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Dear Homeschooler To Be:
One my favorite Bible verses is 3 John 4: “I could have no greater joy than to hear that my children live in the truth.” You can almost hear the apostle’s fatherly pride as he realizes the young Christians he has taught are living out the truth of the Gospel. Two millennia later the same joy exudes from a parent’s heart when they witness their own children owing God’s truth.
Having home-schooled all four of my kids at one time or another, I’ve had opportunities to observe my children “embracing” truth close-up. An academic discussion might evolve into a heart lesson revealing the Father’s love. The truth of His Word would resonate, awakening us, bringing parent and students to a place of spiritual ownership.
Huddling around our television on September 11, 2001, our family gawked at the fiery images of New York City. Overcome with fear, I am ashamed to say I didn’t behave calmly around my kids.
Within a few hours when the panic had evolved into cautious calm, the event brought into focus something we had been studying for weeks: a Bible Prophecy/Holocaust Unit Study.
From its beginning in the fall of 2001, the intensive study had been rejected by my three teenage daughters. They complained often with their assigned reading of the Hiding Place and The Diary of Anne Frank. The Bible prophecy discussion and the current struggle with modern day Israel did not capture their interest like I had hoped. Even watching the Billy Graham classic, The Hiding Place, a movie about the life of Corrie ten Boom, met with a yawn. Such topics had seized me as a young Christian in the 1970’s and I assumed it would hook them as well. Very discouraged in teaching the subject, I began to question the strong impression I had felt all summer. “Why do we have to learn about such a depressing thing?” one teen asked. “The Lord is directing me…” I answered meekly, not too sure at this point that I had heard God correctly.
God’s leading is sometimes beyond our understanding until we have a little hindsight. September 11th brought the picture into focus. “I think I understand why we had to learn about the Jews,” my fourteen year old announced on our way to choir practice that day. She could see the connection with my strong impression and her suddenly wanting to understand the biblical whys of current events. So went an unusual school year.
With one teenage son still under my tutelage, I am taking the final steps of a homeschool journey less crowded as his older sisters are now receiving life’s lessons in other venues. Though the days of cuddling up with books and conducting smelly science experiments are a distant memory, my present influence in my children’s lives is still necessary but in a different way. Less hands-on; more knees-on-the-floor, I understand that persuading my children to walk in righteousness is a work of God, not me. Young adults can no longer be carried or held in laps but nonetheless be carried to the Lord in prayer, laid on His altar along with our own lack of trust in His faithfulness. We continue to ask God to call and keep our older children in His truth!
The question I grapple with is: Are the choices my children make today to walk in the truth a direct result of my home schooling them? Many years ago, I might of answered an emphatic YES to that question. It took almost twenty years of parenting to figure out that God has no set-in-stone formula to turn out godly children because when its all said and done, the righteousness of Christ is a work of God; not us. The Jewish dad who let his prodigal leave home to squander the family money most likely clung to the promise, “train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he shall not turn from it”. Proverbs 22:6 Homeschooled in Jewish tradition, the boy charged ahead in riotous living while the father hoped and prayed in heartbreak. In the same way, many homeschooling parents have watched in horror as the culture has lured and devoured their child in a life of wrong choices.
God is able to draw the hearts of our children to Jesus as we surrender their futures to Him in prayer. When our Jesus becomes their Jesus we may sing with the apostle, “I have no greater joy!”
As an administrator of a California Independent Study Program I encourage first time home educators to ask the Lord to show them HIS plan for their family. By seeking and knocking, surrendering and waiting, the Lord Jesus reveals to parents what that plan is. The God who stamped unique fingerprints on our hands, may have a different educational plan for that particular family than He does for the Harvey Homeschooler’s family across the street. Unlike direct demands in scripture, there is no mandate in the Bible to homeschool your children, but rather specific instruction about teaching them.
Deuteronomy 11:18-19 “So commit yourselves completely to these words of mine. Tie them to your hands as a reminder, and wear them on your forehead. 19Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away on a journey, when you are lying down and when you are getting up again…. “
Am I contradicting myself here? Isn’t this homeschooling, you may ask? Perhaps the question should be, “is the teaching described here only available through home education?” Homeschooling may bring school to home by providing an environment of curriculum, books, whiteboards, science lab materials, paper, and DVDs. It may not embrace the commands of Deuteronomy 11 for what is being described here are heart lessons that happen through relationship with our children, not necessarily the academics that happen at our kitchen tables. Are we to limit our children’s discipleship within the boundaries of homeschooling or is our Father able to give grace to those who choose public schooling for their children? If we rigidly hold to the former and deny the latter, we limit God Himself. What about the single mother trying to earn a living for her family while rising children to follow the Lord?
He is the Craftsman who gives us what we need to accomplish discipleship. The method we use to instruct our children is just a tool He places in our hands. The key to child-rearing is found in our utter dependency upon Jesus Christ in John 15:5.
“I am the Vine; you are the branches. Whoever lives in Me and I in him bears much (abundant) fruit. However, apart from Me (cut off from vital union with Me) you can do nothing.” Amplified Bible
Clinging to Jesus will be your salvation (literally!). This abiding in the vine guarantees a bountiful fruit harvest in your life, but two things are out of your control: how it is accomplished and what type of fruit is produced. When we try to produce fruit in other people’s lives, we often end up only controlling their outward behavior. This type of control does not produce a heart change, which only Christ is able to bring about.
We need not be concerned with the path that God chooses for the child to walk on. We only need to rest in the Vine in complete surrender. Appears easy enough, doesn’t it? But at times resting seems like the hardest job on the planet because it involves abandoning trust in ourselves and our own abilities. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit,” says the Lord of Hosts in Zechariah.
Here may be a controversial statement to the homeschooling community: God may choose to use the public school system or a private religious campus school in your own particular journey in life. He has used both public schooling and home schooling in our four children’s lives.
It began with deep desire and lots of prayer. The Lord did some amazing things, giving me scripture in an amplified way (like getting the same verse in Proverbs three times in one week in three different ways).
During the Spring of 1998, I had been praying about my 8th grader. She was enrolled in a local public school and several months before her graduation I began to pray about her homeschooling through high school. Through some circumstances, her two younger sisters were already being home educated and I felt a strong impression that I was to pray her home. Since she was an A-student, had a good heart toward us, and was looking forward to high school, I decided to let her make the decision about being home educated. I only casually mentioned the possibility to her in April of that year. I then asked God to speak directly to her.
About two weeks before her 8th grade graduation, I got this verse in Proverbs three separate times in three different ways. “There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death.” Proverbs 14:12. I even woke up one morning dreaming the verse. I knew that the verse was related to this child. I decided that if my daughter asked to be home-schooled that such a request would be a confirmation of the Lord’s leading.
On our way to her 8th grade graduation practice, my daughter surprised me with, “Mom, I think the Lord wants me to homeschool next year…” I was so overwhelmed with emotion, I could hardly see the road as I blinked away tears. Feeling very loved by the Lord, as if He very holding my hand, we began to move forward into the unknown territory of teaching high school.
Would public high school have meant “death” for this daughter? Never for one moment did I believe her enrollment would of meant physical death for her, but I felt she would have experienced some type of death in her spirit. My daughter is a unique individual, so God had a very unique path for her to walk on. She eased into home education and developed as a person socially and spiritually. For the most part it was a positive experience for her.
Yet I have another daughter who was homeschooled since 4th grade, and as a junior in high school, my husband made the decision to allow her to attend public high school. After a fun weekend away visiting my cousin, I was greeted in my driveway by this teen with, “Dad says I get to start high school on Monday.” It was mid-October, 2003. I had already purchased her books, a satellite classroom hookup, and she was well into the semester with live classroom instruction at the kitchen table. Did I panic? No way! My husband and I had prayed for months over this child. Daily, sometimes agonizing prayer, “God help us! Please help us with this daughter!”
This sudden move to public education was the antithesis of what my home schooling worldview would have instructed me to do especially with this somewhat challenging daughter. Yet when faced with the decision, I felt absolutely no fear (except perhaps of what my fellow homeschooling moms would think of me). Was I anxious about the change for our daughter? Not at all! I rested in my husband’s decision because it stood resolutely on a mountain of our prayers. Placing this sixteen year old in a secular anti-Christian environment six hours a day proved to be God’s direction for our family. Her previous negative behavior ceased for the most part, and she thrived in her academic world. The fruit from years of homeschooling her became evident as she took isolated stands publicly in her classes against the common secular worldview of her peers. Receiving a 75% four year scholarship to U.C.L.A. was connected with this timely move into the public school system. She is working harder than she ever has in her life and her faith is being challenged daily.
Be open to following Jesus as you make this enormous decision to home educate your children. Listen to HIS voice. He will gently nudge you in the way you should go. Home schooling is a wonderful experience, and it has been a blessing in my life, but apart from His grace, I could of never have undertaken it. Kathy Stairs, a veteran homeschooler of 17 years in the Fresno area, suggests you first ask yourself this….
Has He called you? If so, she encourages you…. He will equip you! (you may read Kathy’s online edition of her Introduction to Home Education here.)
So dear homeschooler or those pondering the decision to home school... Surrender the decision to Him as you rest in the Vine. As you do, He will not disappoint you. You will find the way He has chosen for your family. If you are overwhelmed and cannot decide….pray a bit more…. The direction will come whether it be homeschooling or not.
Karon Ruiz
Revised 5/2007 Return to Fresno Sunnyside Christian Academy Home Page
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