Christmas Break

"Why don't you take them to the park?" Josh asked.

It was an innocent question, born out of enduring a morning full of antsy boredom from our 3 kids. And for some reason, at his suggestion my whole countenance fell. Josh asked me what was the matter, but I couldn't put it into words just then. I silently loaded all three kids into the car, grabbed my journal, and drove to the park.

What was wrong with me, anyway? It was the day after Christmas, it was gorgeous weather, and we didn't have school.  I sat down on a bench in the full sun and wrote the following entry in my journal:

When Expectations Don't Match Reality

As a homeschooler, you spend the bulk of your time planning lessons, soldiering through school days week after week, month after month. There's not much time for house cleaning or personal goals like exercise, art projects, writing, or organizing those areas of life that tend to creep ever downward.  There's not even time for ordinary things like getting laundry done or potty-training your toddler.  You occasionally think about skipping school, but can't for conscience's sake. You know that there looms over your head that pile of school work that won't be ignored. You start yearning for Christmas break, when there are stretched before you two blank weeks, waiting to be filled with whatever you choose. You might actually get your laundry done for a change! Or find the top of your desk, which at present is buried under months of neglected To Dos. Dare you hope to accomplish an art project or the 1000 piece puzzle collecting dust in your closet? You'd even settle for potty-training the toddler.

But.

Christmas break finally rolls around, but what you weren't factoring in to all your Accomplish-All-The Things plans is the fact that your Kids. Are. Still. There. Only, in the absence of school work to keep them occupied, they are now climbing the walls of your house and fighting incessantly with one another. They are looking to you for entertainment.

Your husband suggests you take them to the park, and in one blinding instant you see how it is. How this vacation, this break, is going to roll. You will not be able to make any sense of order out of the chaos, you will not be able to potty train the toddler... and art? Fuggettaboutit! What looked to you in November like an oasis off in the distance really turned out to be More Of The Same Desert. In all your daydreams of checking off lists, how did you forget that you'd still have your kids with you all day long? Other moms have the luxury of doing these goal-type-things while their kids are at school, and then their Christmas breaks are spent actually enjoying their kids.

So is my life just homeschooling and daycare on never-ending repeat? When am I supposed to get anything done?"

I sat staring at those pretty cursive words forming such ugly impudent questions for a few minutes before I shut the journal. I showed Josh my essay when I got home, and he didn't have the answer either, just kind of grimaced at my negativity. "What, no happy ending?" he asked. And I didn't have a happy ending, the resolution he was hoping for, until this morning when God's word once again shed light on my bleak outlook.

Hebrews 10-12 were scheduled for me today, according to my read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan (which, in my current season of life will have taken more than 2 years by the time I finish. Shhh). I read this:

"You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.  Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, 'Yet a little while and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous ones shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.'" Heb 10:34-38.

Do you hear it in there? Faith asserts that this world isn't all there is! My coveted breaks from school, albeit to do noble things (who doesn't want a potty-trained child or an organized office?), might not be God's will for me today. What if God would rather me learn endurance today? What if He'd rather allow the frustrations of this life help to set my affection today on "the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God"? (Heb 11:10) That is "a better country, a heavenly one." (Heb 11:16)

Or, as seems to be the theme from this past year, it is God's will that I might be made strong in Christ through weaknesses (Heb 11:34, 2 Cor 12:10). "Therefore...let us also lay aside every weight and the sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us [and my race might look different from another person's race. Yours does too!], looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." Heb 12:1-2  I'd continue, but I may end up copying the rest of the Bible if I don't stop there!

So, Josh, there's the happy ending: Jesus Christ and eternity with Him in heaven! That just completely blows apart my contrived kingdom of earthly orderliness and art projects and potty training, doesn't it?