Are you a Sunday-morning-only Christian?  What if your pastor were to take the bold approach and ask you personally the reason for your absence on Sunday evenings and at the mid-week service?  Would you be offended?  See what happened when this pastor did just that with his non-100% church members. 

Aren't people funny?  We think, "Oh, God understands..."  Yes, he sure does.

Do you know what this is?  It belongs to my daughter.  It is your window into my world.  My un-styled hair, my un-made-up face, the piles on my desk, the mess in my family room, the squabble between sisters in the room beyond.  It is the reason why we are now moving the furniture. 

 

Monocogman finally made it to the top of Spirit Mountain and back down again, all in once piece, and without having to spend the night up there in the howling wind.  *Insert bells and whistles!*  This is a monumental victory for him, after failing twice in earlier attempts. You can see his blog for the details. When he got home, Monocogman stated that he is NOT interested in climbing that mountain ever again.  (Oh yes, I have heard that one before.) Within about twenty minutes he was talking about the next time...

And, today Alison met her goal of writing 50,000 words in the month of November, and is now a NaNoWriMo winner!  *More bells and whistles!!*  This is wonderful.  After twenty-seven days of missing my daughter, she is back!  Her body has been here the entire time, of course, but her mind has been on a tropical island in the midst of the Pacific Ocean somewhere.  I'm so glad to have her back.  Unfortunately, her characters are still stranded on said tropical island...

Last week as I was preparing my Sunday School lesson I got to thinking about Noah.  The Bible says, "But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord," Genesis 6:8.  It was a wonderful thing for Noah and his family that they did.  No doubt about that.  God's grace brought them through the destruction of the entire world and all its inhabitants, and through a brand new beginning in a world that was now hardly recognizable.  I wonder about the emotional impact that great flood had on Noah, and more especially, on the womenfolk who were aboard the ark. God made everything new. The Bible says Noah found grace.

But the grace that brought the Noah family through that terrible apocalypse also required Noah to endure possibly a hundred years of ark building while the world mocked on.  As a "preacher of righteousness"  (2 Peter 2:5) he warned the world of God's coming judgment and had not one convert (except maybe his sons' wives). There was much work to do in gathering food for his family and all God's animals.  He and his family endured an entire year of cabin fever in a closed-up boat, eating the same simple meals every day and cleaning up after a whole population of smelly beasts.  When they got off the ark, they must have felt like they had traveled to a different planet.  How lonely they must have been those first few years! 

In my way of thinking, supposing I were Noah, finding grace in God's sight would have meant something different.  God would have come to me and said, "Noah, you have found grace in my sight.  I am going to completely destroy the world and everyone in it, but I will save you and your family.  I am going to make an ark big enough for your family and all the animals I choose.  Your neighbors will be respectful of your faith, and even though none of them will believe you, they won't bother you, either.  In fact, I will cause them to help you gather food for your journey.  The ark will have lots of windows, with strong awnings, so you can get some fresh air in there, and there will be a covered deck so you can go outside and get some sun after the first forty days. When you come off the ark, I will have made you and your sons beautiful homes and fields all ready to harvest.  My grace will make things easier for you."

That's not what happened, though.  Finding grace with God didn't mean an easier life, in fact, it meant a lot more trouble and difficulty and things Noah would otherwise never have experienced. 

So here is what I have been thinking about.  The troubles and difficulties I am seeing now -- are they actually part of God's grace in my life?   I think they must be!  Knowing that these things are part of the process of his grace should make my heart more grateful, don't you think?  I know this.  Every Christian knows this.  But I feel like this is sort of a new realization, like this "bad" stuff really is God's plan for me, and not just obstacles for me to overcome in order to follow his plan.  This IS the plan!  I can trust him with this!  Up until now, I think my understanding of God's grace has been all wrong.  I''ll be chewing on this for a while.

When we first started homeschooling, I naïvely believed with all my heart that my children would LOVE school.  They didn't mind learning (nevermind loving it), but they HATED writing.  We could do any assignment orally. But when the children were told to do something (anything) in writing, I witnessed, to my unbelieving eyes, the return of the temper tantrum.  Happy voices turned ugly. Whining, crying, and wailing prevailed. Little bodies writhed on the floor or ran away. 

Maybe their little muscles just weren't ready to write, I don't know.  Whatever the cause, I thought, What am I going to do with this?  We couldn't go on through elementary, junior high, and high school doing our assignments orally!  Not with one child, but especially not with four!!! 

I cajoled, I argued, I threatened.  I finally figured out that God's way would be the best way to handle this  rebellion, because after all, rebellion is what it is. (Proverbs 29:15). 

One small compromise: I allowed them to tackle the keyboard from a very young age, making up words and stories and sending I-love-you emails to their parents and sisters.  Yes, I wanted them to learn to get their thoughts from their brains to the end of a pencil.  But maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the thoughts went from their brains to a keyboard. ??

Forward several years.  My fifteen year old daughter is twelve days and 23,000-some words into a novel.  She is a participant in 2009 NaNoWriMo (that's short for National Novel Writing Month).  She has a journal and a story blog in addition to her regular blog.  She writes for the HSB Backyard. Once in a while she contributes to my church ladies' newsletter.  Who'd a thunk it?  She still hates writing by hand, if it's assigned writing, but she has learned to write in spite of it. 

Don't give up on your non-writer.  There is hope.  

I've been thinking about that visit to our local high school.  One person commented that it must be a really tough school.  I'm thinking, as in inner city L.A./N.Y./Miami?  This is what I would expect to see in inner city L.A., but we are out here in the middle of nowhere, AZ.  I don't think we have a tough school, necessarily.  Actually I think most high schools in America have come to this.  As things have gone downhill with grades, teacher and student behavior, administrative foibles, and the endless black hole effect of pouring money into the school system, we have added more and more rules.  No prayer. No Bibles.  Carry I.D. Fenced-in campuses. Campus police.  No pocket knives, squirt guns, bubble gum, aspirin, etc.  It's just proof that you can't legislate righteousness.  After putting all these rules into practice, we still have more problems. 

The real problem with public school is in the heart of most of those who are involved with it -- government officials, board members, teachers, parents.  The students are the victims. Public school is a mess that I don't want my kids to experience.  With a different foundation (the Bible) and a different outlook, and a very different goal, public school could be a great ministry.  But it isn't. And it's not God's way to begin with.  It's one of those carts from 2 Samuel 6.  When David saw that the Philistine heathen had put the ark of God on a new cart in 1 Samuel 6, he probably thought, What a great idea! That would be much more efficient than having the priests carry the ark. But putting the ark on a cart resulted in disaster for David and his people. God didn't care how the heathen transported the ark, but his own people were to follow the instructions he had given Moses. God's way was to carry the ark, no matter what extra work was involved.  We (my family) are God's people.  Public school has been around for a long, long time, but for God's people, it's a new cart. God's way to educate our children is to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4.  He gives us many warnings to keep away from the ways of the heathen (the heathen aren't just in deep dark Africa -- they shop at Wal*Mart) and to depart from those who teach contrary to God's word.  Sure. It would be much more convenient to send my kids to school, and a lot less work for me.  But it's not God's way at all. It's bound to result in disaster.

I don't believe the fact that we homeschool makes us better than you or anyone else.  However, I do believe with all my heart that my children are better off than those who attend public school, and our home life is better off for it, too.  Anything and everything in us that is good is not there because we are good, but because of the grace of God and the blood of Jesus Christ.  No matter what other way is out there, we are content to do our schooling God's way.  I feel sorry for those kids behind bars.  And I feel sorry for those teachers, administrators and government people who can't figure out why their system isn't working.  They'll never get it until they read and believe God's word and put it into practice.  Public school is now a doomed system graduating doomed students (if they graduate at all). No new carts for us, thank you.