Today my baby sister embarked on her senior year of high school. 26 years ago my parents began the new adventure of homeschooling with three young kids (which was pretty uncharted territory at that point), and I wonder if my mom had any idea that it would be this long before that chapter closed. As I told my mom today, not to scare her or anything, but that might possibly have only been the training ground. So far, she has eight grandchildren with only two of her six kids producing progeny at this point. So I figure maybe around forty grandkids who are homeschooling for the next forty years? Could be a slight exaggeration, just trying not to underestimate the size of God’s plans. 🙂 I figure she has a job as long as she wants to be in the field.
As I watched my kids today on their official first day of the ’11-’12 school year, so many happy memories came flooding back. Memories of pursuing the things we were interested in, of learning with our siblings, of field trips to banks and zoos with our friends, of the really cute guy in the homeschool group who never talked to girls but somehow became my husband, of reading, reading, and reading some more, of hurrying through our work so that we could play outside, of endless opportunities to play with our multitudes of wonderful friends, of traveling right in the middle of the school year…and the list goes on and on. Mostly they are memories of togetherness with the family I loved and learning the most important educational lesson of all: learning is not something that is fed to you in a particular setting but it is a lifestyle that travels with you wherever you go. It is a hunger to know more of what God has created and why He made it that way. It is a desire to become more equipped to reach out to others in the most unexpected ways or during daily routines. It is a lifetime of finding bits and pieces of the puzzle that when put together reveal a bigger, and greater, and more awe-inspiring God who created it all. Math is useless without the Sum of All Life. Language is nothing without the Author of Words. Science is pointless without the Creator of Life. History is empty without the Beginning and the End. So as I sat my kids down around the table today and said, “We learn for one purpose, and one alone. We learn to have more opportunities to know HIM better. Everything else is just a tool to serve Him more effectively,” I thanked that precious Father that twenty-six years ago He gave my parents a vision. A crazy vision that seemed difficult and radical but has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. Thank you, Mom and Dad. May HIS legacy live on.