I'd just like to make a note that the Family History post will be added to every now and then as memories surface, and so I want you who are interested, to check it every so often.

Today I'd like to talk about the value of endurance.  We live in an era where people don't want to put up with anything, go to any trouble, or survive anything. They want to have their lives guaranteed and planned for them. 

I was like this when I was a teenager. I thought you got ahold of an idea or a goal, and pursued it and then it would all come true and life would be gloriously happy and perfect.

As God began to thwart my plans when they were wrong, and shut doors on me, I often felt humilated and bitter and unhappy because I couldn't get where I wanted to go in life.  Even years later when the memories of failures replayed in my mind, I became depressed and sad.

As a young mother I seemed to worried about our future. I worried about many things, even though I was a Christian. You have to understand that most of my life was spent in the instutitions of public education, where my faith was being both slyly and boldy broken down.  As I saw more and more failure of my own goals and plans, I began to trust only in things that I knew would be "for sure."

If it hadn't been for homeschooling, I would never have learned the lesson of faith and endurance.  Endurance is that clinging to a principle and not letting go, even if you suffer. This was the best lesson of my life, one that I had not learned when I was younger, in spite of my colorful upbringing.

There were many forces against us in 1983 when I began homeschooling.  If you can imagine this as a movie, it would actually be quite funny.  I started home schooling and would go to a store, to church, or any public place, see people I'd been seeing for years, and suddenly they wouldn't talk to me.  One matter that gave me reason to hope, was that they still let me give them money for groceries, and did not refuse my contribution at church ;-)

We were not extended invitations to people's homes or other events, and we were not included in anything anymore. We were "different." When we invited others over, we got lame excuses, as people didn't want us to influence them, and were afraid their own children would also want to be homeschooled.

Yet is interesting that the pressure was never so bad that I felt I needed to give up homeschooling.  We were extraordinarily lonely in those days, and we didn't know anyone else who was doing this. I later learned that there were other homeschoolers who thought they also were all alone. 

Let me get back to "endurance."  People don't understand this concept of life, and sometimes God will put them through something  in order to allow them to experience it. Now that I'm older I'm feeling more and more happpy about the trials, because I can look back and see something that ordinarily I would have thought a terrible tragedy, and say, "Oh, NOW I SEE why that happened!  It was so we would do this, instead," or "I know why we didn't get that job--it was so we would go in this other direction, " etc. 

Now that my children are grown, and the busyness of life has changed into a different area, and I have more time to collect my thoughts, I'm finding that the memories that used to be bitter ones of great disappointment and grief, are now great sources of joy, as I see God's hand in it.

Someone will come to my house with a terrible problem, and I'll be thinking, "Good grief, how should I know what the answer is," and then, suddenly, a memory, like a little film clip, will flash through my mind, and then I'll know that it was an event that would help me with some future event.

Or, I'll be working around the yard or house and some sight of something will trigger off one of those memories, and I'll just smille and know why it happened. 

Sometimes we don't know why things happen --whether they be hardships or unhappy events, until years later when we connect them to something that we are doing right now.

That is one of the values of endurance. If you cling to the principles you believe, knowing that resistance from others is part of the territory, that endurance will one day pay off.  Our family endured a lot for homeschooling, that many today may not ever experience, but the end result is that we are able to see more clearly God's hand in our lives. When we feel the weight of some heavy task, we can look back and see how our previous endurance has paid off in the lives of children who are following the Lord.  When disappointments come, we recognize it as God's guidance, and look forward to seeing how things will end up.