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

by Sarah Mackenzie

Here is the bare truth: Not an hour passes without the enormity of the task I have taken on bringing me to my knees. This work of homeschooling and raising hearts and souls and bodies is hard. It is more than I can do in my own strength. 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.

After all, our job is not to be successful—success itself is entirely beside the point. It’s faithfulness that He wants.

The true aim of education is to order a child’s affections—to teach him to love what he ought and hate what he ought. 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.

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.4

Teaching from rest is meaningful learning and growth—but without the anxiety and frenzy so common in our day.

Don’t aim for a rigorous education, Kern and Perrin both told me. If we are aiming to order our children’s affections, learn to love what is lovely, join in the great conversation, and cultivate a soul so that the person is ready in every sense of the word to take on the challenges around the corner and on the other side of the college entrance exams; work toward “diligence” instead.

“Diligence” comes from the Latin diligere, which means to “single out, value highly, esteem, prize, love; aspire to, take delight in, appreciate.” 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.

Through a restful diligence we work at the right things in the right way at the right time—as God gives us that wisdom.

Surely if we can love our enemies, then we can love the laundry, or Latin, or math studies. 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.

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.

unshakable peace is not tied to my success at all. It’s tied to faithfulness.

If our children are images of God (and they are), then we aren’t meeting their needs or tending to their real nature when we swing like a pendulum to either the vice of anxiety or the vice of negligence.

education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire,

Much of our anxiety in homeschooling could be sidestepped by simply acknowledging who we are trying to please.

God is not demanding I be successful on my own. He’s calling me to be faithful and to trust Him for the results, which may not look like what I was expecting.

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.

He never demands that we produce prodigies or achieve what the world would recognize as excellence. Rather, He asks us to live excellently—that is, to live in simple, obedient faith and trust. He asks us to faithfully commit every day to Him and then to do that day’s tasks well.

All true education begins in wonder and ends in wisdom—as

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.

Here’s a hard truth we might as well get used to: Much of the best learning cannot be proven, measured, or easily demonstrated. The kind of encounters that form our children’s hearts, minds, and souls occur as they come in contact with great books and learn to ask hard questions—and their minds are trained to think logically and well.

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.

Its simplicity lies in knowing that we have chosen the better parts, the key ingredients that will have the greatest impact on our students’ lives.

What most curricular models provide today is a survey of everything and mastery in nothing, so our children get an education that is a mile wide and an inch deep. That’s not true education.

The point, then, is to put true, good, and beautiful ideas in front of our children and then to let them feast on them. To sit alongside them and model how one might go about dipping into the feast. We share a giant meal of ideas—contemplating, beholding, loving. We allow ourselves to be transformed by what we come in contact with.

A child who loves and hates what he ought is a truly educated child—and that is the larger “point” of education.

If you have more to do than time to do it in, the simple fact is this: Some of what you are doing isn’t on His agenda for you.

Based firmly on the idea that the purpose of education is to teach our children to love that which is lovely, Morning Time/Symposium is time set aside for contemplation and discussion that offers an opportunity for the homeschooling mom to connect her children directly with beauty, art, poetry, and the ideas that feed and nourish the soul.

When you are trying to teach from a state of rest, employing a Morning Time routine helps you place the emphasis on loving, going deep, and relishing rather than on “getting through.” Nothing stirs up a mom’s anxiety more than pressure to “get through.”

What if, instead of trying to make the most of our time, we worked harder at savoring it?

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

Our children are not projects. If, by the grace of God, we can manage to remember that our children are all made in His image—and more importantly, if we can treat them as such despite the mess and the chaos—then we will really be able to teach from rest.

Therein lies the reason we’ve taken on this arduous task of home education at all—because a government school would not see our children as the image bearers that they are. After reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, there would be no Morning Offering, no Nicene Creed. They would miss countless opportunities to love on their siblings and form deep, meaningful encounters with each other, with us, and with material chosen specifically to nurture their souls. We want all else to pale in comparison to our quest toward honor, virtue, and wisdom.

You are cultivating your child like a tree, and trees will bear fruit in time. We are taking the long view. 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.

What matters is that we seek to imitate Christ. That we order our loves so that our hearts better reflect His.

Cease striving. St. Jerome once said, “It is our part to offer what we can, his to finish what we cannot.”27

If we were teachers in a school, we would be cultivating our professional development because that is what teachers do. So why not invest in ourselves similarly, as teachers within our homes? It takes a subtle paradigm shift to realize that part of our homeschool budget (of both time and money) ought to be set aside for the nurturing of our abilities as teachers of students we have been charged with. Make your own learning and growing a priority, and watch how that impacts the life of your homeschool.

Deciding to devote yourself to scholé—to cultivating truth, goodness, and beauty—not just in your kids, but in yourself—is deciding to be fully human.

If teaching is the art of imitation, then we ought to make ourselves worthy of imitation.

If what we want from our students is the ability to contemplate, behold, and be transformed by truth, beauty, and goodness, we would do well to live that out ourselves.

We don’t view our children as products coming off a factory line—no, we view them as human beings made in the image and likeness of God. We seek to cultivate and nourish their souls on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the arts they study with us in our homes.

There are relationships to cultivate, books to read, oceans to swim in, forts to build, toilets to scrub, bills to pay, paintings to create, dinners to make. This is why we homeschool—because we want to engage in a full-to-bursting life.