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

by Sarah Mackenzie

long to live from a place of rest, to teach and mother from peace rather than anxiety.

I’m quite certain that God desires that for

of us—His beloved daughters called to the...

raising up of little hearts and minds. I am just like yo...

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.

Surrender your idea of what the ideal homeschool day is supposed to look like and take on, with both hands, the day that it is. Rest begins with acceptance, with surrender. Can we accept what He is sending today?

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

Peace comes from recognizing that our real task is to wake up each day and get our marching orders from God. It comes from diligence

to the work He hands us, but diligence infused with faith, with resting in God’s promises to guide and bless us.

When my child does not understand a math lesson, it should not disturb my state of peace. After all, God intends that study and work involve challenges that we face and overcome, so we expect difficulties from time to time when teaching our children. Now it’s time to troubleshoot, problem-solve, and come alongside her. 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. My child doesn’t need me to fret and fear; she needs me to love and guide her with grace. Teaching from rest means we don’t panic when things don’t go according to our plan—in fact, we plan for plans not always to work well.

A curriculum that leaves no room for the soul to breathe will suffocate, but so will the absence of purposeful and intentional teaching. If we are doing our children a great disservice by shuttling them through a set

of books and plans without consideration

for their souls, we are doing them an equal disservice by ignoring their formation and leaving our...

Much of our anxiety in homeschooling could be sidestepped by simply acknowledging who we are trying to please. It sounds simplistic, but consider that your day—what you prioritize, what you don’t—will likely look different depending on whether you are doing it all for His pleasure, or doing it all (or only some of it) to please Grandma, the neighbor, or anyone else.

failure in my teaching either by the tools my

Success in God’s eyes may not always look like the success we were seeking, but if we are faithful, we will know His peace and rest in our studies and efforts.

What more success could we want?

Faithfulness is showing up every day to do the work He has called us to. Whether or not things turn out in the end as I’m hoping they will (for my children to have a strong faith, humble and compassionate hearts, a love for learning, and an academic skill set that helps them seek out knowledge and truth every day and everywhere) is not actually within my span of control. It’s not my assign...

But 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. He’s in charge of the results.

Because whether or not he becomes an excellent writer or a proficient mathematician is not your business to worry over. Your business is that single assignment today and loving him through it.

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

Did we even realize that every Monday, every Thursday, every ordinary day, we were standing on holy ground, building a cathedral far more glorious than what we could dream up on our own? 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. Every moment of the daily grind in raising and teaching and loving on them

We are weary because we forget about grace. We act as though God’s showing up is the miracle. But guess what? God’s showing up is the given. Grace is a fact.

can’t always predict when or how that encounter will happen. It likely won’t be as tidy and quantifiable

light of our child—the trouble arises when we value the timeline over the child God gave us to teach. Whether or not you finish your curriculum by May, get through all the lessons in the book,

material” while diminishing your child’s love for learning.

The first step in simplifying the curriculum is gaining clarity in our vision. If we don’t know where we’re going, what our purpose is for our children, our homeschool, and our family culture, it will be impossible to know what should go and what should stay.

find it immensely helpful to tackle fewer subjects, integrate wherever possible, and really come to grips with the limitations of published resources. I also find it helpful to remind myself of the entire reason I’m homeschooling in the first place and then build in review time so that our time and energy is spent in the best possible way.

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.

Keep it simple. Don’t fall for gimmicky curricula that complicates what should be common sense. Read to your children every day (yes, even the older ones!). If you need some inspiration to make this a priority in your home, head to readaloudrevival.com. Set time aside for them to read on their own as well. Have your children write every day. It doesn’t need to be book reports or historical essays. It can be a letter, an e-mail, a grocery list, or a journal entry. Make writing itself a priority. Do some math every day. Don’t belabor it—do it every day and the consistency will do its work without long, drawn-out, arduous lessons.

you can thrive? How can you work with your own innate

peaceful and happy homeschooling mom when I learned to be content with my own preferences and no longer strove to be like the women whose strengths are different from my own. I began working to overcome my weaknesses and growing in grace where I had been lacking. And then I learned that in the end, I’m just me. And that’s just the kind of homeschooling mom I want to be.