I’m amazed at how God brings us to places of clarity and revelation in our lives. It’s not often a split second thing. It’s a journey. He takes us step by step. Adding layer upon layer of understanding until we can finally put it all together and see the truth that was there all along, hidden from our eyes. This past year has been like this for me. It’s been a winding gentle path that was grown more narrow as I’ve traveled it, God clearly pointing me in a specific direction. At times, I just wasn’t getting it and He would physically shake me with a call to pay attention. “Don’t lose me here”, it seemed He was saying, as if I were a child staring out the window watching birds while my teacher rattled on. He had something important to say and I needed to get it.
What started with a simple call to family, turned into a call of stripping away the distractions of modern western life. From there He showed me the importance of loving others and living community. Then revealing the need of being the early church. We as American Christians have abandoned most of what the early church was. I can’t help but think Paul would be exasperated with us.
Not only were there revelations of the spiritual sort but also some very specific truths of history that either I personally have ignored or we have ignored as a people. As mentioned above, as the Church we’ve neglected much of the living of Christ. Not the teaching of Christ. No, we’ve got that down and we like to talk alot about it. But the living of Christ – we’re often too afraid or proud to do that part. As Americans, we’ve forgotten much of our early history. Or rather, we’ve been content to let the history of our nation be rewritten and sold to us for nearly 90 years. Anyway, all this, when stirred up into a big ole pot of meditation and reflection, leads to a conviction that just can’t be ignored anymore. It’s as if I’m that caterpillar tucked safely in the warmth of a cocoon. Only God has seen fit to melt me down into a puddle of goo just so He can remake me into something altogether unlike anything I could even imagine before. The year in the cocoon taught me so many new things that it just wasn’t possible to emerge as anything but completely different that what I was when I went in. It’s too much for me to hold. I had to be changed to be able to hold it all.
Back in the day when our country’s founding fathers roamed the new world they had some very specific ideas about who God was and why we must exist in subjection to Him. For many years the youth of this nation were taught with excellence in education and never neglecting the truth of Scripture or the God of the Bible. The two went hand in hand. Education and God the Father. In the 1920’s the education of Americans began turning a new tide. The most recognized atheist in the country, along with others, decided that we needed a new set of texts to teach our children from. Based on the fact that money motivated everything and everyone, it was decided this new series of textbooks would be an economic based series and thus you have the birth of our current system of education in America and the beginnings of “historical revisionism” and the economic view of American history. That’s why you hear a ton about taxation without representation but very little about the other 20+ items mentioned in our nation’s constitution.
What does any of this have to do with following Christ, you ask? I have no idea. Except that it’s about truth. Truth in who and how Jesus loved. Truth in who and how this nation lived and loved. Sort of a stripping away of nominal Americanized Christianity and the world’s attempts to smother Christ.
I’ve been given two different resources this year that have proved divinely sat in my lap, so to speak. One is the Madsen Method. I’ve learned so much from Sharon and Joe Madsen and I am eternally grateful for their care and generosity to me. The other is the Eclectic Education Series given to me by Dollar Homeschool. The EES is a set of textbooks which from about 1865 to 1915 WAS education in the United States. These have proved very helpful in my rediscovering education.
Another resource that has been instrumental to me this year is David Barton’s American Heritage Series. It really is eye opening and I challenge everyone to take the time to learn about what this nation was founded on. I dare you. If you think you know, think again. I mean it.
Spiritually, God laid a few things in my lap to teach me about Him and his son Jesus. The first was a young man from eastern Tennessee, Shane Claiborne. I read his book Irresistible Revolution and enjoyed seeing Christ I had never made time for before. If you have time, read the book. If you don’t just watch this one hour Youtube video of Shane. You’ve almost read the book if you’ve seen this video.
Another is the book Blue Like Jazz. I listened to the audiobook being read by the author, Don Miller. I finished it in two days. I loved this book for it’s honesty. I would never have the courage to say some of the things Don does. I don’t think I even had the words to say some of them. But to hear Don say them… I felt them bubble up out me.
And lastly, the thing that started it all for me… A Journey Home. The Waller family invited me to peer down into this rabbit hole that has held me in a free fall for a year now. I’m forever thankful to God for this precious family and will treasure every thought of them. They have become as dear to me as my own family.
That’s what’s been going on with me. I know I’ve been silent here quite a bit. It’s a homeschool blog. And honestly, homeschooling has not been ranking up there with things I feel like writing about. Still, no excuses. I know. Maybe now that I’ve gotten all this out I can spend a little more time on it. Thanks for listening.
Sara O’