can be kindle for burning bushes and God can come upon the dry bones and they can bud and blossom. And we can eat almonds and taste miraculous fruit from limbs just surrendered.
Though the fig tree doesn’t blossom nor fruit be on the vine, yet I will rejoice– and there is the reviving. He can make the dry bones dance.
After Palm Sunday and before Good Friday, that’s what we eat — the almonds and the figs and the fruit, because by Grace, God can get a fig out of even this dry stick. Levi sets out the third bowl.
A small dish of toothpicks. Dry, like dead trees.
“It’s what we’ll do when we repent.” He tells my Mama when she stops in. He shows her, holding up this grapevine wreath, this wood withered and wound.
“These wreaths that we made from the vines back in the wood? Every time we need to repent this Holy Week,” he reaches for the bowl… ” — we’ll slip in one of these sticks.”
“Yes,” she nods.
“Yes, exactly.”
I’m fingering the sharp edge of one brittle point.
And I go first.
I slip in a toothpick thorn, repenting of fruit that isn’t and believing in Him who is, and it’s there in these hands, this snapped, withered wood that will bear the impossible life and right everything again.
This hope encircling like a crown…
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Three Bowls & a Crown of Thorns :
A Holy Week Activity
Three Bowls & a Crown of Thorns :
Items Needed:
1. Figs in a bowl
2. Almonds in a bowl
3. Toothpicks, tea or coffee stained in a bowl
4. a grapevine wreath, crowned-sized
Set the Three Bowls (figs, almonds, toothpicks) & a Crown of Thorns on a table during Holy Week.
1. Read of Jesus’ last miracle before His death: The Withering of the Fig Tree.
Share how Christ is looking for fruit in our lives of faith. And the first fruit is to believe that Jesus Christ is our Saviour, that without Him, there is no fruit. Have a time of personal and family reflection: What are the fruits of the Spirit? How does my life bear each of the fruits of the Spirit?
2. Read the story of Aaron’s dry as death rod budding and blossoming and bearing fruit.
Give glory to God for doing miraculous work in your life, to bear unlikely faith, by His grace alone! Share God-glorifying stories of unexpected fruit!
3. Leave out the bowl of figs and almonds to eat throughout Holy Week
A literal reminder of what Christ seeks and how He surprisingly saves.
4. Set out the bowl of thorns {toothpicks stained} and the Thorn
Throughout Holy Week, as issues arise that beg repenting, slip a toothpick thorn into the grapevine wreath — and thank Him for His painful grace that He offers to bear fruit in our lives…
Without thy grace, we waste and wither away.
Related: This is part of a series preparing hearts for Easter. Part 1 of A Holy Week can be found here
Why be crazy enough to homeschool?
So a series of questions land in the inbox for a print article on homeschooling, asking how a Christian family makes educational choices for their family? {Why would anyone really be crazy enough to homeshool?}… And I smile and nod… and tentatively, prayerfully, attempt to meander through some of these queries…. but only with no small trembling, and this very tentative humble preface:
I don’t write specifically about homeschooling often, as I’m not an expert and I’m very concerned that the topic can sadly be divisive and too we are still deeply in process … by His grace, still growing, changing.
So to say from the outset, that I do not think in any way that homeschooling makes a family virtuous — and there are a myriad of very good educational choices.
Homeschooling is not a formula for perfection, nor is homeschooling a panacea for all the sin in this world.
We’re all messy and fallen and sin-scraped. We and our children are born sinners.
Homeschooling will not fix any of that. Only Jesus and His grace can.
It’s scary to share that we homeschool.
But it’s part of who we are and I am praying for your grace, in just taking us anyways. And we’re all big, gracious folks here. Learning from each other, knowing we are all called differently, but all for the singular purpose of His Glory.
May we all be gracious and supportive of educational choices? Mamas are all just really trying and need so much encouragement.
Three of my closest personal friends, all ardent Christ-followers, have each chosen the public school route; please know that I answer these questions only because of reader queries — so this is descriptive of our lives, not prescriptive for anyone else. I humbly and fully believe that Father Himself leads each family…With that preface, seven quick questions… with some not so quick thoughts…. ~warm smile~
1. When & why did you initially decide to home school?
I was a third year university student, taking a concurrent degree in Education and Child Psychology, when I began to consider the possibility of home education for our future family. Sitting in child development classes, studying how a child needs a close attachment with his or her parents, especially before the age of ten, if they are to emotionally thrive through adolescence, I began to question whether it was best to be separated from young children for the majority of their waking hours.
I came to agree with Dr. Neufeld who writes that the problem today is that ‘parenthood is no longer lasting as long as childhood‘ — that our children need parents to be intimately involved, moment-by-moment, not till they are only four years old and leave home for school and possible peer dependency, but they need us to be parents until they are fourteen years old and older…. “We need to hold on to our children and help them hold on to us. We need to hold on to them until our work is done,” writes Dr. Neufeld“We need to hold on, not to hold them back but so that they can venture forth.”
For us, forging a deep attachment to parents was a key factor in our decision, so that children had a strong foundation for their own sense of self, saw parents as more important than peers, and as we modeled the preeminence of God in our lives, our children could see too how to live out that faith model.
Was there a way to home educate that could nurture whole, innovative, creative, well-read, skilled young persons who were passionate Kingdom builders and people lovers? That was the environment we sought to foster. Where two or three are gathered, there He is also.
What I love most about the homeschooling lifestyle is that we are all together, in all our glorious mess, day in and day out. We are not time-torn or fragmented. We are gathered. There is no dichotomy between God and secular: we are making a one-piece life. This works for us.
We are real, transparent, and growing –sometimes painfully– with each other, season upon season, and God is in the center, bathing us sin-scraped ones with His Grace. That’s rich.
2. What does a typical school day look like for you?
Ah… we’re a bit of glorious mess here everyday!
While we generally don’t have schedules, per se, we prefer to do engage in a daily rhythm, an expected routine, an everyday liturgy that is fluid… Our quotidian harmony (that, now and then, definitely does shriek off tune!)
So times stated are general (in my attempt to tend to this flock instead of being driven by the clock), while the length of time for each string of notes is a valiant attempt at consistency:
5:30 am: 6 children rise and chore in the barn with the Farmer
8:30 am: Eat breakfast as a family
9:00 am: Collective Bible reading, hymns , memorization, prayer … then clean-up
9:30 — 12:30 am:
Two Middle children (11 and 13): do mental gymnastics: Latin , Math, Grammar, Spelling , history readings, Music practice — coming for helps as needed, using a Veritas Press curriculum
Two Youngest Children (6 and 9): We work together on Phonics, handwriting, Spelling , Math , Latin , Story Circle, Art .
Two Oldest Children (14 and 16): Independently and daily Math and Latin, then work on their classes with Veritas Press Scholars Academy — Omnibus (Theology, Literature, History), Rhetoric, Latin, Chemistry, Art, Omnibus Secondary, Economics, Business, and several electives from The Potter’s School – checking in with their real-time, live classes, interacting with their teachers and fellow classmates via computer microphones and doing their homework and readings
12:30 — 1:30 pm: Family Noon Meal — close again with Bible readings and prayer — try to clean up our messes
2:00 pm — 3:30 pm: Exploring Time with 4 youngest:
Tea and literature read aloudsincluding poetry, reading, and art appreciation. Then reading a wide spectrum of books that lead us deeper into Geography, Nature and Science, History, Theology — just simply reading a stack of books.
We explore intriguing side trails as we read, check out our Everyday Learning Links– Checking out Today in History, Today’s Word of the Day, The Last 24 Hours in Pictures around the World, The Bird of the Day…. sparking curiosity about the world right now and all around us! God is in it! And then googling what we’ve read to understand more, you-tubing for a relevant video to get an on-the-ground sense of something, grabbing another book off the shelf that fleshes something else out a bit more.
As a mama-teacher, I approach all the readings as a co-discoverer with an insatiable appetite to learn more. I’m exploring with the kids and I’m excited every day about we’re finding out together! It’s not perfect — but it is contagious!
3:30 pm — 4:00 pm: Piano practice, knitting , working in the shop, woodworking, baking, work on history timelines, sketching and drawing in nature journals , go for a walk, cook something in the kitchen, work on a family project — just us, living.
Learning just pervades all time, continuing throughout the evening — kids reading, composing music, working with Farmer Husband in the shed, exploring in the woods, playing games, making dinner in the kitchen.
We don’t have a television — or radio, or video games — so perhaps children engage their worlds more fully?
3. How do you ensure that your children get the same, if not better quality education as those in public school?
We once had a couple come visit us from Germany. Homeschooling is not an option in Germany, so they were intrigued by our choice of education for our children: the stacks and stacks of books, the daily reading of Shakespeare, children narrating poetry, singing hymns together at the table, the spontaneous creativity that was happening — and the noise levels and the happy spin to our days, the way life and learning and laundry just fold into each other.
And at the end of the week, they wanted to know: How else could children learn like this, with all these books?
In a home we have the advantage of getting the best books out of the library. Of low-teacher to child ratios, of google and research at the fingertips of every child, if need be. We can pile close on the couch together to read those books, to check out that youtube video on the Rock of Gibraltar. In a classroom with 25 students, the logistics of great books, and easy internet access for each student get trickier. I really believe that a curious mother and a library card can offer a stellar education.
Ultimately, for us, a quality education focuses on commitment, of both the learner and the teacher. A commitment by both parties to authenticity, joy, curiosity, and consistency. These elements of an education then translate into necessary, future life-skills
For us that means living:
Authentically.
Live your life. Invite your children to join you! Read together. Pray together. Sing together. Work, bake, garden, chore, clean, sew, fix, build together. Don’t fabricate artificial demarcation lines between schooling and living. Live a one-piece life. Live holistically.
Joyfully.
Explore! Be awed by His World! Restore Wonder! Be a creative, thinking, exuberant person who spills with the joy of learning. Your zest for learning and life will be contagious–the children will catch it!
Curiously.
Read, read, read. Fill the house with library books. Play classical music. Post the art of the masters about the house. Go for walks in the woods. Learn a new language, a new culture, a new poem. Everyday set out to discover again, and again, and again. The whole earth is full of His glory! Go seek His face…
Consistently.
Consistently pray. Consistently read. Consistently keep the routine. Consistently live an everyday liturgy.
Children thrive in routine. So do households. Have hardstops: times that you fully stop to pray, to read, to write. Regardless of what isn’t done, what isn’t finished. Make a full stop, do the needful thing, then return to meals, laundry, household management.
Consistently be consistent.
That’s all. The curriculum doesn’t really matter, so much. Use what works for you, how He leads you.
Just make it part of your real life, make it a joy, make it a discovery, and prayerfully make it consistent.
4. What are some downfalls of home schooling, in your opinion, and what are some ways of making up for them?
So true: whichever choice we make, there are advantages and disadvantages.
Whichever educational choice we make, we choose a whole lifestyle.
No doubt, homeschooling comes with pitfalls, ones we’ve intimately wrestled with….
There needs to be consistency, consistency, consistency.
We are responsible for creating the scaffolding for children to climb. That takes daily intentionality and prayerful self-discipline.
Our commitment needs to be intrinsic and for some, that can be a challenge — but a mama who is struggling in that area can set up accountability with her husband, a friend, another teaching-mama. Homeschooled children need to learn about deadlines and goals and time management — and that too can be a challenge when educating at home. We’re daily working on these things, failing and falling into grace, and beginning again. And again, formulating together some agreed upon standards with built-in accountability is paramount.
But much more critically, I believe, a very real concern for of the potential for home-educating families to create hothouses of weak plants that can’t withstand the winds of this world.
When our home environment is Christian and our social circles are primarily (or exclusively) Christian, what makes our children vigilant in their faith? What makes them put down deep, deep roots?
We personally don’t believe that children are called to be kingdom warriors in the public school system because, in our humble, and very possibly misguided opinion, that doesn’t seem a level playing field. There are agendas operating there that may leave a child at a disadvantage. But do we need to walk with our children in the world with a vibrant, fearless faith that has full confidence in an all-powerful God? Yes!
If we are going to home-educate, we are going to need to be proactive in engaging the world. As homeschoolers, we can’t create our own self-protective ghettos so our safe Christian children may just meet and marry another safe and good Christian to have their own safe and good Christian family. God didn’t call us to that! He called us to love a lost and hurting world.
We may be homeschoolers, but we can’t stay at home! If we’re going to home-educate, we need to find ways to be in the world, to serve the world, to live a BIG RADICAL FAITH in this world… But not be of the world. Daily we need to be intentionally asking and living: How can we reach out to our neighbors, the hurting kid around the corner, our non-believing uncle, our community at large?
(Related: Reb Bradley speaks profoundly to the pitfalls of homeschooling and how to advert them
Wise Katherine @ Raising Five who once homeschooled and now doesn’t wrote a deeply thoughtful post that I return to often: Sheltering is not a Place but a Relationship )
5. What are some downfalls of the public school system?
While I think the public school has some very real advantages over home education — discipline, deadlines, sports programs, some technical and highly skilled programs — and it works tremendously well for some families, for us, the downfalls are simply inherent to what public school is: perhaps an artificial fragmentation of life?
Separating children from siblings, from family, their natural community, homes, faith and environment to instead be grouped in a rather institutionalized space with possible agendas that may be disconnected from community and family values, that marks time with bells… perhaps this could potentially disconnect young people from the real world and real family relationships?
And possibly, in some instance, may not be most conducive to fostering a whole-hearted person whose faith, family, work, and service is all woven into a cloth of one-piece.
For us, an integrated life before God, is perhaps experienced and cultivated and expressed in the crazy wonder of educating at home?
6. What are your dreams for your children, scholastically?
Scholastically, our aim for our children asks the same question that esteemed educator A Charlotte Mason asked: “The question is not, ‘how much does the youth know?’ when he has finished his education––but how much does he care?
And about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set?”
We believe that whatever we do, we need to do it wholeheartedly as unto the Lord. Right now, learning about God and His world is our children’s full-time work. That means: education is a priority and it will be engaging work that requires real effort.
But that doesn’t necessarily translate into them aiming towards traditional careers. It means we simply pursue the beginning of knowledge which is the fear of the Lord.
Do they care about God?
Do they love people?
Are their feet set in the large, large world as salt and light?
It means that we pursue not a cultural definition of success but of true greatness for our kids: “having an unquenchable passion for God that manifests itself in an unwavering love and concern for others” (Tim Kimmel, Raising Kids for True Greatness)
7. How long do you plan to home school them for, and why?
In fear and trembling, we plan to homeschool, Lord willing, throughout highschool…. Yet we do that in a supportive, large homeschooling community that offers a myriad of resources that makes it possible to have top-notch online teachers in classes with students all over the globe.
And why would we continue?
Because homeschooling is this magnificent crucible, to reveal impurities and sinfulness and brokenness.
It keeps us on our knees. Homeschooling often hurts and disappoints.
You cry and wonder if you are insane to try to educate these children, to disciple these little hearts, while laundering, cooking, cleaning, managing a household, and still being a wife, a sister, a daughter, a missionary in your community, a servant to Christ and in your faith community. And He smiles and say that He walks with you, has grand and glorious purposes, and He understands radical and crazy!
Homeschooling is about going higher up and deeper in, for you learn to sacrificially love in ways you have never loved before. You come to know your own heart in ways you never imagined, the souls of your children in intimate, very real ways.
For you will be together, making memories together, laughing together, crying together, praying together, and asking forgiveness together. Throughout your day, you worship God, together. And you learn to die-to-self together. It’s about doing hard things… together. And there will be no fragmentation of learning, home-life, friends, work, God.
We keep homeschooling to weave a one-piece life – hallowed threads of parenting, love, pain, education, growing, stumbling, creativity, forgiveness, wonder, sacrifice, and God all woven together.
We wear it, and it’s not perfect and it’s messy — but oh, it’s a good fit for us!
Grace, Joy, Gratitude.
Related Links:
More Glimpses into our Homeschool Room: How to make a Learning Space
Seven Things We do Everyday to Holistically Homeschool
If you are considering homeschooling– perhaps read this post?
Resource: The Lord Is My Strength – Vinyl Wall Art
edited text from the archives to make current
The Photo Glimpses into our recent discovery days:
Hope wrapped up under a tree studying history:Veritas Press History Cards: Explorers to 1815::Levi working on history timelines {We chart the events from the free 100 Pivotal Events in History and our Veritas Press History events on this timeline, that includes the Biblical Genesis: The Wallchart of World History: From Earliest Times to the Present  } :: nature study :: Levi’s boat carving :: Read Aloud from 1955 Newberry Medal Winner: The Wheel on the School :: Joshua’s painting of a Roman Soldier :: dogwoods in the wood with Shalom :: more timeline work :: Malakai’s (8 yrs old) self-portrait :: Hope reading outside to Shalom :: creek fun :: dinner time in the evening, everyone boisterous around the table
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