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

by Sarah Mackenzie

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.

I am not meant to take on this task of teaching and raising my children in my own strength, and neither are you. We are, however, meant to recognize every

facet of our day as coming from the hand of God. It all passes through His fingers first, and He uses it to make sure that we lean hard on Him.

it isn’t a setback; it’s just God showing us our marching orders for the day.

When I take on the challenge of this day with both hands and trust that we are right where He wants us, that’s when I experience unshakable peace.

This.

A curriculum that leaves no room for the soul to breathe will suffocate, but so will the absence of purposeful and intentional teaching.

Rest, therefore, is not the absence of work or a failure to consider and carry out a plan. It is work and leisure, properly ordered. It is doing the right thing at the right time, realizing that our task is to hear God’s call and follow His commands, and then to trust that God will be God—to be at rest even while at work.

He asks us to faithfully commit every day to Him and then to do that day’s tasks well. He’s in charge of the results.

Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.

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

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.

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.

You are insufficient. But His grace is not. God is not limited by objective reality. His yoke is easy and His burden light.

Instead of focusing on what we need to cover in any given year, it may be helpful to think about what we might uncover and master. After all, if our eyes are so fixed on the finish line that we miss the experience entirely, what have we really gained for our labors?

How you teach is just as important as what you teach.

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.

The quality of study matters far more than the mere quantity of learning.

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. It is full and robust, and yet at the very same time, it is simple.

We know that we must begin with surrender, that prayer is foundational, and that our daily grind is holy ground.

They tell me to focus on relationships, to help my children preserve wonder and perceive truth, and to do each day’s work as diligently as I can.

wrote that the fundamental skills of humanity itself are remembering, thinking, and speaking.

She is not a project to be managed but a soul to be cultivated. Let’s consider why we ought to do the right thing at the right time and focus on one main task at a time.

What if, instead of trying to make the most of our time, we worked harder at savoring it? What if we were more intentional and lavish with our time and more detached from our checklists?

It means that we are doing one thing at a time, and we do that thing with all our heart.

The whole underlying principle is that we have to decide ahead of time what the most important thing is to do at any given time in order to banish the worry that we might not actually be doing the best thing possible in this moment.

Remember, we want to love what we ought to love, and shun what we ought to shun.

Little drops of water, Little grains of sand, Make the mighty ocean And the pleasant land. So the little moments, Humble though they be, Make the mighty ages Of Eternity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little deeds of kindness, Little words of love, Help to make earth happy Like the Heaven above.

Today, do less. Do it well.

peaceful and happy mother is the real key to successful homeschooling.

We must look ourselves squarely in the eye and decide what is true about how we operate best, then base our homeschools on those truths, playing to our strengths and providing for our weaknesses.

Or you can take this day, today, this gift of the present, and you can live it. You can seek first the Kingdom of God here on earth, and by doing so, model the best kind of living to your kids.

Rest is not the opposite of work, but rather work of a different order.

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

Fix your eyes on Jesus. Don’t you dare take your eyes off Him, because you will surely sink.

Consistency over time goes a long way toward tending our orchard. Faithfully tending to your work each day is what success looks like for the homeschooling mother.

“It is our part to offer what we can, his to finish what we cannot.”27