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

by Sarah Mackenzie

Can we seek Him first? Can we live and teach from a state of rest? My prayer is that we will. But we must approach the Holy Spirit every single day, asking Him to lead us and to quiet our anxious souls so that we can really bless our children—not with shiny curriculum or perfect lesson plans, but rather with purposeful, restful spirits.

Teaching from rest doesn’t mean that we let our children dictate the curriculum, that we ignore timetables altogether and decide we don’t care if our children ever get into college or pass

their exams. Rest is trusting that God’s got this, even if I’m a mess, even if I’m not enough, even if I mess up every day. Because I do.

Rest looks like stewardship. Consider a garden—a raised bed right outside your kitchen window, perhaps. The Master Gardener has charged you to plant it with seeds, to cultivate the soil, to tend to the plants and help them to flourish. He did not throw some seeds at you and tell you that you were responsible for the miracle of turning them to ripe, plump vegetables. He placed the seeds into your palm, patted your fist lovingly, and asked you to tend them well. To steward them. To help them grow. Remember your place, then. You cannot make the plants grow or bear fruit. You can only plant the seeds. You can water them, and steward them. You can cultivate the soil (education is an atmosphere!), thin them (a discipline!), and water them (a life!). It is only by our cooperation with the grace of God and the laws of nature that the seed becomes a plant and bears fruit. We don’t need to have anxiety about when the plant will grow, about how quickly it will come to fruition—our part is to steward it and do what we can to make sure it has the ability to grow rightly.

Remember your true task. Surrender everything. Bring your loaves and your fish, even if you think them completely insufficient. They are insufficient. You are insufficient. But His grace is not. God is not limited by objective reality. His yoke is easy and His burden light.

I like to picture my children about twenty years down the road. I imagine they are enjoying a meal with friends and are asked about their growing-up years. “You were homeschooled,” a friend says. Then she asks, “What was that like?” Which words, phrases, or sentences do I want my child to use when describing his or her homeschooled childhood? Without contemplating too deeply on this, jot a few things down that are your own gut reactions to the question: What words do you want your children to use when they describe their homeschooled childhood? You don’t really need to go that deep here—just skim the surface and you’re bound to see what matters most to you.

If you want to be a peaceful homeschooling mother, and you want interested, engaged students, you have to schedule margin into your day. This is where it gets tricky, of course, because if you’re going to fill up only 80 percent of your day, you’re going to have to seriously simplify your curriculum. There’s no way around it. Here’s an example of a day with margin scheduled in, though there are an infinite number of ways to schedule your day. How you divide up and schedule work in your home will depend on a variety of factors, including your husband’s work schedule, the number of babies or toddlers underfoot, and a whole host of other variables. SAMPLE DAY WITH MARGIN TIME ALLOTED TIME SCHEDULED 8:00-10:00 Math (60 min.) Latin (30 min.) Phonics with younger kids (15 min.) 120 min. 105 min. 10:00-10:30 Break! Recess; play outside! 10:30-12:00 Morning Time/Symposium (60 min.) 90 min. 60 min. 12:00-2:00 Lunch Quiet reading hour (60 min.) Play outside 2:00-3:00 Writing (45 min.) 60 min. 45 min. 3:00-4:00 Independent work (45 min.)—spelling, typing, workbooks, etc. 60 min. 45 min. TOTAL 5.5 hours 4.25 hours The key to the diagram above is to notice that 4.25 hours of schoolwork has been scheduled into 5.5 hours of the day. There is room, then, to breathe, to take what comes and see all of the unanticipated interruptions as pieces that make up a full and varied life. Life is made up of inconsistencies, so make sure your schedule provides guide rails for your day rather than serv...

Yes, there are oodles of blogs in which crafty moms showcase all the incredibly wonderful things they are doing with their kids. Good for them! I don’t mean that sarcastically at all—I really do mean, good for them. What beauty to watch a mom thrive alongside her children. But there is more than one way. If you aren’t a crafty mom—if the thought of letting your child loose with a can of glitter and a bottle of glue makes you break out in hives (join the club!), then shut your Internet browser and quit looking at Pinterest long enough to figure out what would help you thrive. I have spent a lot of time (too much, actually) thinking about my children’s learning styles. I’ve pondered how to meet their unique needs and provide them with learning opportunities based on their own interests. It never occurred to me, during all that reading and pondering, that I just might burn out if I didn’t consider my own personality and my own teaching style as well. If I’m not thriving as a homeschooling mother, my students are going to suffer for it.

Of course, we must remember: Rest is not the opposite of work, but rather work of a different order. Josef Pieper describes this for us in Leisure: The Basis of Culture: Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul, and as such utterly contrary to the ideal of “worker” in each and every one of the three aspects under which it was analyzed: work as activity, as toil, as social function. . . . For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.24 Restful learning is not throwing all care to the wind, eschewing worthy goals such as mastery of the math facts, the ability to read hard books, or cultivating the art of writing persuasively and well. Remember the account of creation—six days the Lord labored before He rested on the Sabbath. Rest, then, is not the absence of work or toil. It is the absence of anxiety or frenzy.

Tell me this: If you could have a guarantee that your child would be a National Merit Scholar and get into a prestigious college, have good work habits and a successful career, but that your relationship with him would be destroyed in the process, would you do it? Why not? Because you are made to love, that’s why. We care about our relationships more than about our accomplishments. That’s the way God made us. So why don’t we live that way? Why, come a damp and gloomy day in March, do we yell over a math lesson or lose our temper over a writing assignment? Why do we see the lessons left to finish and get lost in an anxiety-ridden haze? We forget that we are dealing with a soul, a precious child bearing the image of God, and all we can see is that there are only a few months left to the school year and we are still only halfway through the math book.

These children, entrusted to our care, are not mere mortals. When you are performing mommy triage—that is, when you have a crisis moment and have to figure out which fire to put out first—always choose your child. It’s just a math lesson. It’s only a writing assignment. It’s a Latin declension. Nothing more. But your child? He is God’s. And the Almighty put him in your charge for relationship. Don’t damage that relationship over something so trivial as an algebra problem. And when you do (because you will, and so will I), repent.

“The gospel isn’t about rolling up our sleeves and trying harder. The gospel is about tapping into His power.”