Homeschooling for an Extraordinary Family – Part 2

Posted by Joonu | 0 comments

When you have a dream, there is always a gap between the vision and your current reality.

How you live in that space makes all that difference. In order to have the dream be reality you must develop into a person who has the capacity and skills to cause that dream. There is growth to be experienced, capacities to be created and developed, new relationships to be established, and skills to be acquired. Realizing that who you are today is not going to get you where you want to go can create tension, to say the least. It is easy to get overwhelmed and give up or give over to the inner saboteur and all your reasons as to why your dream will never happen. It is easy to find agreement from others as to why your dream won’t or can’t happen. You may blame yourself and make yourself wrong for things you’ve done or didn’t do in the past that seem at odds with what you hope to create now. The key is to realize that nothing was “wrong” until the moment you created the dream! In fact, there is still nothing “wrong”, only some distance of time and experience between where you are now and where you want to be. There is nothing wrong with you or anyone else. Everything is as it should be. There are simply new choices to be made and a new context to create. If you plant your feet in love and faith and do what is in your power to do, God will do what you can’t do.

To homeschool was our family commitment. Our dream was to create an extraordinary family through learning together. There are many other reasons for choosing to homeschool, but for us they are subordinate to the big picture; creating an engaged family where each member is respected, valued, and supported as a unique individual.

Who would I need to become in order to be successful?

How would my family change and be changed by the experience?

I didn’t know where to start. I felt overwhelmed. When I began to seek out resources, there seemed such an abundance that I became overwhelmed. I felt inadequate in the face of the vision. I had fallen far short of my own expectations in the mother and wife department. Now I had raised the bar from having a family that “worked” to a family that was extraordinary. I had gone beyond taking responsibility for my child’s education to taking on full accountability for all aspects of his education as well as making it a fun adventure for all involved. I could certainly find naysayers who would voice their concerns and doubts, but I resisted giving them power over my dream.

For the first time in my life I stopped planning and started to listen deeply and patiently wait for guidance. I think some of my close friends became a little concerned at my seeming lack of direction. My way of being in the world had always been to create a goal, a plan of how to accomplish that goal, assertively execute said plan through drive, ambition, and self-discipline, far exceeding expectations, and moving on. Plan and conquer. Achieve results. Now I was waiting and listening in faith. I felt directed to intensely study Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. One verse that stood out to me was Ephesians 2: 8-10

“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God: not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”

It brought to light one of my biggest misunderstandings. I had been working so hard all my life to be “acceptable”; to be accepted by others, to earn good will and approval, and to prove myself worthy of God’s love and blessings. Mistakenly, it was a life of works trying to prove that I was a good person. I was able to put that aside. I realized I had nothing to prove to God and certainly not to anyone else. Ironically, it was at this time that I received word I was to receive two prestigious local awards in recognition of my commitment to community and service. Due to the timing, it was as if God was saying, “See, you’ve done incredible work. Now step back and refocus where you’ll be walking in service next.” I know that my friends and family were glad to see me slow down and take a break, but I could sense that some people were growing a bit concerned at the duration of this break. It was so unlike me. Perhaps I was depressed? I was praying and listening for God to show me the next step.

God showed me that the way to my dream was through the transformation of my heart. In order to have the capacity to lead and create an extraordinary family I needed to be on the love walk with Christ.

Ephesians 3:14 – 19 “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.”

Through God’s grace and a very generous gift that was given to me by my friends and family I attended The Landmark Forum, a transformational educational weekend and a 10-week seminar course. This program gave me access to creating possibilities in my life; to gain power over the stories I had created in my life and then lived by as if they were try; to be engaged in being authentic; and to remain powerful and creative in the face of anything life brought my way. Through this non-religious program I grew in my faith. After the program completed I realized the many areas in my life that I was being inauthentic and was sacrificing full self-expression in relationships.

One area I realized I was being inauthentic was in not standing in life as a Christian. I started to speak the truth of my faith with confidence. It wasn’t easy at first but I slowly began to experience that people appreciated my point of view. This was particularly challenging in my relationship with my husband who was staunchly against formalized religion. However, through several conversations he grew to understand my point of view. He grew to trust that I wasn’t coming from a place of judgment but rather a place of love and strength in my personal relationship with Christ. He experienced that my faith made me a better mom and wife and that it was the sustaining force in my resolve to create an exceptional marriage with him. Being “filled up to all the fullness of God”, I was truly overflowing and expressing that love to those around me. As a result, I experienced him as more embracing of a family practice of going to church on Sundays and incorporating worship practices into our daily family life. While being a Christian wasn’t my main reason for wanting to homeschool, I knew that I wanted to be able to bring my love of Christ into our family learning, asking God to work through me to show His abundant love for my loved ones. In ways that I could never think up on my own.

I knew that in my role of mother, wife, and teacher I must “walk in a manner worthy of the calling … with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:1-3)

I asked God to show me the places in my life where I was being proud, harsh, impatient, intolerant and not preserving of peace. Oh boy! You have to be really careful when you ask to have that kind of stuff revealed.

It was so painful to wake up to what a jerk I was being and had been in my life. To get how I had been so wrapped up in myself and my own selfish considerations and reasons and had not been walking in love was hard to take. I think I cried daily. It was almost unbearable to look in the mirror and see what was really there. Now, to be fair to myself, I have many friends and am generally a likable person. But the ugliness in my mind, my self-centered inner motivations, and the contract of how I saw myself as opposed to what was really going on and the true impact I had on others was shocking. I saw that there was a new level of integrity and empowerment in coming from a place of love and encouragement I could bring into my relationships. I was shown that once I got beyond myself, I could really be with people, see them for who they were, listen to them from a new place of generosity, and really serve them in their best interest verses mine! God did show mercy, and after a few weeks the onslaught subsided to a trickle. The realizations and awakenings still come daily but they are much more gentle now.

I got that I had been doing the best I could at the time with the tools I’d had. Now I had new tools and insights and so I had a new level of responsibility and new choices to make. I chose to forgive myself and march on. I had opportunities to clean up with some of my closest friends and family. That is a gift of the love walk. Once I vowed to walk in love and to be humble, patient, gentle, tolerant, and preserving of peace, I was able to direct that in for myself as well. I enrolled others in keeping me accountable to my dreams. I got in communication with people to get right with and apologize to them for how I’d been. This was such a blessing. I’ll use an analogy you to which we can all relate. It’s like when you go into the bathroom and come out with toilet paper on your shoe or your skirt tucked up in your panty hose. You don’t see it but everyone else does. There are a lot of people out there that will see it and not bring it to your attention because they don’t want to embarrass you or themselves. So they will carry on a whole conversation with you as if there is nothing wrong but the whole time they are distracted by the toilet paper or your skirt. Then someone will point it out to you, and in being embarrassed, you’ll make them wrong about it somehow! Well, once I started getting present to the jerk I had been and talking to people about it, it was no surprise to them. They knew on some level I was being a jerk. But they’d chosen to look beyond my behavior and love me anyway. What an expression of mercy! Some of these people have been my greatest teachers in that they were able to accept me and love me despite how I had been and had shown up in their lives. I can say I may not have been so gracious and forgiving if I had been them! They were relieved and moved to hear me acknowledge my mistakes to them and apologize. I now experience deeper intimacy and trust in many of my relationships which support me in creating an extraordinary extended family of loved ones.

So by letting God in to work on my heart, all the details of homeschooling are falling into place. All the choices of field trips, co-ops, curriculum and so on are working themselves out in time without much effort on my part. The appropriate choices seem to presents themselves.

Most movingly, in church this past Sunday we celebrated All Soul’s Day with a gospel worship. During service members of the congregation were invited up to share the names of loved ones who had passed to spirit. My husband, who had never felt moved to speak in church, went to to the pulpit and remembered our little unborn who passed in May, the gift from God that set in motion this period of searching and rebirth for our family. “I remember my unborn child who passed away in May. Although I never got to meet him or her, the baby’s short life brought our family closer together and for that I’m deeply grateful.” It brought tears to my eyes. We may never understand at the time why certain things happen. I choose to trust in God that all will be revealed in His time. That moment in church, it was all revealed to me and I’m so thankful for this opportunity to be with my family and create an extraordinary life with them. There is nothing wrong. Everything is perfect. I am becoming more and more each day through God’s grace the woman who has the capacity to create the dream of an extraordinary life for herself and her family.

Joonu is a wife and mother to a 3-year old energetic little boy and has one on the way. She is just starting out on her journey in homeschooling and embraces it as a family lifestyle. She is also a successful yoga teacher, the co-founder and President of a charity called Blackstone Valley WomenAid, Inc, coordinator of service activities at her church, and a Chief Dream Officer of an entrepreneurial development community for women called The Dream Factory Community. She enjoys being in nature, spiritual study, reading, golf, chocolate, and spending time with family and friends. She started blogging as a way of recording her observations and got great feedback from family and friends so she kept going. Her intention is that by sharing of her own experience she can offer resources, support, and ultimately enrich someone experience of themselves as whole, perfect, and loved. Please visit her blog at howhomeschoolinghappens.blogspot.com.