Why I Stopped Homeschooling and Put My Kids Into School

  I couldn't sleep so I thought I would write out my thoughts just to keep them from rolling around uncontrollably.  (It may help, anyways)  I don't usually write about personal matters on my blog, but I just needed to get all of this out and didn't really know where else to do it.  

The girls did their placement testing for school this week and we got the results yesterday.  My oldest is 11 and is supposed to be in 6th grade.  She is reading at an 8th grade level! Yay! I was so proud of her.  She was a little behind in math, though. We decided to go ahead and place her in 6th grade math and utilize the amazing tutoring program that they have in place at the Middle School.  They have two math lab classes for struggling math students and tutoring before and after school.  So with all that help, she should catch up in no time.  My second oldest did good in math, but is a little behind in reading, which I already kind of knew would happen.  We decided that since most of the subjects require reading, to keep her home the rest of the year.  Since I have two  in school, I can work with her one on one and get her caught up and hopefully she will be caught up for next school year.  

I was thinking about our four years of homeschooling and everything that has happened with our family and I am glad that my kids know anything at all with everything that we have gone through.  One year into homeschooling my husband had a heart attack and was home recovering for about 6 month afterwards. About a year later he went for a checkup and discovered that the blockages in his heart gotten much much worse, so ended he up getting a quintuple bypass surgery.   A few months after the surgery I had a baby.  Not long after that hubby went into a rehabilitation program.  Then we split up and the kids and I moved to north Louisiana and he moved to a small town in the center of the state.  We met almost every weekend in a town in the middle to let a kid or two go visit him for a week, alternating between the three oldest kids. The baby was still breastfeeding and I wasn't ready to part with her.   After doing this for  almost a year, God began to heal our marriage and our family.  When we first split up, I thought we were going to get a divorce, but God didn't let that happen.  He brought us back together.  So the kids and I moved to live with their Papa.  I am amazed that we are not only back together as a family, but we are really doing good! God has made it better than it was before all of this happened.  

I am not telling you all this to make excuses.  I take full responsibility for my kids education.  I did the best I could do under the circumstances.  I know there are people who are thinking that I should have put the kids into school a long time ago with all this that has happened to our family.  When Papa's heart attack first happened, we couldn't look into the future and know that all this was going to happen, so I thought that it would just blow over and we would get caught up again, but then the next thing happened, then the next… the problems just didn't stop coming.  And I am going to say something that you may disagree with and I am ok with that.  I believe that there are things in life that are more important than academics.  Now, before you completely bash my head in, let me explain.  I know that you must know someone who is so completely intelligent, but you find yourself saying about them, "He is so smart, but he just can't get his act together." Or, "She did so good in school, but now that she graduated, she just can't live in the real world." or "he is the smartest dumb person I know," you know, something along those lines.  People can have a lot of knowledge, but don't know what to do with it and it really does them no good.  You can have the knowledge of a brain surgeon, but if you don't know how to handle everyday life, you may end up flipping burgers at McDonalds.  I feel that I have grounded my kids in the word of God, I have taught them coping skills to get through extremely hard situations in life. I have been there for them to cry on my shoulder when Papa wasn't there.  They know that bad things can happen, and that life goes on and you just do the best that you can, and that will go so much farther in real life than knowing algebra.

Math can always be learned, but a broken spirit is hard to mend.  

There is also a group of people who are thinking that I should not put my kids in school and keep homeschooling.  I am still a huge fan of homeschooling.  I love it.  Even with all the bad things that have happened, I loved homeschooling.  But as a wife and a mother, I have been pushed and stretched to the very edge of my sanity and I need a break! Lol!  I really tried to search out every avenue, and there are absolutely no homeschooling groups that I can find. We live in a small town that is just not a homeschool friendly town. And there is just not much to do here.   After 8 months of the kids being cooped up in the house with Joey and I, having no friends and nothing to do, we decided it was best for the mental health of our entire family to enroll our kids into school.   At first I fought it, but finally I realized that is really is the best thing for us right now.  And now I am looking forward to having a break.  I need it.  I feel that one reason that God brought us to the slow pace of Winnfield is so that we can just rest.  Our whole family needs to recuperate from the stress of the past 3 years.  I am looking forward to sending my kids to school and being able to just breathe for a while without having to worry about being solely responsible for my kids education.   

We are beginning a new chapter in our family and I can't wait to see what God has for us.  Hint: He told me it was going to be awesome!

...And is Kind

 ^"Love suffers long and is kind"  1 Corinthians 13:4

I have heard the "love verses" millions of times, but this morning when I read it, this portion of the verse jumped out at me.  This is something that I needed to hear.  The translations I usually read have the words "longsuffering" or "patient" instead of "suffers long" and for some reason when I read this NKJV version, it spoke to me in a new way.  Love suffers.  The word suffer is not a pleasant one, it's meaning, of course, is to experience pain, illness, or injury.  Love will experience all of that for another, just as Jesus experienced pain and injury for you and me.  

However, there is another definition of the word that really cut deep: to submit or be forced to endure .  Not only does one experience pain for another, it is chosen.  And is kind. If you are human and have ever experienced pain, you know that while you are experiencing it, you are not kind.  Pain and suffering usually bring about rudeness and lashing out at loved ones around us.  When I am suffering a migraine, I do not want anyone to talk to me, be near me,...breathe too loud.  I am not a nice person when I am suffering.  

When my husband and I are going through hard times, the paycheck isn't exactly stretching the way we would both want it to and we are feeling stressed, we are feeling a whole different kind of pain.  At that moment we are to be KIND to each other.  You married folks know how completely easy it is to be kind to your spouse when you don't agree how the paycheck should be spent.  Right?!

For my unmarried friends, let me bring up another scenario.  Your car runs out of gas on a busy highway and none of your friends or family are answering their phones.  You have to walk half a mile and back to put gas in your car.  You are not happy.  When you finally get back home, ________ (fill in the blank with room mate, boyfriend, mom, ect.) says, "How was your day."  You want to lose it and give them a piece of your mind after feeling deserted all afternoon.  That is the exact moment you are to be KIND. 

These scenarios aren't even THAT bad.  Consider what so many of the Christian martyrs went through.  That is real suffering.  And we can barely get through our cushy little day being kind to each other.  What if you were in an arena filled with thousands of people who are cheering for the hungry lions to come and eat you.  Think you could be kind to anybody at that point? 

Love suffers LONG.  It not only endures pain, it will do it for a long time and yet still be kind.  That baffles my mind.  How can you do that? I am not the expert on this because I am still trying to figure it out myself.  I do know that a heart full of Jesus can give you the endurance to suffer long, to love, and be kind.  When my husband and I separated and the Lord brought us back together, we had gone through a world of suffering.  I felt Jesus put his arms around me and I knew that He would put my life back together.  My life isn't perfect and it hasn't been easy over the past couple of years, but I have so much peace about everything.  I can sit and enjoy his presence and it doesn't matter where I am or what has happened in my life.  That presence is what makes me able to endure any amount of suffering.  It is only with His strength that I can look past my suffering and have any ounce of kindness left.  I can't argue with a Bible scholar about the truths of the Bible, but I know that my experience with Jesus is true and no one can take that away from me.  

Thread of Life

I have been thinking a lot lately about hard times.  A couple of weeks ago my pastor preached a sermon about staying strong when you go through trials.   This is something in which I happen to have a lot of experience, but honestly, I am glad I have gone through everything that I have gone through.  God is weaving a unique story with each day of my life.  Throughout my life God has been the thread, the very fiber, woven into the months and years that make up the whole of who I am, and there is no other story exactly like mine.  And that, no one can take away from me.

Just like a tapestry on the wall of a castle can be intricate and beautiful, God only creates quality pieces of work.  There is no trash, no junk, in his kingdom.  The process of making a tapestry is long and tedious, seeming like each thread that joins its mates are not making a difference to the size of the tapestry.  One tiny thread doesn't seem to make a difference, but when combined with thousands of pieces, it creates pieces that can span an entire wall. Each day that has gone by in my life has seemed like a mundane piece of thread, but it is building up to something extraordinary.



The Lord takes such painstaking, mechanical, detailed attention to every fiber of who you are.  I have heard before that when our life seems hard, it is because we are just seeing a small piece of the larger picture.  I believe this.  In weaving, the weaver begins with a picture; a piece of artwork, a photograph, or drawing that will be transformed into a tapestry or fabric.  This is enlarged to the size that is needed for the piece, then is placed behind the loom so that it can be seen through the threads.  The Creator has a masterpiece in mind before your life begins, although instead of a two dimensional tapestry, He is creating a life.  Besides the fact that he created your physical body, which is amazing in itself, the Lord is sculpting an emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimension to you as well.  This goes well beyond the three dimension movies we watch in theaters.  There is so much that goes into who you are.  He has a picture of what he wants you to be right there in the loom of who you are.  However, He is not creating a piece of fabric, but a human who He graciously allows to make its own decisions.

A weaver may have hundreds of colors that go into a single piece of tapestry.  As he is working on it, he may have many of them attached and hanging from the loom while he goes back and forth to create a work of art.  Ten colors over here to create a butterfly, five next to that to create a flower, twenty-three on the left side to make the log cabin, and three shades of gray will make the smoke billowing from the chimney.  Add to that fifty different colors for the scene of the children playing in the field.  The weaver knows where each piece of thread needs to go.  He knows how much of each color and in what direction it should be woven.


At all times, the Lord has hundreds, thousands of threads attached to you just to keep you alive and breathing.  He is constantly creating and re-creating you, all while you are making decisions that could completely change the direction of your life.  But He has a plan for that, too.  He simply re-draws and re-plans the picture and begins His work again.  He is constantly working on you. The most beautiful of God's tapestries are the ones who submit to His will and allow the Weaver to just do His work.  They begin to ask Him what to do in their lives.  Sometimes He needs to undo some sections and re-do them because of bad decisions or things that happen that are out of their control.  Some tapestries need more re-doing than others.  But when the human tapestry submits to Him, they can know without a doubt that it will be absolutely breathtaking.

The hard times I mentioned earlier may just be some of the darker thread that is needed to highlight the brighter areas of the work.  How exciting would an art gallery be if the artist only used one color paint for all of his art? We need the good times and the bad to make us who we are.  Psalm 11:5 states, "The Lord tests the righteous," and James 1:2-4 says,^"My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." I think that these dark  times are refining us and removing our impurities.  If all you can see is darkness around you,  rest in the truth that God has a large view of your life, and he doesn't just see the dark time, but the entire picture.  He loves you and is creating something breathtaking in you.

Super Glue for my Broken Heart: Pain

Super Glue for my Broken Heart: Pain: I place my pain                           on a platter, And ice it like a cake. They eat it up and love it so  Cuz they don&#39...

The Great Plank Removal

This past week, a friend of mine on my favorite social networking site posted something that caught my attention and really bothered me.  He was approached by a teenage kid asking for donations for a church trip.  The kid accepts the money then proceeds to lay into my friend for wearing a t-shirt of a rock band that wouldn't exactly be considered "churchy." Then he lectures my friend about listening to certain types of music and announces that he has stopped listening to non-Christian music.   I really wanted to comment on his post, but I had no idea how to respond to this.  I felt like no matter what I said, I would sound like a pious know-it-all or something like that.

Coincidentally I have been meditating on a verse for a few weeks that ties in perfectly with this little scenario.  Luke 6:41-42 talks about judging others:

⁴¹ And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the plank in your own eye? ⁴² Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the plank that is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

What I have been especially been focused on is the "plank."  I have been asking the Lord to reveal to me what planks I have in my own eyes.  I figure there are probably several in there that I can't even see.  According to Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, "plank" can be translated into the words "log, tree trunk, or telephone pole."  I find the last one to be a bit of a stretch considering there were no telephones at the time that Jesus walked the earth.  I assume Mr. Dake included that word merely to emphasize the huge size of the plank in question.  The one that makes the most sense to me is "tree trunk" and the more I think about it, the more I get it.  There is a reason Jesus used that scenario to describe the judgmental condition of mankind.  The most obvious thing that I see in this verse is that when you judge others, you are blind to your own afflictions.  What I gained from meditating on this is that I need to take a good hard look at myself and fix all the many things wrong with me before looking at others.  But then I pressed deeper and really thought about that plank, that tree trunk growing out of my eye that Jesus spoke about; and what I saw in my mind's eye was this: when you have a huge tree growing out of your eye, you not only are blind, you hurt others! If I have a huge tree growing out of my face, every where I turn I am bashing other people with it. Also, if you leave a tree alone, it will continue to grow larger and larger.  The more I focus on other people's problems and leave mine alone, my own problems will just get bigger.  And the more I try to "help" others while I refuse to get my own help, the more I will just keep bashing in the heads of those around me and keep pushing them away until I no longer have anyone who wants to get close to me.  Jesus commanded us to love others, not bash their heads in all the time.  When I let the Lord remove my afflictions, then I can lovingly help those around me with the things that are afflicting them.  

So as I meditated on this and asked the Lord to reveal my tree trunks, he very quickly showed me a huge one that was in my life and very swiftly removed it.  I knew it was there, but what I didn't know  how much it was affecting me.  It was very painful to remove this thing from my life because it involved a huge setback in my family's income, but I truly believe with all my heart that when God removes something from our lives he replaces it with huge blessings.  I can already say that He has provided everything my family needs and I know that He will continue to do so.  

I have to admit that God has really reached me with this verse that I have known since I was a kid. I have read and heard it so many times that I used to just tune it out. But it seems that the Lord has been re-teaching me a lot that I thought I already knew.   I used to be very judgmental.  Very.  Like to the point where I would read Bible verses or hear a sermon and think about all the people I knew who needed to hear THAT! But I was missing the point entirely.  Jesus speaks directly to ME and to YOU, he doesn't teach all of his lessons to give us an excuse to judge everyone else we know while we don't change a thing about ourselves.  The teenage boy who berated by friend may have felt in his heart that he should cut out certain music from his life so that God could speak to him.  He may have cut it from his life because his youth minister told him it was the only way he could go on the trip. I don't know the reason he stopped listening to certain types of music.  All I know is that he inappropriately judged my friend.  I hope and pray that this boy changes his ways and that the Lord removes the planks from his eyes so that he will stop bashing others.  I believe that the music that a person listens to is up to them. I believe that God looks at our hearts and I truly believe he would rather me listen to non Christian music because that is what I want to listen to rather than broadcasting that I listen to Christian music just to prove how great I am.  The whole point of listening to Christian music is to praise God and if a person does it with the point of showing off how great they are they are missing the point entirely.  They are praising themselves and not God.  I hope and pray that my friend who received the bashing doesn't think that all Christians just want to go out and bash anyone who doesn't have the same views as them. If you look hard enough you can find those special people who have a true relationship with the One Living God.  Christians are never going to be perfect, but there really are those who do want to love others.   Once you find people like that, never let them go!! 

Hello Again!

Hello again! I am back after taking a long break from blogging.  I started this blog because The Lord told me to.  I argued with Him, but He insisted.  I told Him that I hate blogs, that they are not for serious writers, and if I can't go to college and become a "real writer" then I am not going to waste my time blogging.  But He wouldn't let it go.  He kept pressing into my spirit that I start this blog so I finally broke down and started it; and I admit now that I really love it.  The few posts  I have already written, I poured my heart into and God has really blessed me through writing them.  At the beginning, things were going great with my new blog.

Then God told me to write what was on my heart about the gay and lesbian community in my post Rainbows.  I argued with Him about that too.  I don't like to write controversial things.  I don't like to rock the boat.  I like things to be simple and easy.  But again, He kept pressing me so I decided to write it and I was nervous the whole time writing it.  After I wrote it I was angry at God for making me write a post that was so out of my comfort zone and I just couldn't bring myself to write anything else for a while.  I didn't even log onto the blogger screen to check on things for months.   Well,  when I finally did get back onto my blogger screen and started looking around I realized that God apparently had a plan with that little post because Rainbows ended up getting the most hits out of all my posts.  And not just by a little, either, like 400% more than my other posts.  Someone even posted a link to it in an atheist forum which is where it received most of the hits. I think that is so crazy because that post had the most Bible verses than any of my other posts!  So apparently I struck a nerve with that one! Praise God! His word made it into places where it may not have otherwise gone and I hope that every single person who read it was able to get to know Jesus in a new and personal way.  I am saying all this to tell how awesome God is because I know that all this was not because of me.  If it would have been up to me, I would never even have started the blog in the first place.

 God's plans are not our plans! I read the story of Gideon to my kids from the book of Judges a couple of weeks ago and it really resonated with me.  All Gideon wanted was to bake bread for his family, but God had a much bigger plan for him! God used Gideon to lead an army of 300 men to conquer 3 entire nations.  When a person joins the US armed forces, it is not an easy life.  First there is boot camp where they go through intense training, then they go to war and have to sometimes live in horrible conditions and go through things they have never dreamed of doing.  But even with all the hardship, if they follow their general's orders they will achieve so much more it their lives.  Way more than if they had never joined in the first place.  If this is true in a natural army, how much more is this a truth in God's army? With Gideon, God equipped him after he was called. In fact, Gideon was very unprepared for a battle.  He was pretty much a nobody in the nation of Israel.  When God told him his plan for the nation, Gideon argued with God and told Him that he had the wrong guy.  Gideon was the smallest man in his family and his family was the smallest in the nation.  Not only that,  Gideon had such a small plan for his life: Grind wheat for his family without the Midianites taking it. That is all Gideon wanted to do. But God had so much more in store for him. God took a small man from a small family with a small plan and just like a tiny seed grows into a might tree, Gideon became a huge part of God's story in the Bible.  Gideon obeyed God and ended up leading an army to defeat the Midianites and eventually became the leader of Israel.   I think I really related to Gideon because I argued with God about my blog and I know that having a lot of people read a little blog is nothing compared to defeating 3 nations with 300 men like Gideon, but I like the idea that God can use a nobody like me, like Gideon, to do something big when we obey Him.  What is God telling YOU to do? Go do it!!

Acts

These are my personal notes on the New Testament book of Acts.  I have a hard time just reading books. I think I am by nature a writer in the most simplest way in that I have a very basic need to write things in order to understand them.  It is how I learn.  So any time I read the Bible or any other book that is a teaching book I have to write about it to really get it.  I usually do this in an actual journal, but the Lord has led me to share it, so here it is.  I hope that it helps you! I have started a new dedicated page here