I thought I would take a {quick} break from my
planning. I’ve spent my evening getting
ready to participate in an Awana Children’s Ministry conference at the end of this
month. This will be the second time that
I have been to this conference and this year I will be presenting two new
workshops called “What is a Biblical Education?” and “Day by Day and Side by
Side”. Even though I do get nervous and
pretty perfectionist about my preparations I am really looking forward to
sharing some of the new things I have been learning and pondering.
At the encouragement of our local Awana missionary, I picked
up a copy of Raising Modern Day
Joseph by Larry Fowler and tonight I got to curl up with a good book to do
some “work”. (This is one of the reasons
that I love my job: reading is a requirement!)
I am only part way through it but I am feeling challenged already.
The author asked this question, “What do you want to be able
to say about your children when they are thirty?” Good question…
I think that as homeschooling parents we often consider
ourselves more intentional than our counterparts that don’t spend hours mulling
over lessons plans and curriculum choices.
But do we often look at our children’s education with such far-sighted
lenses?
This was a great reminder to me that I really do need to
remember to live beyond just this moment and to think of what the long term
goals are that I have when I am educating my kids. Charlotte Mason stressed that an education was
so much more than simply the cramming of much knowledge into a little mind but
that equally important was the motivation for learning and the habits that were
formed along the way.
Diana Waring recently reminded me in a talk that she did
(Thank you Lord for seminars on CD!) that biblical education is a blend of
knowledge, piety and morality. To be
truly educated we must be assimilating knowledge in accordance with our
relationship with the God of the universe and our love for Him and we must
apply that love and knowledge to the world around us, learning to live in a way
that is fitting for a child of The King.
I still have so much to learn in this respect but my husband
and I have put some thought into what we want to be able to say about these
children of ours when they are thirty and, so far, it looks something like
this, “It is our hope and prayer that our daughters will become lovers of God
and of their families, women of strong character who are contributors to
family, church and society, who are unwavering in their faith and able to share
it with and defend it to others.”
Tall order, I know.
And I do struggle with the notion of expecting something of them that I
don’t always see in myself. I guess this
is better to be called a hope, a prayer, than an expectation. But without a plan, as we know, we will never
get anywhere. I like the quote that I
read in the book this evening, an excerpt from a poem by Longfellow,
I shot an
arrow into the air,
It fell to
earth, I knew not where.
Without intentionality in our efforts to rightly guide these
precious treasures in the path that they should go we can only be sure that we
won’t know where they will end up.
The path is long from finished in our journey of parenting
and educating but it is my hope and prayer that, with God’s help, if we keep
those long term goals in mind, we will have a better chance of answering that
question with confidence someday: “My daughter is 30 today and she is all that
I every imagined that God would want for her to be!”
What are your hopes, Friends, for your children? What to you want to be able to say about them
when they are beyond these intensive years in your care?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Cori
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