Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

It is so exhausting- sometimes even demoralizing- to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it.

It doesn't really matter if we have the most beautiful, carefully thought-out plan if there aren't enough hours in the day to get to it. Look, if God expected you to get 36 hours worth of work done in a day, he would have given you 36 hours to do it. If you have more to do than time to do it in, the simple fact is this: some of what you are doing isn't on His agenda for you.

The God who turned water into wine can take our smallest efforts and weave them into a glorious tapestry for His delight.

Listen carefully: you do not need to have a "productive" homeschool day to please the Savior. You do not need to have a clean house to please the Savior. You do not even need to have well-behaved kids to please Him. It doesn't matter if you hit every math problem, get through an entire spelling lesson, or whether your child loves learning the way you want him to. It doesn't matter! What matters is that we seek to imitate Christ. That we order our loves so that our hearts better reflect His.  Many days, checklists will go untouched, books will go unread, ducks will not line up in a row, no matter how much we strive. So cease striving. "It is our part to offer what we can, His to finish what we cannot." —— St. Jerome

You are made in the image and likeness of God, and you have exactly what you need to be the mother that He wants you to be. Figure out what drives you and then let your kids shine within the atmosphere you create. Trying to be something you're not, trying hard to provide your kids with the education that the blogger-next-door is giving hers will burn you out make you want to quit the whole project entirely.

It’s easy to forget that teaching is holy work. We forget that building up the intellect- teaching our children to really think- does not happen by the might of human reason, but rather by the grace of God. On an ordinary day, you and I likely have a set of tasks we've scheduled for our kids. But it's more than math. It's more than history. It's the building up of our children's minds and hearts, and we can only do that if we realize that this is how we thank Him for the graces He so lavishly pours out on us.

Rest, then, is not the absence of work or toil. It is the absence of anxiety or frenzy.

The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.

We are weary because we forget about grace. We act as though God’s showing up is the miracle. But guess what? God’s showing up is the given. Grace is a fact.

Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender. There will always be more you can do. You will never complete your tasks entirely, because just on the horizon is tomorrow, and tomorrow the to-do list starts anew. It is so exhausting—sometimes even demoralizing—to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it.

What if, instead of trying to make the most of our time, we worked harder at savoring it?

The great educator Charlotte Mason says that when we put children in direct contact with great ideas and get out of the way, "Teachers shall teach less and scholars shall learn more." Any homeschooling parent who has observed her own children for any length of time will know this to be true. Real learning happens when our children wrestle directly with great ideas- not as a result of our repackaging those great ideas, but when they interact with the ideas themselves.

Can we live and teach from a state of rest? My prayer is that we will. But we must approach the Holy Spirit every single day, asking Him to lead us and to quiet our anxious souls so that we can really bless our children- not with shiny curriculum or perfect lesson plans, but rather with purposeful, restful spirits.

The daily mundane is holy ground because the ordinary tasks of a monotonous Monday are where we meet our Maker.

It isn't about how long we pray or how many times we have to bring our minds back when it wanders off. It's about showing up, sitting at the foot of the cross, and putting aside our own will in order to give ourselves completely to His.

At the end of our lives, He is going to look into hearts. What is it He will find there, I wonder? Will he find that we used the geography lesson, the dreaded math test, the teetering laundry pile and the boiling-over pot of soup to draw closer to Him? Did we use these gifts to teach our children to lift their eyes heavenward? Were the tedious details of a homeschooling day offered up as a way for us to love Him, or were they merely gotten through, checked off and accomplished? Did we even realize that every Monday, every Thursday, we were standing on holy ground? No task is too trivial, no assignment too small. Educating our children is an offering of love we make to the God Who was so gracious to bestow them upon us in the first place. Every moment of the daily grind in raising and teaching and loving on them is hallowed, because we do it for Him and because there would be no point of doing it without Him.

Tell me this- if you could have a guarantee that your child would be a National Merit Scholar and get into a prestigious college, have good work habits and a successful career, but that your relationship with him would be destroyed in the process, would you do it? Why not? Because you are made to love, that's why. We care about our relationships more than about our accomplishments. That's the way God made us. Then why don't we live that way? Why, come a damp and gloomy day in March, do we yell over a  math lesson or lose our temper over a writing assignment? Why do we see the lessons left to finish and get lost in an anxiety-ridden haze? We forget that we are dealing with a soul, a precious child bearing the Image of God, and all we can see is that there are only a few months left to the school year and we are still only halfway through the math book. When you are performing mommy triage- that is, when you have a crisis moment and have to figure out which fire to put out first- always choose your child. It's just a math lesson. It's only a writing assignment. It's a Latin declension. Nothing more. But your child? He is God's. And the Almighty put him in your charge for relationship. Don't damage that relationship over something so trivial as an algebra problem. And when you do (because you will, and so will I), repent. We like to feed our egos. When our children perform well, we can puff up with satisfaction and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. But as important as it is to give our children a solid education (and it is important, don't misunderstand me), it is far more important that we love them well.  Our children need to know that the most important thing about them is not whether they finished their science curriculum or score well on the SAT. Their worth is not bound up in a booklist or a test score. Take a moment. Take ten. Look deep into your child's eyes. Listen, even when you're bored. Break out a board game or an old picture book you haven't read in ages. Resting in Him means relaxing into the knowledge that He has put these children in our care to nurture. And nurturing looks different than charging through the checklist all angst-like. Your children are not ordinary kids or ordinary people, because there are no ordinary kids or ordinary people. They are little reflections of the

Whatever is getting in the way of your plan for the day- the toddler's tantrum, the messy bedroom, the sticky juice leaking all over the fridge and into the cracks of the drawers, the frustrated child, the irritable husband, the car that won't start, the vomiting dog, the pie spilled on the oven door...whatever that intrusion into your grand plan for the day is, it's also an opportunity to enter into rest.

Our curriculum is the course that we travel.

Some people call it multi-tasking, as though it’s a skill to be desired and honed, but I know it’s really a lack of focus-a refusal to seek out the important things.

The true aim of education is to order a child’s affections—to teach him to love what he ought and hate what he ought. Our greatest task, then, is to put living ideas in front of our children like a feast. We have been charged to cultivate the souls of our children, to nourish them in truth, goodness, and beauty, to raise them up in wisdom and eloquence. It is to those ends that we labor. We toil because we long to be like the man in Psalm

You are teaching your living, breathing, made-in-the-Image-of-God students. The resources are there to help you do that. It's that simple, we just forget when we get all wrapped up in "getting through" all the math lessons before the end of May, or finishing every science experiment in the book before we call it good and move on. It doesn't really matter how far in the book we get. What matters is what happens in the mind and heart of our student, and for that matter- in ourselves. You know this. I know this. But we've got to start living it. We are all spinning our wheels because we're frantically trying to "get through" published curriculum as if turning the last page in the book by the beginning of summer vacation will somehow mean that our children learned something. Truth is, they do learn something from that. But it's not at all the message we want them to internalize. We are teaching people, not books. We need to understand the limitations of curriculum. We need to stop trying to make it something that it's not, expecting it to yield what it was never intended to deliver.

Pacing doesn’t matter if you are sacrificing mastery and love for truth, goodness, and beauty.

All true education begins in wonder and ends in wisdom—as

Take a deep breath, mama. This isn’t as dependent on you as you think it is. Give God your “Here I am. Use me.” Let Him carry the burden.

The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in and out of the wind." — C.S. Lewis

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life- the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls ones' 'real life' is a phantom of one's own imagination.

Realize that when you are reading aloud from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, you are not just doing literature. If you read it slowly, enjoying it, taking time to contemplate the ideas and discuss them with your kids, you are taking on history, geography, writing, vocabulary, theology, and philosophy as well. This isn't dabbling; it’s wrestling. I think of integration as a kind of curricular power punch. I want to choose published resources and subjects that are going to die me a lot of bang for my buck, so I try to think carefully before I add anything to our docket…Our lives are, by nature, integrated. Our school day should reflect that.

Here is the bare truth: Not an hour passes without the enormity of the task I have taken on bringing me to my knees. This work of homeschooling and raising hearts and souls and bodies is hard. It is more than I can do in my own strength. Even so, more than anything else, I desire to teach and mother in a way that pleases God. Some days that feels like feeding the five thousand. But He is not asking me to feed the five thousand; He just wants me to bring my basket of loaves and fish and lay them at His feet.