crying woman covers mouth with paper smile

The Gospel for Homeschool Parents and Teachers

September 17, 2024

by Missy Andrews

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser… Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:1-5)

It’s back-to-school time and emotions are running high. I can almost hear the air crackling with energy. Some of us are excited at the thought of another year of books and bouquets of sharpened pencils. Crisp fall days, sharp minds, early mornings, and familiar routines beckon and promise order, productivity, and progress.

Others will admit to being a bit anxious, filled with a nagging fear that this year might look just like last year – a failure, that is. We reason that we haven’t changed. Our organizational strategies haven’t changed. Our personal education and degree of capability haven’t changed. Our children haven’t changed. We are still ourselves, and we take ourselves up and, with fear and trepidation, don the yoke of that broken plow, readying ourselves to trudge and toil in the traces again. Anxiety is the energy that crackles in us – anxiety and despair that we will never be enough, never do enough.

In this fear, we might be more like our energetic, can-do neighbors than we think. Regardless of our mental orientation in this moment, all we homeschoolers are presently facing in the same direction. The coming year stretches out before us and we know our marching orders. Despite our differences, we share goals and a task, and these common things bind us together in a common cause. Here on the precipice of the new academic year, our minds are set on lessons.

If you will indulge me, I’d like to give you one.

First, take out a clean sheet of notebook paper and a sharpened #2 Ticonderoga – you know the kind: the one with the big pink eraser. Sit yourself down in a quiet place and write down what it would mean to be successful in your homeschooling venture. Take your time and think with me. What does success look like? Feel like? Smell like? Mean? By what will you measure it, and what will it do for you and your kids? Dream for a minute and paint a picture for me. I’ll wait.

Done? Very good.

What you have now in your hand is an image – an ideal. It’s a hope, a dream, a goad. It’s what keeps you going, calls you up and gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s also what judges and condemns you, declares you guilty, and names you a failure. Your image is what puts you under a yoke of slavery – and it does this regardless of your capabilities, regardless of whether you see yourself as a Shiny “Can” or a Dismal “Can’t” in the homeschool project.

Images make us do lots of things. Business owners know this; that’s why there are so many ads littering your Facebook feed. In fact, some data collection agencies predict that advertising and marketing spending worldwide will exceed $1.75 trillion this year. That image of a thin and beautiful woman on the fitness brochure might make us buy that new weight loss program. The image of the handsome and successful man in the Mercedes-Benz might make us buy that new car, hoping we will somehow find success thrown into the bargain. The image of the smiling child eating Cheerios might make us buy more breakfast cereal. The image of that happy mom and her cute, laughing baby in the diaper covers ad might make us exchange the Pampers for cozy cloth diapers, hoping our child will smile a little more or cry a little less. Images are powerful motivators. They promise us that we will look and feel better if we obtain them, that we will have control, power, wealth, happiness, and success.

The only problem is that images cannot deliver any of these good things. How many diet supplements sit in your cupboard? How many exercise machines litter the yard of Goodwill? Do Cheerios really make your child happy? Does the cute diaper cover make your child stop crying or make his poop stink any less? How about that homeschool curriculum you purchased last year at the fair, or the year before that, or the year before that? Have you even cracked it open? What were you purchasing but a vision – a glittering image of success?

Do these shiny images succeed in making you and your family shiny and happy? Of course not. In fact, they may actually function in the opposite way. I got an exercise bike for Christmas one year. It was going to get me in shape – a shape besides round and soft, that is. Instead, it became my new clothes horse, holding up my sweatshirts and bath robe and judging me until my son hauled it off to his house, bless him. Now, it holds his clothes and glares disapproval and judgment at him every time he walks by, a metal monument of his failure to “Just Do It.” Not only that, but every fit and toned man he passes reminds him of his own weakness – just like every smiling kid, dressed up in their Sunday best and looking good, makes your squalling toddler look like a hot mess and makes you feel like a loser.

Not only do these images promise things they cannot deliver and then judge us in our failure, but they also make us envy our neighbors, who have somehow miraculously achieved those promised goods. Externally, we might court those people. We want to know their secret and drink from their fountain. In our hearts, however, we scorn them because they represent failure and judgment.

Meanwhile, the glittery and successful among us hope that no one will notice the chewing gum and scotch tape that holds our image together. We take that “first day of homeschool” picture – the one where the children are smiling and neatly dressed, sitting studiously beside their stack of books with pencils in hand and an American flag behind them – and we stand behind them smiling, as if we’d just won Homeschool-Mother-of-the-Year. We hope that if we can just keep going, just press forward with our foot in everyone’s back, the image might become a reality. We’ll “fake it ’til we make it.” No one needs to know that in our beds at night, we lie awake in fear that the other shoe will drop and our pretense will be exposed.

What does your image of the successful homeschool family promise? A secure future? A fortune? A reputation? A name? These are glittering images, and, regardless of your self-perception, serving them creates isolation and loneliness that keeps you from others even as those images ride you hard. Bearing their yoke, we are beasts of burden, all of us.

But Jesus speaks to us: “Come unto Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light, and you will find rest for your souls.” You are no beast of burden, He says. You are not a slave, but a daughter of the Most High God. He invites you to put off the yoke of slavery, as the Apostle Paul puts it, and to live free of the images you serve. He calls you to look upon Him, the Suffering Servant and the true image of the invisible God, and to recognize that He put an end to servitude forever.

In Christ Jesus, we are not slaves, but sons and daughters. We are heirs of God our Father, if we will forsake our glittering images and gaze on Him. “Those who regard and follow worthless idols forsake their own mercy and loving-kindness.” (Jonah 2:8) The English Heritage Version puts it this way, “Those who cling to worthless idols forsake the mercy that is theirs.” You see, it’s not about our images of perfection and success. It’s about mercy.

What, you say? Is this article some kind of bait and switch? How is this supposed to help me man up and do the job that is before me this year? I’ve got a lot to do and a long way to go. I need energy and vision and help! I was looking for a pep talk, not a pietistic call to repentance.

There is a world of difference between pietism and piety. As someone who has stood in your shoes, fixed on my own glittering image, I am here to tell you with all the empathy in the world that you don’t need a pep talk.

A pep talk is designed to convince you that you can do it. If you screw your courage to the sticking place and follow ten simple steps, you too can have the life you’ve always dreamed of. But that life is vanity. Those steps are images, worthless idols all. They don’t serve. They’re flat and lifeless, demanding of you sacrifice, homage, and perfection. They exact and burden and beat the life out of you. That is not really what you need.

What you really need, here on the precipice of a new academic year, is the gospel. What you most need is Jesus. He alone is your way out of those enslaving traces, out of servitude and into the family. He suffered to perfect you in love for all He has planned for you this year. He promises by His Holy Spirit to be with you in this work and to give you joy for your journey “through this dark world and wide” (as the 17th c poet John Milton put it). Not as the world gives does Jesus give to you. No tit-for-tat economy is it that He traffics in.

So in the words of Milton’s Holy Sonnet 19, I exhort you to put away the “fond” fears your image produces. They are, as Milton suggests, plain foolishness. We serve the King: “His state is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed and post o’er land and oceans without rest. They also serve who only stand and wait.” Standing and waiting – these represent the hardest work of all, do they not?

Jesus called this abiding: “Abide in me,” He said. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser… Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:1-5). Fruitfulness: that’s what we hope for here at the beginning of the homeschool season. We want to plant seeds that will grow into an abundant harvest – a cornucopia of beauty and grace and provision for ourselves and our children. This is surely a lovely image, but do not be deceived into chasing it. Images are vaporous; chasing them is chasing the wind. Instead, receive the vision Jesus holds up in this passage: The life and glory you are seeking doesn’t come in your doings. It comes in your abiding.

Listen to these words of 19th c hymn writer, James Proctor:

Nothing either great or small
Nothing sinner, no
Jesus died to pay it all
Ever long ago
When he from his lofty throne
Stooped to do and die
Everything was fully done
Hearken to his cry
And rest in the hands of the
Savior
Rest in the grace of his labor
Rest in him

Weary working burdened one
Wherefore toil you so?
Cease your doing, all was done
Ever long ago
Til to Jesus’ work you cling
By a simple faith
Doing is a deadly thing
But by his work, we’re saved
So rest in the hands of the Savior
Oh rest in the grace of his labor
Rest in him

It is finished, yes indeed
Finished we were bought
Sinners, this is all we need
Tell me, is it not?
We cast our deadly doing down
Down at Jesus’ feet
Stand in him and him alone
Gloriously complete
And rest in the hands of the savior
Rest in the grace of his labor
Rest in him.

Jesus calls you today, at the outset of this great work He has set before you, to abide, to rest, to cast your own deadly doings down at His feet and to trust in Him alone. Here’s the good news: There is simply no need to turn the task of homeschooling into a self-salvation project, freighting it with existential meaning and courting it for identity, security, and belonging. Today, at the beginning of a new school year, hear the gospel: Your identity has been secured by your savior, Jesus. He alone infuses life and work with meaning. Will you discard your glittering image and receive from Him? Instead of laboring in the traces this year, will you strive to remember Jesus? He has not only performed all things for you but has also promised to abide with you as you walk by faith into His glorious vision for your children and your future.