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Category Archives: Homeschooling
Resource: Bless Our Nest When he asked me what I wanted for Valentine’s Day? I’d grinned and said all I wanted was a clean house.
I mean, National Geographics wave across the study like a sea. Boys erupt here, lego this lava everywhere. There are dolls, two girl in this blast of boys, and their stream of scissors, and papers, and scraps. There are days I’m the volcano on the verge. Come Valentine’s Day, I’m standing in the kitchen icing mounds of cupcakes. Smooth out the pink icing. Reach for another cinnamon heart. Augustine had said that in The City of God
It’s the house that’s in disarray. And there’s the Valentine’s flag to be hung. And the Valentine’s cards to hide — lopsided and gloriously over-glued. And the Valentine table to be set. That is the thing: Everything in the world is love — just right-ordered or wrong-ordered. Turn the cupcake in hand. Smooth out the icing. The work of a life is to reorder the love — to turn all things towards the True Lover. Forget how disordered the house is — how’s my heart? If I moved a stack of books, reached over dishes and pencils and crayons, I could get to the music, turn on something lovely. Turn. Turn. I try not to get icing on the home-made hearts on the counter. I try to write my own Valentine’s. This is what a mother can do –Remind herself how to reorder her love and I should write it on my hands in red: Sin is what happens when our love gets disordered. And it’s never worth disordering the heart to get a right-ordered house. How is my love ordered? Towards a Better Homes and Gardens House? Or a better, holy, godly heart? A right-ordered house isn’t virtuous like a right-ordered heart. It’s true: I could close my eyes to the magma of mess. But the thing is: Love isn’t blind. Love is the holy sight. Love has the long, real sight, that sees what won’t burn up. Love’s priorities are things unseen. “They sure are sweet, aren’t they?” A boy grins over at me, his lips all cinnamon red. I smile and wink and he whispers it all silly, ”Will you be my Valentine?” Icing cupcakes, it’s my heart that melts, dropping these cinnamon hearts like molten love, love and these souls that outlast fire. :: Nothing changes and the perfect gift is the heart ordered after His.
In a messy house, I turn, turn, and grab all that erupting boy in a long hug and the house, everything, it falls into this perfect order. These hearts turned towards each other and close and falling into this sweet, right-ordered one beat. :: :::: Related: It’s what I sang over dishes. Sang on the days when I felt too weary to take another step, clean up another mess, change another diaper.
It’s what I sing when the enemy attacks with lies, when I feel alone and scared, when I fear the future and whispers in the shadows. It’s what my mother-in-law, a Dutch farmer’s wife and mother of nine, godly and with these big calloused work hands, said to do. What she told me once hunched over this row of peas we were picking out in a June twilight: “It’s what my mother said too, Ann: When it is hardest — that is when you sing the loudest. The devil flees at a hymn.” At the last, when the cancer wound tighter, folks would ask how she was — and my father-in-law would say, “Good! She’s singing all the time.” And we knew how hard it was — and how good she knew He is.
Abandon the worries… and Abide in the Word. Abandon the fears… and Abide in the Father. Abandon the hurts… and Abide in His heart. Abandon the cares… because Christ will never abandon you. It’s what I self-preach again and again to the fearful sinner who is me: Abandon and Abide. I run water for the next stack of dishes. Take off my ring and watch, leave them there on the counter. And immerse hands in water, the tap still running. Everything, everywhere quietly humming…. :: :: ::
They build it with their own hands. They build it in the angling sun and they are loud and happy and they pack in in all the gaps with handfuls of snow spraying like sweet sugar everywhere. They talk of sleeping under stars and sleeping in coats under blankets and with a flashlight and candles and the dog, the dog right there at the door. When one lies down, they nudge on; they have this vision. They say that this will be like nothing ever before, the most beautiful one ever. Levi pulls off his touque, hot and sweaty, and piles his snow high on the wall. They build this snow house. They hand me a shovel.
They tell me that – how they have sculpted something that will last beyond the next thaw. That they have made a memory and what can erode that and wasn’t it worth it? If we build companies but lose the company of family and if we build visions but lose sight of relationship, have we only built these hollow canyons of pain? Family is this altar you lie down on and build joy. All that life in their cheeks, all that effort, all that love, it flames with a heat of it’s own. I watch how she works with that shovel. How she crawls straight through that door in the wall, exhausted but smiling, her hair blowing long in the wind. :: :: ::
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(now and then?)
(a quiet tweeter)
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