The Convivial Homeschool Quotes

“A selfish, complaining heart cannot receive rest, no matter what we do.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Truly, the temptation is an opportunity to rely on God and His grace for carrying on. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. 1 Corinthians 10:13”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“As our children’s guides and coaches, we don’t work to remove all temptations, but we do need to provide the support they need in order to withstand and persevere. We point out the path; we remind them of their armor and weapons; we pray for them and with them; we cheer them on as they endure and grow strong.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“To be tempted is to be confronted by your enemy—whether it’s the world, the flesh, or the devil—and if you try to fight in your own strength and power, you will be overcome. Jesus taught us the way to handle temptation: answer with Scripture, answer with prayer, and we will be delivered from evil by God’s hand, not our own.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“By overcoming our difficulties, we make true progress. Our goal is not to avoid ever having temptations. Encountering temptation is an expected part of life. If Jesus could be tempted yet be without sin, we know that temptation itself is not sin. It is giving in to temptation that is sin.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“It’s as if we’re each journeying in A Homeschool Mom’s Progress. In A Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian started off on the journey because he knew where he wanted to be—the Celestial City—and he knew he wasn’t there yet. Along the way, he took accidental detours and needed reassurance that he was on the right path. His criteria was not “Is this road safe?” but “Will this road take me to the Celestial City?” If the answer was “Yes,” then when there were lions and giants and naysayers and swamps, he persevered. The obstacles he encountered were not signs that he was lost or wrong or failing. They were there on the path as tests, trials, and temptations. Their existence did not make him a rotten pilgrim. No, it’s really only because he kept going that he was a pilgrim at all.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“We don’t parent or educate so that our children skip phases of development; rather, we shepherd them through those phases, ensuring they don’t get stuck and stall out.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Because God never slumbers or sleeps, we can. Because God has the whole world in His hand, we don’t need to be fearful or anxious. We can rest.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“In the Bible, God tells us what will bring us rest and peace in Him: Go to church every Sunday. Read the Bible and pray. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Give thanks in all things. Repent of unkindness, pride, and irritability. Love others. Rejoice always. If all that sounds unreasonable, then we must also repent of our unbelief. Basically, we have to trust God and believe that He knows what He’s talking about when He tells us these things. We can’t claim to need something more than or different from what God says we need. He made us; He knows.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“With His grace, you are able and equipped to pray, love God’s Word, withstand temptation, kill sin, and grow the fruits of the Spirit.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Give yourself grace,” though a commonplace piece of advice in Christian women’s circles today, is never going to work. Grace, in theological terms, is fairly specific, and it isn’t the kind of thing you can give yourself at all. Grace is the favor of God by which He gives us undeserved mercy. Only He can give it because it is only He we have offended.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Learning and growing is a turbulent, stretching process that is not always nice or pretty as it is happening. If we smooth over and prevent every difficulty, in the end, we will find that what we actually prevented was learning, wisdom, and maturity.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“It turns out, though, that all kids are still kids, even if they’re homeschooled. They bicker and squabble. They “forget” and “lose”—both intentionally and unintentionally—schoolwork, books, chores, and assignments. Like other kids—and adults, too—they like to get their own way. They cry and fuss and get angry. They break things, spill things, drop things, and generally interrupt the flow of the day with accidents. They have a hard time cleaning their rooms. They are persons.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Education is learning to know God rightly, to love what He loves, to discover what He has created and what He is doing. Education helps us align our affections and choices with His. Math, grammar, history, and science all proclaim the wonder and glory of God. Each provides a different avenue to know God’s ways better and an opportunity to glorify Him more. Education is to be enjoyed.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. 1 Peter 2:16”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Our job as mothers is not to help our kids feel good about themselves. Our job is to help them feel good about obeying God, knowing and glorifying Him more and more in all they do.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Our children’s primary problem is also guilt. Sure, we’re homeschooling so they can read, write, and do arithmetic, but as we teach, we can’t neglect the health of their souls.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“One hallmark of modernity is a refusal to admit personal guilt. It makes sense. If a person—or a society—denies God, then guilt can also be denied. After all, guilt is only real in relation to a holy God. We are guilty because we fall short of our created purpose, because we have individually and personally ruined what God made good.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Because we are with our children for nearly all the waking hours of their childhoods, we need to get good at dealing with sin—theirs and ours. Ignoring or excusing sin is an easy coping method to slip into when we only interact with people on a short-term basis, but real relationships require repentance and restoration on repeat.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“We are equipped with God’s forgiveness, continually receiving it and then giving it to others.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“When we homeschool, we take on the role of full-time (as in most-waking-hours full-time) parent, teacher, tutor, nurse, and counselor. It feels exhausting because it is likely more responsibility than we’ve ever had to shoulder before, and we’re probably not prepared or equipped for it. The amount of responsibility isn’t a problem; it’s our calling. When God calls us to educate our children at home, He also equips us to do so.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Guilt only disappears when we are made right with God. When we break the laws of God we incur real guilt. The only remedy I know for real guilt is real forgiveness. The price tag for real forgiveness is real repentance. R.C. Sproul, What Can I Do with My Guilt?”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“When we realize that the only truly fundamental problem is sin, and the only answer to that problem is Jesus, we are set free from treating sin’s effects as problems we’re supposed to solve. Instead, we understand that our duty is to worship, obey, and proclaim our Savior, not fix the world.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“When we know our actions are shot through with sin, we don’t become detectives, spotlighting others’ ugliness. Instead, we recognize that we’re bringing plenty of our own, and we ask the Holy Spirit to show us our sin so we can seek forgiveness and a right standing before God. When we see sin in others, especially our children, it should remind us of our own. It is our own sin that we have a responsibility to deal with first.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Knowing the depth of sin in our lives keeps us humble with one another. Even as parents, it’s not our job to root out each and every possible sin in our child’s life. Instead, it’s our job to create a life where there is room for the Holy Spirit to convict, where there is a practice of forgiveness, and where there are no roadblocks to repentance and restoration.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Fruit comes after a season of labor, not as soon as the seed goes in the ground. Our children aren’t annuals, producing a quick crop. They are trees. Trees take years to establish roots and bear fruit, but when the tree is cared for, their yield is for a lifetime. They can also yield more of their kind in time.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Fruit comes after a season of labor, not as soon as the seed goes in the ground.”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Homeschooling for God’s glory means that we must be willing to humbly offer our poor, weak efforts and trust that God is the One making something of them, of us, of our children. Our hope is not set on our daily performance. Our ideals are not the standard by which we measure ourselves. Our failures are expected, given to us so that we may repent, forgiven so that we can rejoice. For this is the will of God, your sanctification. 1 Thessalonians 4:3”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Sometimes, chasing your dreams can be “easier” than just being who we are, where God has placed you, with the gifts he has given to you. Michael Horton, Ordinary”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids

“Not what my hands have done
can save my guilty soul;
not what my toiling flesh has borne
can make my spirit whole. Not what I feel or do
can give me peace with God;
not all my prayers and sighs and tears
can bear my awful load. Thy work alone, O Christ,
can ease this weight of sin;
thy blood alone, O Lamb of God,
can give me peace within. Thy love to me, O God,
not mine, O Lord, to thee,
can rid me of this dark unrest,
and set my spirit free. Horatius Bonar, 1861”
― Mystie Winckler, The Convivial Homeschool: Gospel Encouragement for Keeping Your Sanity While Living and Learning Alongside Your Kids