If you were convinced that the world had forgotten how to think and teach, if you believed it had discarded the beauty of art and literature, if you thought it had crushed the power of truth, would you let that world educate your children?
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim
Notice the Glory
We are driving across the country today, taking our eldest daughter Blythe to college. The heartache is palpable, as is the joy. Our family now sprawls the continental U.S. as three of our four children are living away from home. We are savoring the last years with our youngest at home, knowing it will be quite different for all of us and yet no less precious. I need your tips for how to do this, a friend nudges. And I wonder: how does one prepare a heart for the elasticity required of it in life? Some might say to petrify it against the heartache, but instead, I might encourage you, dear reader, to receive today as a gift, even in its potential weariness and obscurity. You will one day miss it, even if you don’t miss the particular circumstance. You will miss them, your children being exactly as they are today, even as you enjoy who they are becoming.
This movement toward empty nesting has precipitated so much of how and why I want to write here. I hope you hear the whisper between every line, a phrase from my favorite movie, Tree of Life, that my husband and I have often tossed back and forth to one other over the years— notice the glory. In the film, the father is grieving all that he didn’t enjoy in his sons’ childhoods in the wake of tremendous tragedy, and it’s a haunting warning for our work in this life. Take notice. God is in our midst, cultivating something beautiful between humans and himself in real time, regardless of how dire the context.
The work of mothering and teaching from home is as arduous as it is glorious. Time is brief, and although the work can at times feel impossible, God is interested in our formation as much as theirs. Receive the stretching of your heart today as he creates room for the destiny that lies beyond it.
Why do rhythms matter?
In the month of August, I am focusing on the particulars of beginnings, especially as it pertains to the homeschool. Each Friday, I hope to share a little something from our own home and experience as you establish your own for the year ahead. Of all of the questions I receive from mothers, many of them involve something within the context of rhythms, how to form them? How do they change with age? How do we fit everything in? Although there is a place for the questions around scheduling, some of which I try to help you navigate in my workbook, Your Best Homeschool Year, I love the word rhythm for its connotation. It speaks to harmony and atmosphere, whether we are speaking of time, sound, biological cycles, or seasonal ones. In the home, they are all indeed connected.
When many of us ask about home rhythms, often we are asking something else, such as: How do we get it all done in a day? How do I make time for myself? How do I teach my children to care about their work? Does homeschooling mean I have a messy home all the time? There is no one size fits all path to creating a rhythm at home, and understanding the atmosphere we desire to cultivate is the start.
But what do I mean by humanizing a rhythm?
I mean for us to cultivate rhythms at home that make us more fully human, which is also to say more like Christ, who was fully man and fully God. In a world of optimization, efficiency, and productivity, we can assume those ideas into our parenting and home life. We adopt the language of the machine in reference to ourselves and our family: Her battery is low. I need to reboot. He’s unplugged right now. I wish I could download that book into my brain. He’s hardwired for that job. She’s a machine!
To clarify, efficiency and optimization are not wrong or improper to consider in regards to time and the way we govern our days, but are they always the highest good? Consider so many stories in the Scriptures, where God chooses the most inefficient path so the he can engage the heart of man in a deeper and more fruitful way, such as Israel in the wilderness, Joseph rising into Egyptian leadership, Jesus encountering the disciples in the boat during the storm. In each of these moments, a more direct, immediate, and efficient path were available, but would they have been as fruitful in addressing the heart? The idolatry, the pride, the fear?
As mothers, we create rhythms at home to help form our children toward virtue and wisdom, but we must remember: we are human and growth doesn’t always appear as we expect. It is not solely that our children hear and learn the Scriptures in one assigned block of time each day, but that they experience Christ in time, whether they are frustrated during a reading lesson or awed by an emerging butterfly. You may have scheduled a specific block of time for that lesson or nature walk, but it is the time given to repentance, comfort, wonder, or joy (etc.) that humanizes the rhythm. They remind us and them, that we are not machines, rushing through our work to download and process information. We are human, engaging our days as a way of encountering God in time, in one another, and the world around us.
How do I create humanizing rhythms at home?
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