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

by Sarah Mackenzie

“The most important thing a homeschooling mother can do is to teach from a state of rest.”

He didn’t mean teach your calm children in a calm manner on a calm afternoon. He didn’t even mean teach on a full night’s sleep (thank goodness). He meant that we ought to enter into God’s rest and then serve Him wholeheartedly—not out of anxiety, but out of love and trust.

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.

We worry. We fret. We know, deep down in the core of our being, that we are not enough. That what we offer is a pittance compared to the task before us. We feel small and insignificant because we are small and insignificant.

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.

Have you considered that God may have scooted these people into view for the very purpose of slowing you down?

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 one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination.

What we are really aiming for in giving our children a rigorous education is not just doing hard things, but cultivating a habit of focused attention.

When we are diligent, even our mundane daily tasks can be offered up to God as gifts of love and sacrifice.

When she doesn’t understand the day’s lesson, it isn’t a setback; it’s just God showing us our marching orders for the day.

we are doing them an equal disservice by ignoring their formation and leaving our children to form themselves.

“The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.”7 Modern translations of Plutarch’s maxim tell us that education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire, but we must remember that a fire does indeed need to be lit and then stoked, or else it will burn out.

Who am I trying to impress, anyway? What ends up on my list of essentials may not look remarkable to the state or to anyone else, but I just have to keep reminding myself: That doesn’t matter. I cannot serve two masters, and neither can you. Whose “well done” are you working for?

Success in God’s eyes may not always look like the success we were seeking,

Faithfulness is showing up every day to do the work He has called us to.

He isn’t asking me to succeed on the world’s terms. He’s asking me to faithfully do the work.

Rather, He asks us to live excellently—that is, to live in simple, obedient faith and trust.

I tend to get lost in the details of large-family life when I’m right in the midst of it. It takes a certain fortitude, after all, to look at a pile of dishes and see it as the makings of a cathedral. The daily mundane is holy ground because the ordinary tasks of a monotonous Monday are where we meet our Maker.

The Master Gardener has charged you to plant it with seeds, to cultivate the soil, to tend to the plants and help them to flourish. He did not throw some seeds at you and tell you that you were responsible for the miracle of turning them to ripe, plump vegetables.

You can cultivate the soil (education is an atmosphere!), thin them (a discipline!), and water them (a life!).

Be encouraged. Those seeds our Lord has tucked into your hand can bear great fruit in the kingdom of God—but it takes something from you. It takes a reliance on providence, a commitment to faithful stewardship, and a state of restful trust. Cultivate your garden.

Remember your true task. Surrender everything. Bring your loaves and your fish, even if you think them completely insufficient. They are insufficient. You are insufficient. But His grace is not. God is not limited by objective reality. His yoke is easy and His burden light.

An indispensable part of bringing our basket, prayer puts aside “doing” in favor of “being” and “becoming”: being in His presence and becoming more like Him.

Curriculum isn’t something we buy. It’s something we teach. Something we embody. Something we love. It is the form and content of our children’s learning experiences.

It is wise to evaluate our pace in light of our child—the trouble arises when we value the timeline over the child God gave us to teach.

Live your life, relish ideas, wrestle. Remember, think, and converse. That is a curriculum you cannot buy, but your child’s heart and mind will feast on it for years to come.

Education becomes a series of checkboxes and canned activities in our efforts to prove that learning is happening, even when it isn’t.

The point, then, is to put true, good, and beautiful ideas in front of our children and then to let them feast on them.

Don’t get so distracted by thirty-six weeks of carefully plotted lesson plans that you miss the glory that is already yours for the taking.

Based firmly on the idea that the purpose of education is to teach our children to love that which is lovely,

She is not a project to be managed but a soul to be cultivated.

Jesus did not do it all. Jesus didn’t meet every need. He left people waiting in line to be healed. He left one town to preach to another. He hid away to pray. He got tired. He never interacted with the vast majority of people on the planet. He spent thirty years in training and only three years in ministry. He did not try to do it all. And yet, he did everything God asked him to do.

Today, do less. Do it well.

It never occurred to me, during all that reading and pondering, that I just might burn out if I didn’t consider my own personality and my own teaching style as well.

enjoy teaching life skills. I’d rather teach my kids how to bake a cake than how to make a paper-bag puppet.

I have a tendency to start strong and then fizzle. This means I must have good habits in place to help carry me through when I’m feeling less enthusiastic.

The most important thing every teacher should understand is that teaching is the art of being imitated. If you want a student to perceive a truth, you have to embody it. That’s what teaching is. When you teach, whether you intend to or not, you are saying to your students, “imitate me.” Make yourself worthy of imitation.

The Sabbath rest and the regular feasts were not given so that God’s people would do nothing, though it did mean ceasing from typical daily labor. Rather it was meant as a time for a particular kind of robust activity—feasting, celebration and blessing.

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

“It is our part to offer what we can, his to finish what we cannot.”

Chesterton tells us that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

I wonder how good a job we can do at nurturing the beautiful humanity in our children if we are disengaged so thoroughly from our own.

We don’t view our children as products coming off a factory line—no,

“The gospel isn’t about rolling up our sleeves and trying harder. The gospel is about tapping into His power.”