Author name: Missy Andrews

August is upon us, and if you’re anything like me, in addition to the sunshine and heat, it brings with it a crushing realization that the long list of summer to-dos that we penned with great hope in late May is not going to be accomplished. Mine sits before me, a glaring accusation. Where did the time go? The bathroom with 18-year-old wallpaper I was going to re-decorate, the vanity I was going to refinish, the pictures I was going to rescue from the vaults of my computer and finally frame on my walls, the books I was going to read, the coffee dates I was going to have with neglected friends and family, all of these proclaim my insufficiency…

In award-winning author Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, twice-orphaned Jonah searches for answers to the eternal questions: What is the nature of God? What is prayer? Is life a random series of disconnected events, or a linear, purposeful, meaningful path? These universal questions all converge upon Jonah’s more personal questions of identity: Who am I? Am I what I do? Do I, in fact, choose my profession, thus bearing the immense responsibility of making myself? Or am I born to a calling? Crow describes this undetected pressure to create an identity for oneself as a kind of subtle bondage… 

It was spring of my oldest son’s eighth grade year, and I, like homeschool moms all over the country, was planning for the fall. Except this time, my son would be starting high school. This time, it would “count.” Panic replaced my usual plenary excitement as I wondered what colleges would be looking for on high school transcripts and how I was going to prepare my homeschooler to convince them that he had mastered everything. I flew through reams of paper creating a plethora of booklists, each one longer and more ambitious than the previous, and frankly wore myself out with worry in the process…