Homeschool Today:
8 yr old learned that toddlers make colossal messes which cannot be cleaned up by said toddler and are therefore “community messes”
11 yr old learned that mom really means it when she says “get this done” or “that” will happen
6 yr old learned that it is difficult to get Sharpie out of the carpet
Oh. And we did some math and reading, too.
CROCK POT ARTICHOKES
Ingredients:
Directions:
Organic/non-organic,
dresses/pants,
unschooling/school-at-home,
dating/courting, married/single,
big family/small family … on and on it goes.
Let’s not be divided over things that do not have eternal significance.
…the greatest of these is LOVE. ♥
~Heidi St. John
Refuse to Be Sidelined
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9
Something sad and fascinating is happening to parents in this post-modern era. We’re being lied to. We’re being told that we aren’t necessary—and what’s worse, many moms today are buying the lie! After all, they say the “village” can do it better.
Slowly but surely society is shutting parents out. What used to be regarded as a parent’s responsibility is now seen as an infringement on the child. If we want to stay in the race and finish it we must refuse to be sidelined. MomStrong moms possess a willingness to endure rather than become a passive onlooker in the lives of their children.
When the world says “give up” or “it’s not your business,” I challenge you to stand up for the sake of your child. Go ahead and risk being annoying. Be the mom who knows the names of your child’s friends. Be the mom who asks the hard questions and loves unconditionally. Be the mom who refuses to be sidelined and actively guides her child through every stage of growing to adulthood.
Your children don’t need the government or the school system to teach them about the big things in life, they need their parents. Moms, you are stronger than they say you are. You are more capable and more invested. You’re your children’s mother, and kids today need their mothers to be all-in.
They need the wisdom and love of their parents, and they need a mom who is one hundred percent invested.
Be that mom!
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. 2 Timothy 2:15
I have been talking about parenting for a long time, not because I have it down, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the older I get and the older my kids get, I realize how much I really don’t know and how very dependent on the Lord I am.
It’s easy for me to get tired and busy and neglect my own time with the Lord. Maybe you can relate. If you are parenting your children from a spiritually dry place yourself, remember this: you can’t give them what you don’t have. If you don’t have a walk with the Lord, if you don’t have a clear understanding of God’s Word, or a love for His will, or a clear method of reasoning with Biblical convictions, your children won’t have that either.
I want to encourage you today to spend time with God. Read His Word for yourself. Often times, we do not know how to use the Bible to guide us in matters of everyday living, and our own lack of knowledge is keeping us from teaching our children to live in a Biblically wise way. Our job is to teach them to develop their own set of internalized Biblical convictions: a set of standards that they derive from the Bible, so that when we are not around them, they are capable of making good, moral, and wise decisions.
We should be teaching our children to love, serve, and follow the Lord, so that they can stay away from the two spectrums that the world defines as religion. There’s a ditch on either side. We always tell our kids; the one ditch is legalism–where everything is bound by law and things done by rote. The other side of that is moral relativism where truth is undefined.
Neither of those are Biblical boundaries. A true believer decides that the Lord is in charge of his life and willingly lives inside those boundaries, he does not live testing them. Often times we find our children testing them and I’ve noticed some things in the life of our own children, and, frankly, in my own life, that our convictions are based on the truth of God’s word. We must have those convictions in our hearts, and in order for me to impart those to my children, and to do what the Bible says in Deuteronomy, to train my children to love and follow the Lord, I have to be doing that in my own life.
Jay and I wrote a Bible Study series because we are seeing so many families who are giving their kids rules but they are not directing them to Scripture. It’s easy to parent our children out of fear and not even realize we’re doing it. Older kids, especially, need to understand the boundaries that God has set for us in Scripture. As parents, we have to know God’s word.
When you think about what the most important thing is you can do for your children, think of it in the context of how you can help them walk with the Lord. I am convinced that it is so important to define the concept of conviction and personal responsibility in our children within the framework of God’s Word.
So, take them back to His Word–over and over again. If they have a question that you don’t have an answer to, it’s okay to say, “You know what? I don’t have the answer to that. But God does. Let’s pray about it.”
Be a place where your kids can be a sounding board and get to know God’s word yourself in a personal way, because you can’t give your kids what you don’t have yourself. You can do it, because God will give you what you need. Just ask!
Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. Colossians 4:6
Grace is something that’s given but not deserved. It’s the free and unmerited favor of God, demonstrated when He sent His son as atonement for my sin. And i was the last thing on my mind last night when I noticed it was 9:30 p.m. and the kids were still going full-tilt—after I put them in bed for the third time. I just wanted them to go.to.sleep.
It’s daunting to realize that my kids are learning about grace … from me. To be honest, I sometimes wonder if God got the wrong girl. You see, I came to this motherhood thing broken in a thousand ways. I needed healing and a lot of grace. In short, I needed Jesus.
Over the past 24 years, God has shown me ten-thousand different kinds of grace. He’s good like that. God, through His son, Jesus, is grace personified. In fact, whenever you read the word grace in the Bible, you can substitute the name of Jesus. What does grace look like? It looks like Jesus. What does it sound like? It sounds like Jesus.
Sometimes, I admit, I don’t sound very much like Jesus to my kids. And honestly? If I can’t get that right, my witness isn’t worth very much. My kids know the “real” me. They will reflect to the world the kind of grace they learn at home. It matters now more than ever—because the world is asking important questions right now.
We’ve got to know how to give—and receive—grace. Why? Because God wants us to teach it. To testify. To bear witness to the faithful goodness of God.
Paul understood this. He wrote, “But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.” Acts 20:24
He knew his ministry was to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. He knew that grace was the big deal.
The word grace is as over-used as “cool” these days, and I think we’ve forgotten how powerful grace is. Grace is love, personified. Grace is undeserved favor poured out over a lost world in the name of Jesus.
If you are not talking about what grace is with your kids, now is the time.
Give grace, sweet moms.
After my daughter had just given birth, I had the privilege of walking through a learning season with her. Little Noah was a couple of weeks old and I was really loving the new season I was in—a season with little ones of my own and a grandma is truly a special time. But Noah’s birth was a little scary and ended in an emergency c-section. So began our daughter’s new journey of learning to trust the Lord with her child. It’s never as easy as it sounds, is it?
Matthew 14:22 is a passage that I wanted to share with you. Something that jumps out at me in the this passage is the fact that Jesus went to get alone by Himself and pray. Don’t you love that? The Lord Himself, God incarnate—prayed. Shortly after that, we read the story of Peter walking out onto the water to Jesus. As soon as the storm grows, his faith falters. Jesus calms the storm and then says to Peter, “You of little faith!” Why did you doubt?”
I think it’s easy for us to find ourselves in the same position that Peter was in. As I was explaining to my daughter at her baby shower, life throws things at you that you cannot possibly expect.
Here are a few things I’ve been learning about how to be a faith-filled mom:
Faith-filled mothering is constrained by love. As mothers, we are preparing our children for a world that we will likely never see. Often, we make decisions that our children do not like—even painful decisions because love tells us that it is the right decision to make.
Faith-filled mothers are dependent on prayer. We read in verse 23 that Jesus got alone to pray. Even the Lord needed to pray. Here was Jesus, physically tired, tempted and alone—yet He took the time to pray to His Father.
Finally, faith-filled mothering is not fear-based. It is not afraid. My grandfather used to say that “fear was present when Jesus was absent, but always absent when Jesus was present.”
Matthew 28:20 says, “I am with you always.” If you want to be a faith filled mother today, anticipate God’s grace and goodness in the lives of your children. Believe His promises for your family. “Train up your children in the way they should go, and when they are old, they will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6
Be brave! The Lord is with you.
Even though I hate to see the winter go, I love the change of seasons. Change is just part of life, isn’t it? Change happens with our children, our families, and our friendships. It happens in politics and in our churches. Sometimes change is very hard. Sometimes, it hurts. Sometimes I struggle to accept change as it comes into my life and disrupts the way I like things. Sometimes, I resist—but I’m learning acceptance is better.
I’ve been thinking lately about all the changes my husband and I have been through over the past 25 years. From ministry to marriage, we’ve seen a lot of ups and downs. When I was younger, I thought I knew so much more than I do now! I didn’t know there would be so.many.changes. in my life. From my parenting style to the realization that I had a lot of growing up to to … change has just become part of life. Isn’t it funny how the older you get the more you realize how much you DON’T know?
Looking back, I can see that very few of the painful changes have ever happened on my terms—and many of the good ones were on God’s terms, too. His terms, His timing.
I still have so much to learn about God’s timing.
Accepting God’s timing is just part of accepting the changes that inevitably come. I find myself very nostalgic as I watch the kids grow and leave the nest we’ve spent over 25 years building. But then, I remind myself, “that’s why we built the “nest” … so that the kids could grow and leave it! Funny, isn’t it? As I get older, changes in my life have given me another reason to be grateful for God’s Word. His mercies are new every morning. He is so faithful. He is trustworthy. That means that even when I’d rather things were different, I can trust God’s heart for me. Listen to what the prophet Jeremiah said about God’s unchanging nature:
Lamentations 3:22-23 (ESV)
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
God never changes. He’ll see you through whatever you are facing today. His mercies are new for you right now, busy mom!
Hang on tight to the Lord in every season of life. He’ll get you through.
Thankful for an unchanging God,
Heidi