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

by Sarah Mackenzie

When a person interrupts what you are doing, you [ought to] recognize a representative of Christ. When the dog is seen getting under the sofa with tonight’s dessert, you at once assume that God wants you to put aside the half hour you have been looking forward to (which you meant to spend with a book in church or doing the stations of the Cross) to make another dessert.3

C.S. Lewis once observed: 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

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?

As Laura Ingalls Wilder reminds us, “The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.”5

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?

Yet if Monica had judged the success or failure of her mothering based on her son’s behavior at age twenty, she would have considered herself a failure. Do you see? We must drop the self-inflated view that we are the be-all and end-all of whether the education we offer our children is going to work out.