Before I begin I must give full disclosure: I am fighting the temptation to only post: With the Lord’s help and provision we will begin home schooling next year. If you have any questions please ask.
The temptation to be brief and to the point is to cover up my own lack of knowledge about home schooling, to protect myself from saying something that I will realize is not true later, and to avoid having to answer questions about why we are deciding to home school.
Which leads me to the reason I know I need to post about our decision because the words myself, I, and we are too prevalent in my excuses. This leads right into how I’m realizing that God will use home schooling to continue to work on my selfishness and my pride. Making the decision to home school forces you to examine your own sin. But, let me start from the beginning.
For years, I have admired my sister and her courage, devotion, and love for her children displayed in their decision to home school. Even so, being a teacher myself (future blog posts on this topic to come), I still found these types of excuses passing my lips:
“There is no way that I am the best teacher for
my children.”
“I need my own time to myself during the day.”
“I will have to give up some of the things I love doing – “good” things like bible study during the mornings, volunteering, or lunch with friends during the week.
“I just don’t want to.”
“They need to be in school to have the experience of sports teams, prom, being a part of a school culture.”
“There is no way I could teach them what they need in high school and prepare them for college. I am only trained to teach younger children.”
“It’s just weird and I don’t have a love for hair buns with a covering or long skirts and tennis shoes so I won’t fit in and don’t really want to fit in with them.”
Did you notice how many times I said the word “I” in the excuses above? God has begun to show me that I must die to myself and my own wants, needs, and feelings. It is not all about me. I’ve learned that simply being blessed by God with our two girls (and more on the way – Lord willing) gives me authority and blessing from God to be their mother and teacher. I’ve realized that it will not be me who gets the credit for anything the girls learn anyway. God gets the glory as long as I seek Him and desire to call on His wisdom, His strength, His patience, His comfort, and His love to guide us each day.
Come this June, our family will have experienced the three types of education options America has to offer. Our girls attended private Christian preschool, public elementary school, private Christian elementary school, and will dive into home schooling beginning this June. I think this unique perspective gives us a platform to be able to humbly and carefully evaluate the pros and cons of each option.
First – public school.
I have no desire to discredit public schools. In fact, I still believe that families who love the Lord can raise God-fearing children and glorify God in their children attending public schools, private schools, or in home schooling. Nate and I both grew up in public schools and I taught in public schools for three years. Our neighborhood school has a strong parent volunteer team, we were blessed by loving teachers who cared about our girls, and our girls met academic expectations. We loved our school. As Nate and I continued in our faith journey as a family and desired to have a school come alongside what we were teaching at home in family devotions, everyday life, and what they were hearing at church - we felt led to explore private Christian school.
Second – private school.
I attended an Open house and simply wept. Nate came to an Open house a month later and he wept. We were overcome and deeply moved that school could be this way. We saw evidence that a biblical worldview was a part of everything the school did and we highly valued our girls being exposed to biblical truth. We heard the school say they wanted to come alongside us and help us protect the innocence of our children. Nate asked, “Where do we sign up?” It was clear that this was a wonderful option for our girls and we were so blessed with the support of family to be able to send the girls. We loved the school and will continue to praise God for the work He is doing there.
Third – home school.
In the meantime though, I was attending or signing up for home school conventions. Yes, I know this is weird and I realize that I am a minority in that I love workshops, seminars, and conventions!! I appreciate though how wonderful it is to have a convention come to your hometown. Many families travel from neighboring states to visit a convention. I attended the first one in March of 2011 with my sister and I think I bought more materials, books, and curriculum that she did!! I had decided to home school just during the summer to keep the girls learning and was excited to get books and ideas! The teacher in me could have spent days in the vendor hall pouring over fantastic literature, learning new methods of teaching math, attending workshops on home school teaching methods and of course people watching. Home school conferences are fantastic for people/family watching. If you’ve ever been to one you know what I mean.
I can see now how God was planting the seeds. Then in October of 2011 the registration came out for a new conference in Spartanburg called Teach Them Diligently. I signed up and was excited to attend just to scope out materials again and check out the vendor hall. What’s so funny is that I kept reminding my sister to sign up and was signed up myself for months and wasn’t even home schooling!!! God was giving me a heads up and I didn’t even know it.
The Teach Them Diligently Convention was held this March. In the weeks leading up to the conference, Nate and I began seriously talking about the option of home schooling. We prayed, talked, talked to my sister, talked to friends, and decided that maybe attending a few workshops on getting started in home schooling at the upcoming convention would be a good idea.
Looking back I can see that God had the idea and He was trying to get us on board. I cried during my first workshop called Gaining the Confidence to Teach by Debbie Strayer. When she reminded me that confidence doesn’t come from what we know or how well we do as home school moms but our confidence comes from letting God do the work. She then led us through lies that we may have told ourselves in order to give excuses for not home schooling. Ummm, totally felt like a spotlight was on me.
Here are a few:
1. But, I don’t know everything!
2. Any teacher is more qualified than me!
3. My child will learn better from a teacher than me.
4. What if my child fails because of me?
Here is how I learned to combat those lies:
1. God will equip me. I need to trade in my plan for God’s plan.
2. Authority comes from God alone. He made me the mother of my children. I must be faithful and obey. My commitment to my children exceeds the best the world has to offer.
3. As parents we are anointed to see the heart of our children. The world will deal with their heart if I don’t. So I need to be the one to teach them with a loving, merciful approach as only a parent can do.
4. 1 Thessalonians 5:24 God will make this happen, for He who calls you is faithful. It is not up to me, but up to God.
This teaching welled up in me so deeply. I want to sell out like this to God and give up my plan for His. This means I will need to set aside some of the things that are nonessentials in my life. Good things. Great things. But lay them down in order to do the Best thing.
Sharing this with Nate and covering it in prayer, led us to the decision that God was calling us to home school.
Now that we felt led in that direction, I needed to remind myself of the second part of Debbie Strayer’s talk on encouragers and discouragers when home schooling.
1. Be aware that the progress of each child will come and go. I need to be their biggest encourager. Children are a blessing not a burden.
2. My feelings about how it is going are not reliable. Our commitment to home school doesn’t change based on feelings. This is God led, not feeling driven. There will be days when I want to look up the bus schedule and send my children to the neighborhood school.
3. The enemy will creep in by causing me to compare myself to other moms and my children to other children. If my eyes are on other people then they are off the Lord. My answer to comparison is that God is doing this, not me.
4. Be aware of my own pride issues. Remind my children and myself what it means to give God the glory and show this to them by my words and actions. (Isaiah 40:28-31 – great truth)
So, we are feeling led to home school. A few thoughts as we being this journey:
1. I know it will not be easy.
2. I will miss many of the good and great things I was doing before that I’ve had to lay aside.
3. I will get frustrated, impatient, and sometimes not feel like doing school that day.
4. I will have to answer questions from family, friends, neighbors, etc. that don’t understand why we are making this decision.
5. The fruit of making the decision to home school may not be harvested immediately.
Lord, help my answer to be: But, God! I know YOU to be faithful and true. I know that as I seek to obey YOU and follow YOUR will that blessings will abound. So, we will trust and obey. We will be faithful with the small things and know that YOU are filling in the gaps. We will rely on YOU for all things and in all things give YOU the glory!
So, that is why we are humbly home schooling.
Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name goes all the glory for your unfailing love and faithfulness. Psalm 115:1
A couple of months ago I worked with a graphic designer to put together an infographic that would display the attributes of God. Putting it together was far more worship than work as I looked to the Bible to see what God tells us about himself, about who he is and what he’s like. Each one of those attributes is worthy of a study because each one is part of an answer to questions like this: Who is this God who has forgiven me for my sin? What is this God like?
