Spring is here and the forward motion of the newness leaves me with an undeniable truth.

New is good.

Over my short lifetime I would be able to, with good reason, label myself unapologeticaly  sentimental.

(Unapologeticaly is not a word.  In the spirit of honesty).

However.

I have learned that sometimes sentimentality gets in the way of the new.

It gets in the way of the growing and the stretching and the moving.

I want to grow and move and stretch.

I love my history and all that it entails, but I also love the idea of my future.  A future involving the plans of a sovereign God toward me.

Therefore, I am moving on from this blog.  It’s been good.  Nah, it’s been great!  I have loved every moment of writing, posting, and planning.  But it was an experiment from the beginning, with admittedly very little foundation.  Experiments typically end up being a stepping stone to something else.

I am currently on the road to planning that something else.   I’ll be around.  Don’t you worry.

Thanks for everything.

~heather

I will qualify that by saying that you don’t have to buy your family members crocheted Barbie princess toilet paper covers in order to follow this ideal.   Unless they really, really want it.  In that case,  well,  go for it with gusto.

Dig around in that bag you carry around, full of feelings and memories and scruffle to the bottom and find those sweet flowers of  “good”  that aren’t big and out front and clearly seen.  The ones that happen every single day.  The little realities gifted to you from a big, untamed God.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

happy birthday, anna bird.

we love you.

It has to do with education.

I will let you mature adults snicker and snort behind your hands for a second and then I will continue.

Many of you are aware of the fact that The Semi-Indomitable Schrock Clan of the Midwest home educates their young.  No, I didn’t not say eat our young.  I said we teach them.

However, you also know that we are not so narrow as to assume that that is the only kind of educating being done.  I was schooled in America’s public school system until I reached high school, when my parents decided to begin our home education.  It was quite an interesting adjustment.  Each of the family members had to find their rhythm, their style, their habits.  It took infinite patience on our mother’s part and a few times we felt like we were going to implode.   We didn’t.  Namely, because our loving parents continued to let us tease our hair and tightroll our pants,  heathens.

And, now as adults, we are so grateful for the efforts and sacrifices our parents made to make it possible.

My husband, on the other hand, was home educated through his grade school, junior high, and high school years.  He has never known anything else, and at the age of_ahem_almost 35  (sorry, babe),  he has seen quite an interesting shift in the world of home schooling from when he began at age 4 or 5.   Back then,  it was a very grassroots type of idea with very ardent parents,  all of them doing it with a determination that defied the naysayers, of whom were many.

It also required that you wear the waistband of your jeans in your armpits,  apparently.  Oh no?  That was just the 80’s you say?  Riiiiight.  Uh, huh.  Gotcha.  Wink.

Now, it is a more popular option, made more accessible by a myriad of resources and a plethora of successful home educated graduates, lending more than  a bit of credence to the whole idea that yes, you can be successful even if you did your math in your pajamas. And by the allowance for non-home school regulation pant lengths, i.e. all the way to the ankle.

It has been interesting, this journey of finding our own way through the decisions, the balancing act that many times presents itself.  This curriculum, or that one?  Classical or unschool?  Self-directed or parent-controlled?

In my pursuit to better solidify my reasons, as a mother, for exerting myself in this particular way,  I try to continue enriching my own mind, my own life,  through reading,  writing,  teaching other children in settings that expand my patience and threshold of grace.  Because I am realizing that for me,  home educating isn’t just about teaching them facts, and dates, and names, and places and eating a boat load of peanut butter and jelly.   It’s not about winning the National Spelling Bee.  Really.  It’s not.

Seriously.

Whatever.

Anyway,  I want my children to grow up intuitively.  Knowing who God made them to be as intensely individual beings, and above all, to know who God is.  And for them to know that, yes,  they are weird, but that weird totally rocks.

Additionally,  I am fervently praying that they don’t grow up with my home school pants issues.

So, in my heart today,  a gentle shift has occurred.  Perhaps the most obvious change will be an addition to our schedule for more of their ideas to pour forth.

I began reading Isaac Watts’ book The Improvement of the Mind to Which is added A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth, whew!, about a year ago.  Didn’t get very far because, well,  have you read any of his work?  I would say the word discourse doesn’t even begin to describe the wealth of insight in this particular book.  I don’t go by the chapter,  I have to read by paragraph, people.

Just a couple quotes from the book to send you on your merry, parenting way,  home school parent or not.  Because we all know no matter what type of education we have chosen for our progeny,  we want to make sure they are getting what they need, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.  In short, we want them to walk tall, as adults,  knowing why they are here,  and what they are meant to do,  not as a career,  but simply as a life lived well before God and man.

Excerpt:

Chapter I, Rule I.

” Deeply possess your mind with the vast importance of a good judgment, and the rich and inestimable advantage of the right reasoning. Review the instances of your own misconduct in life: think seriously with yourselves how many follies and sorrows you had escaped, and how much guilt and misery you had prevented, if from your early years you had but taken due pains to judge aright concerning persons, times, and things.  This will awaken you with lively vigour to address yourselves to the work if improving your reasoning powers, and seizing every opportunity and advantage for that end.”

Chapter I, Rule IV.

“Presume not too much upon a bright genius, a ready wit, and good parts;  for this, without labour and study, will never make a man of knowledge and wisdom. This has been an unhappy temptation to persons of a vigorous and gay fancy, to despise learning and study.  They have been acknowledged to shine in an assembly, and sparkle in a discourse on common topics, and thence they took in into their heads to abandon reading and labour, and grow old in ignorance:…”

Taken from Isaac Watts book, The Improvement of the Mind.

Goodbye Sweet Garden.  See you in the Spring.

I have posted his crazy facial antics here before. This time, he kept shooting his face and then turning the camera over, looking at the screen, and giggling.  He was thoroughly enjoying the effects of the barrel distortion on his nose.  Like a personal mad-house mirror.

I don’t know where he gets it.

Mom,  you know where he got it, but you aren’t allowed to tell.  Ever.

When you have been sleeping in a tent in 42 degree weather for several nights, you view your bed differently.

The unadulterated quiet also made us realize how frantic we tend to be.  It was so nice to have no cell phone signal, or laptop access, or people knocking on our door.  It was just us and God’s green earth.  And, occasionally, the random neighbor camper or ever diligent park ranger.

Other than that we sometimes forgot to even check the time.

Oh, yeah.  It’s probably time for lunch.

We walked,  we hiked some pretty rugged trails,  we read by the fire at night with a flashlight,  we prayed,  we laid and napped in the silence of our tent,  and we learned a little bit more about what it means to stop moving and appreciate the breath God has given us.

We were also reminded of some of the muscles God intends for us to use on a more regular basis, but that is another story for another day.

It was so wonderful,  even the freezing to death at night, because it just brought us closer as a family.   We learned to depend on each other just a little more.

I hope your weekend will be a blessed one.

For the first time in our eleven years of marriage.

One seasoned camper (me), another not-so-seasoned camper (my man), one avid cub scout age 9,  a little girl age 7 who has just declared she can’t stand camping (she has never even been camping),  and a little 4 year old of the male gender who hates walking.  I mean really, really hates walking.  Maybe I can bait him on our hikes by dangling a granola bar from the back of my pack.

What have we done.

It’s called breaking the old mold and getting out of a rut.  Having a bit of adventure out there in the wilderness (the local state part that has actual potties),  and learning what it means to go without a bath and shaving for a few days.  The kiddos don’t shave so that wasn’t much incentive.   Big whoop.   But the part about not having to take baths kinda made them look a little excited.  It was when I mentioned roasting marshmallows and reading the next book in the Narnia series inside the tent that got them all excited and bothered.

This could work after all.

Now, here’s hoping there are many laughs, lots of memories made,  and not too many midnight trips down the dark, dark, dark  hill to the loo.

See you on Monday.  Have a blessed,  warm and cozy and aren’t-you-grateful-you-have-a-bathroom-right-down-the-hall  weekend.

However, lately, with my mind more and more on this idea of deliberate living, I have come to understand something.  It is  something I had in my head.  I tend to be smart that way,  holding all kinds of  stuff up there.  I tend to think I am smart, anyhow.

Don’t we all.

Application is the crux of the matter I have said to students.  It hurts my heart that I don’t often listen to my own advice.  Or rather, not my advice, but words I have stolen in a different form, stealthy, from the book of Hebrews.

It is this thing called faith.

This thing of living in strength not my own, of taking steps illuminated by the Spirit.  It is one thing to know and another thing entirely to do.

I find Exhaustion and Despair too often my companions instead of Hope and Strength.  Weariness and Cynicism instead of Dependence and Humility.

I know all the old analogies of sitting on that ugly, metal chair in the youth room.  Did you sit in the chair?  The youth leader addresses our skinny, circa 1994 faces.  Well, you trusted the chair to hold you.  That’s faith.  Uh, huh.  That’s it right there.

Huh?

Nothing against that analogy, but that hasn’t made a lick of sense this whole time and I haven’t had the guts to say so.  So now it’s off my chest and I can move on.

The only problem with that analogy is the only reason we sat on that paint-spattered chair is because we knew something about it.  We were familiar with it.  Gracious, we had sat on it a thousand times.  We were educated, almost not knowing we were, to know that it was going to hold us. We had seen it, touched it, felt it, time after time after time and it had never failed us before.

Faith isn’t just sitting in the chair.

It’s grasping the witness of truth, the reputation of a holy God and banking on the fact that everything He says is true.  But in order to do that, we need to know Him.  Know the details, the testimonies, the history, the past, present, and future of the God we serve.  Get to know His dimensions, His strength.   Get to know the difference between Him and all the flimsy, worldly holograms.

That comes through relationship.  There cannot be  faith without relationship of some sort.

Even new believers understand they are resting in a record.  A record never broken of a perfect God,  consistent through the ages, the great I Am.

Not only,  what is He going to do?

But, what has He already done?

Faith is a sprint that, suddenly, turns into a marathon right when you think you have achieved the pace.  It’s a sucker punch realizing twenty-five years into the Christian experience that I know how to do the sprint part,  it’s the long-haul that is the rabid struggle.

I have come to realize I want one thing.

To know God.

Beyond the promise of heaven, beyond the initial moment of salvation.  I want to know Him for now, for today’s gritty battles, for tomorrow’s unknowns.  And praise Him for yesterday’s care, myself unaware.

Do I know God well enough to rest in Him for all the sufficiency He offers?

I pray someday I will be able to offer a resounding, yes.