Homeschooling

January and February were difficult months for us Andrews types. The new year brought with it two car accidents, a health drama, and a broken furnace in the coldest week of the season. I would love to report that we handled it all with faces “set like flint,” hearts full of faith and unflappable confidence in God’s goodness, but that wouldn’t be honest. Instead, we hunkered down, forgetting our responsibilities, alternately trembling and petitioning God for relief… 

I can’t stop thinking about the passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory that I wrote about in my last post, where he cautions us against idolizing our memories of the past: “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found,” he says. I am sure he chose that image because of a flower’s beauty, but I wonder if he also had in mind how fleeting that beauty was designed to be…

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…