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

by Sarah Mackenzie

The builders of medieval cathedrals knew what it meant to work their entire lives to please God without ever expecting to see their work completed. Many cathedrals would take more than a hundred years to build—more than the span of a man’s lifetime. I once heard a story of an artisan who worked tirelessly for many years to carve a beautiful bird into the wood of a portion of the cathedral that would be covered up. When someone asked why he was working so hard on something that no one would see, he replied, “Because God sees.” God sees your little wooden bird too. Just as the artisans and carpenters of old built beautiful cathedrals for the glory of God, so do you. Yes, you—you who work tirelessly day after day over a geography lesson, a math test, a laundry pile, a kitchen sink. Those are the moments wherein you build cathedrals for God. We are doing the small, difficult tasks day by day, one stone at a time. The cathedral builders toiled for years of their lives without knowing whether they would see the finished cathedral—the holy place to which they had given their lives. A homeschooling mother acts on similar faith—adding one small brick at a time—wondering if it makes a difference, if anyone will ever notice, if those small quotidian tasks will ever add up in a meaningful way. At the end of our lives, He is going to look into our hearts. What is it He will find there, I wonder? Will He find that we used the geography lesson, the dreaded math test, the teetering laundr...