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I long to live from a place of rest, to teach and mother from peace rather than anxiety.
He meant that we ought to enter into God’s rest and then serve Him wholeheartedly—not out of anxiety, but out of love and trust.
I’m writing this book anyway because the message keeps rattling around in my heart and I won’t be able to shake it free until I learn to embrace it:
Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, O Lord.
We choose anxiety as our guide instead of humbly submitting to God and letting Him guide us.
We may sit at His feet; we may begin our day with prayer, Bible reading, and supplication, but is our teaching and mothering transformed by it? Do we really trust Him? Do we live each day from a state of rest?
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.
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 i...
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Giving our all. The raising of children,
the teaching of truth, the sharing of life, the nourishing of imagination, and the cultivating of wisdom: These are all His anyway; we are merely His servants.
Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender.
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
Rest Is Not Ease
teaching from rest will take diligence, attention, and a lot of hard work.
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.
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.
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.”
When we are diligent, even our mundane daily tasks can be offered up to God as gifts of love and sacrifice.
“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
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.
unshakable peace is not tied to my success at all. It’s tied to faithfulness.
secular culture is made up of virtues run wild,
Rest is the virtue between negligence and anxiety,
When we are weak in virtue, we inch toward vice.
I failed to build a bridge at all between the child in front of me and the man God intended him to become.
“The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.”7
Luke 6:40 we learn that a student, fully formed, will become like his teacher.
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. 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.
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 assigned task. He is...
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Rather, He asks us to live excellently—that is, to live in simple, obedient faith and trust.
All true education begins in wonder and ends in wisdom—as
The daily mundane is holy ground because the ordinary tasks of a monotonous Monday are where we meet our Maker.
You can cultivate the soil (education is an atmosphere!), thin them (a discipline!), and water them (a life!).
We only receive grace for reality.
prayer puts aside “doing” in favor of “being” and “becoming”: being in His presence and becoming more like Him.
the resource will be our servant, not our master.
How you teach is just as important as what you teach.
The quality of study matters far more than the mere quantity of learning.
A stack of books. Hours of reading. Poetry. Long walks outside. Bike rides. Spelling words. Visits to the orchards. Sitting for hours with toddlers on laps, flipping through picture books, singing silly rhymes. Algebra problems. Library visits. Outings. Winter evenings spent huddled around a board game or listening to a story. Phonics. Handwork. A five-paragraph essay. Baking soda-and-vinegar volcanoes. Mapwork. Drawing. Music. Conversations about everything under the sun. A garden. A grammar page. A memorized fact. A meal eaten with grandparents. A camping trip in August.
Live your life, relish ideas, wrestle. Remember, think, and converse.
true breadth is achieved through depth.
If you read it slowly, enjoying it, taking time to contemplate the ideas and discuss them with your kids, you are taking on history, geography, writing, vocabulary, theology, and philosophy as well. This isn’t dabbling; it’s wrestling.
Our lives are, by nature, integrated. Our school day should reflect that.
the true goal of education: to order a child’s affections and teach him to love that which is lovely.
A child who loves and hates what he ought is a truly educated child—and that is the larger “point” of education.
We need to come face to face with good ideas—with order, with logic, and with truth. We need to focus on the first things so that we may look back and know that we have done what we were called to do.
Then, live your life. Do it in front of and with your kids. Plant a garden, keep house, learn to knit, cook, listen to audio books, visit new places, take factory tours, go to parks, sing, watch a play, go to museums, make music, take walks, care for pets, build things, watch films, listen to the stories of grandparents and elderly neighbors, go to church, celebrate the seasons, decorate the house for the holidays, create family traditions, play with art, visit the library and learn how to use it, go to the farmer’s market, pick berries, read poetry and commit some to memory.
