Were it in my power to
name this generation, I would lean toward
something like “The Age of Acceleration.” Compare any area of
life now to what life was like 40 years ago. It is hard to find
deceleration anywhere. Media, sports, churches, movies, shops,
restaurants, books, cars, you name it—every major area of our
culture has accelerated, and we’re all trying to keep up.
And, yes, even homeschooling is succumbing to the spirit of the
age. After 20 years of slow and steady growth, fueled mostly by
families choosing to homeschool out of spiritual conviction, it
is rapidly becoming an “industry” and a “market” accelerating up
the growth curve, fueled by families looking for an educational
and social fix.
The predominant, emerging educational model seems based on the
presumption that it is easier to prove that your children do a
lot to learn, than it is to prove that they learn a lot from what
they do. (Read that again; I think it might be profound.)
In that environment, we will all, regardless of the educational
model we follow, at some time begin to feel under pressure to
overcommit. You’ll know it when you feel obliged to pour out a
litany of tasks, goals, activities, and events when your neighbor
asks, “What is it you really do all day?” You’ll find yourself
doing a little bit more, taking a few more lessons, scheduling
more classes in the support group co-op, getting involved in one
more sports activity (just one?), doing more at church,
volunteering for more ministry.
It’s the nature of the age, sure, but that’s just the easy
explanation.
The hard part is realizing that it is what happens when we lose
sight of what our lives are really about from God’s
perspective.
God did not design us to be Energizer Bunnies who just keep going
and going and going until one day the battery runs dry.
Sally and I have been encouraged this year to go in a different
direction, energized by Paul’s simple admonition to the
Thessalonian church. He told them to “make it your ambition to
lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with
your hands.” He was telling them to slow down, to avoid getting
caught up in the culture around them, and to be different. He
goes on to say that it will be a part of their testimony for
Christ. Burned-out, busy Christian families are not a good
testimony of God’s grace and peace.
With a busy homeschooling household, an expanding ministry to
Christian parents, a stopping-point house for friends and family
passing through Colorado, and a new church just started and
growing, it feels like the throttle of our life is glued to the
floor right now. If we don’t learn to decelerate like the
Thessalonians, we’ll either run out of gas, or crash and burn.
That is why we are “making it our ambition” this year to do
whatever we need to do as a family to find the “quiet life” that
Paul envisioned. After all, how can we “be still and know that I
am God” if we are always moving?
There is no formula for getting to the “quiet life”
. . . just walking in the Spirit and keeping the goal in view.
However, there are some familiar principles and proverbs we try
to keep in mind that might help you put the brakes on life if you
are beginning to feel the acceleration of culture in your
family.
“Redeem the time.” You cannot “save” one second of time; you can
only redeem it. I am surgically attached to my Day-Timer, and yet
I know that over-emphasis on time management can become a
bondage. Every minute of your day is already in slavery to the
world until you make a conscious decision to “redeem” it, to buy
it out of slavery and set it free for God’s use. Trying to save
or manage unredeemed time only leads me into slavery to it. I
fall back often on a proverb that expresses the human-divine
nature of our relationship with time: “The mind of man plans his
way but the Lord directs his steps.”
“Number my days.” We are constantly stepping back from our daily
immersion in the details of living to look at the bigger picture
of life. Sally once had a dream in which God took her far up into
space until the earth was just a ball, and He showed her how
trivial many of her worries and concerns were in relation to
eternity with Him. When we stop to consider how very few are the
days we have on earth to build for an eternity with God, we are
always motivated to use them more wisely. However, numbering our
days does not come naturally. It is a practice that God needs to
“teach us” because we won’t learn it from the culture or from
life.
“This one thing I do.” Paul had a single purpose in mind. Through
much practice, we are learning to limit our priorities in life,
and trying to focus on the few things that are the most
important. It was life-changing for us as parents to realize that
it is not our responsibility to make our children happy by making
sure they do everything the world says they are entitled to do as
children. Rather, it is our responsibility to make them mature by
focusing on godly priorities. That one realization helps us focus
our family commitments on what God says is most important, not
the world.
If you think about it, homeschooling is one of the few areas in
our culture that, by its nature, has the potential to provide the
kind of witness that Paul envisioned. Few others in American
Christian culture are able to ambitiously pursue the “quiet life”
like homeschooling families.
Too often, though, too many find themselves in the slipstream of
the rapidly accelerating Mack truck of culture. It feels nice to
not have to think about driving, so they let go of the wheel, sit
back, and let culture just pull them along.
If that has happened to you, WAKE UP! Grab hold of the wheel of
your life and steer your way back to a safer speed in the slow
lane. It may be the most important spiritual decision you’ll make
as a family, and a powerful witness to many others along the
road.
Perhaps that, and not just the education, is why God will bless
Christian homeschooling.
