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

by Sarah Mackenzie

He didn’t mean teach your calm children in a calm manner on a calm afternoon. He didn’t even mean teach on a full night’s sleep (thank goodness). 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.

Not an hour passes without the enormity of the task I have taken on bringing me to my knees. This work of homeschooling and raising hearts and souls and bodies is hard. It is more than I can do in my own strength. Even so, more than anything else, I desire to teach and mother in a way that pleases God. Some days that feels like feeding the five thousand. But He is not asking me to feed the five thousand; He just wants me to bring my basket of loaves and fish and lay them at His feet.

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.

We have been charged to cultivate the souls of our children, to nourish them in truth, goodness, and beauty, to raise them up in wisdom and eloquence. It is to those ends that we labor.

All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.

Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender.

It is so exhausting—sometimes even demoralizing—to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it.

What is keeping you from speeding through the reading curriculum, flying through the math book, checking off the lesson plans, and maximizing efficiency? Usually the answer is: people. Can you hit the pause button on your frustration long enough to realize that people rank infinitely higher than anything else on the list?

Whatever is getting in the way of your plan for the day—the toddler’s tantrum, the messy bedroom, the sticky juice leaking all over the fridge and into the cracks of the drawers, the frustrated child, the irritable husband, the car that won’t start, the cake the dog dragged under the couch . . . whatever that intrusion into your grand plan for the day is, it’s also an opportunity to enter into rest.

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.

I can’t teach from rest unless I trust Him with my kids’ education too. I am not meant to take on this task of teaching and raising my children in my own strength, and neither are you.

Don’t aim for a rigorous education, Kern and Perrin both told me. 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.

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.

The Greek historian Plutarch once wrote, “The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.”7

Much of our anxiety in homeschooling could be sidestepped by simply acknowledging who we are trying to please.

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 isn’t asking me to succeed on the world’s terms. He’s asking me to faithfully do the work.

All true education begins in wonder and ends in wisdom—as

It is easy to forget that teaching is holy work.

It takes a certain fortitude, after all, to look at a pile of dishes and see it as the makings of a cathedral. 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.

I don’t really have any idea how I’m supposed to tackle everything ahead of me in this day, this year, this decade when that’s all I’ve got. It’s just a couple loaves of bread and a few fish. Apparently, that’s all He needs.

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.

When we begin the day by offering it up to God, we acknowledge that no matter what comes our way, we are doing it all for His pleasure. We remind ourselves that He is who He says He is, and that nothing matters except pleasing Him. Whether or not our children bicker all day, whether or not we get through the lesson plans, whether or not we barely hang on while everything falls apart around us—none of it matters except that we offer it up to God.

Grant to me keenness of mind, capacity to remember, skill in learning, subtlety to interpret, and eloquence in speech. May You guide the beginning of my work, direct its progress, and bring it to completion.

We beg God to use us to fulfill His purpose, and then we see that every frustration in the day ahead is an answer to that very prayer.

We are responsible for presenting the feast, but we can’t always predict when or how that encounter will happen. It likely won’t be as tidy and quantifiable as we think it should be.

Much of the best learning cannot be proven, measured, or easily demonstrated. The kind of encounters that form our children’s hearts, minds, and souls occur as they come in contact with great books and learn to ask hard questions—and their minds are trained to think logically and well.

the trouble arises when we value the timeline over the child God gave us to teach.

Change the way you assess your success. The quality of study matters far more than the mere quantity of learning.

If anyone can be sure that “unanticipated situations” will arise, it is a homeschooling mother. It’s helpful to allow room for them, even if we can’t necessarily see them coming.

Allow your small children to play with whatever is in the box at the kitchen table or on a blanket on the floor. Some ideas for what to put inside: playdough Color Wonder markers and paper (no mess!) a rice or bean sensory tub a tub of water with funnels, measuring spoons and cups, etc. animal figurines (my kids love the Toobs from Safari Limited) a snack in a muffin tin (they can move their snack from liner to liner, taking bites here and there but mostly playing!) paintbrush and a small dish of water (to be used in the high chair; this also makes a fabulous outdoor activity with fat brushes and a bucket of water—tell your small child to “paint the deck” while you read aloud to the others on a picnic blanket) pattern blocks chunky wooden puzzles lacing cards

By definition, to be efficient is to achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. But relationships don’t flourish or grow that way. Relationships need time, spent lavishly. Homeschooling is all about relationships, and relationships just aren’t efficient.

What if, instead of trying to make the most of our time, we worked harder at savoring it? What if we were more intentional and lavish with our time and more detached from our checklists?

“Keep cutting back until there is peace in your home,” says Nancy Kelly, a Charlotte Mason Consultant and blogger at Sage Parnassus.20 If education is in part an atmosphere, then creating an atmosphere of peace should be of utmost importance.

Today, do less. Do it well.

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others. —Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

one thing is abundantly clear to me: A peaceful and happy mother is the real key to successful homeschooling.

We can read up on every curriculum on the market, listen to podcasts, devour articles, attend conferences, participate in co-ops or support groups, but none of this will have the same impact on the life of a homeschooling family as a peaceful and happy mother.

What creates an environment in which you can thrive? How can you work with your own innate strengths and weaknesses so that your homeschool will be happy and humming,

The most important thing every teacher should understand is that teaching is the art of being imitated. If you want a student to perceive a truth, you have to embody it. That’s what teaching is. When you teach, whether you intend to or not, you are saying to your students, “imitate me.” Make yourself worthy of imitation.22

it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.25 These children, entrusted to our care, are not mere mortals.

But as important as it is to give our children a solid education (and it is important, don’t misunderstand me), it is far more important that we love them well. Our children need to know that the most important thing about them is not whether they finished their science curriculum or scored well on the SAT. Their worth is not bound up in a booklist or a test score.

You are cultivating your child like a tree, and trees will bear fruit in time. We are taking the long view. Consistency over time goes a long way toward tending our orchard. Faithfully tending to your work each day is what success looks like for the homeschooling mother.

When we meet regularly with other women to read a classic, do an hour of nature study, or learn to paint with watercolors, we are demonstrating with our very lives that the world is worth learning about, our minds are worth cultivating, and people are worth loving. We model delight in learning something new, and we demonstrate what it looks like to find like-minded peers to encourage and to be encouraged by. Isn’t this the very thing we long for our children to do?

“Homeschooling is not about school. It’s about pursuing wisdom; it’s about becoming virtuous beings; it’s about soul transformation.”29

God doesn’t need you. But He wants to work through you.

We should confidently go into our day, thinking to ourselves, “Well, I’m going to make some mistakes today. Thank God for grace, His presence, and His promise to work through me!” and give it our all anyway. We know that God will use our mistakes just as thoroughly as He uses our successes, and so we rest in that.