For many families who educate their children at home spring is a time to evaluate and plan for next year. It is also the time of homeschooling conventions. I attended two wonderful conventions this year. One hosted by APHEA. So inspiring and encouraging because the speakers share their faith and encourage directly from God’s word. The IDEA convention is also excellent. The speakers believe parents are the best educators of their children. Both conventions offer help and tools to equip parents in educating their children.

This past year has been a very stressful one for our family. I went into the conventions knowing I wished I had done things differently this year, but fairly uncertain about what I should do next year. See I’m really a rebel. No one would know it to look at me, but I don’t like to be told what to do. I want to go with my own ideas. In educating my children this has meant mostly not following a curriculum. I tried, sort of, but never made it work very well, too rebellious, too independent. As I prayed about next year I realized the stress in our life had taken so much energy that our education suffered. I did not have the mental and emotional energy to be creative or even patient too many days. I kept thinking, “By next fall things should be calmer, less stress, I can do it the way I want in the fall.”

At the APHEA convention I was convicted that my children needed to be a higher priority than their education. What would it matter if I put together a wonderful lesson, but missed their heart because I didn’t have the time and energy left for them? On my way to the IDEA convention God spoke to my heart that I needed to pick a curriculum I like and follow it for next year. Even if things are “normal” in the fall I am in a season where I need to put my creative energies into my family, maybe into ministry, not into curriculum. There are families out there who had no choices and made a plan from how they raised their kids. I can rest in their work. I can save my energy for building relationships.

I can rest in Jesus work also. I will never measure up. I will never get it all figured out. Jesus did. Jesus died and rose again for me to have access to all he has. I have access to the throne of Heaven. I have the righteousness of Christ. All I need is provided according to God’s riches in glory. If I lack wisdom I ask, God gladly gives his wisdom. So I will rest in the work of others, for educating my children and for my very existence. I rest in Jesus work for my salvation, here and now, and for eternity.

Somewhere in my thinking was, well still is on occasion, the idea that I need to win when it comes to discipline issues with my children. They must do what I want, when I want or I’m “loosing”.

God does not battle with me when I want to go my own way. He has clearly laid out the benefits of following and the consequences for not. It’s my choice. He tries to win me and my heart, my allegiance by His love, not by forcing me to comply. His will is obviously stronger than mine, He has far greater resources. Still He does not use this to crush me into submission. He woos me with his unfailing mercies, new grace and forgiveness every second of the day. I want to provide the same opportunity to my children. I want them to run to me when they fail, not stand in defiance to prove their strong enough to be their own person.

Motivate and encourage obedience by praise and natural consequences. Isn’t that how God deals with you? Perhaps you don’t know God like that. How do you see God? What is your perspective of what he does with your failures? Is it a Biblical perspective?

What I have come to know is that I must win, but I must win them, not the battle of the moment. I must connect with their heart so they learn people are more important than power or having your own way. By winning their heart I am making greater strides toward the real goal- relationship with me and with the Father.

I have always wanted to do a timeline with my children. I can rememer how much more interesting history was to me in high school when I began to connect events of the same time period and their sequence in history.  Something came through my email and I found The Timeline Project by Brabdenburg Studies. Their idea is to do a large wall timeline, which I like in theory, but do not have space to display long term. I also want each child to begin personalizing with events and people that are signifcant to them. The Timeline Project has lots of pictures and links to dates for placing events in the timeline. I used their idea of having a line for Roman, Greek, Biblical, Egyptian and Other and put it on a page. We did 1000 years to a two page spread for 4000 to 2000 BC. The rest of the timeline is 100 years to a two page spread. I did a dotted line every 10 years so there was a refrence for placing events. 

We are just getting started so there's not much to show. I am not doing a history program this year so we are entering dates from our readings. The plan is to mark when we do a project, notebook page, map, ect on the timeline so we can then refrence back to what we learned beyond the entry on the timeline. I think we'll do supplemental timelines of countries or events we study more in depth.

This page is 0 to 100AD Each color is a different group.

We have begun a timeline project in our learning adventure. I looked through several resources, but as usual decided to do my own thing with others ideas. More about the timeline itself in another post. As we were getting started the verse about God having planned for us to do good works before the foundation of the world came to mind. I got the idea to start our tmeline before time began. I found an article on Revive Israel Ministries that lists and explains simply verses that mention "before the foundation of the world". I made a simple mini treasure book with these verses and a statement of what they tell about before the world began. Having a Biblical perspective means and eternal perspective, including eternity past as well as eternity future. I hope it will make an impression on them as they grow. Our life is such a small line on history. History is an even smaller mark on eternity. It makes the troubles here easier to bear. Jesus looked into time and decided His time of suffering, as horrid and intense as it was, would be worthwhile. He created us knowing He would have to suffer and died to bring us into eternity with Him.  

As I was feeding my chickens the other day, thinking about the effort, it occurred to me “Harder is sometimes better.” This is my fourth summer raising chickens. I’ve learned a lot. I choose to feed my chickens twice a day. There have been people tell me I should change things so I only had to go out there once a day, or even every other day. When I’m tired this sounds like a great idea. However, one time in particular I got to see my birds compared to someone’s chickens who had only fed once a day. Mine had turned out better. It’s worth the extra time and effort to me for them to turn out better. Besides, I like my chickens.

I feel the same way about my children. The more time and effort I put into training them, the better they will turn out. Now there are certainly many ways of parenting, taking varying amounts of time and effort, with varying results. I have very high, sometimes too high, goals for my children, especially where behavior and character is concerned. Good behavior and strong character take effort to train into a child (and myself for that matter). It may seem easier to just give in, make them happy, especially when I’m tired. Then I remember that I am training my children to equip them for God’s calling on their lives.

Scripture says to “train up a child”. What come to mind when you hear “basic training”? Or think of someone training for a marathon. Training is hard work. Think of all the things your children need to be trained for in order to walk in God’s calling for them. First they need to know God and how to get to know Him better, that means prayer, Bible study, reasoning, listening, obedience… Then they need to know how to get along with others, friends, family, coworkers, bosses, authorities of every kind, difficult people, people with differing world views… In order to do that they will need to know how to listen, communicate, persuade, compromise, and know when not to compromise, how to trust, love, respect and a host of other things. We haven’t even gotten to anything academic or specific skills for a vocation. That’s a lot of training and a lot of effort. It will be worth all of it when they turn out better. Besides, I like my children.