Friday: From the Archives

Each Friday I plan to post a previous post from the archives. Hope you enjoy it!

What’s your measuring stick?

(Originally posted here in Nov, 2005)

What do I use as a yardstick to measure my family’s growth by? I think a lot of us can fall into this trap of listening to others. Sometimes this ‘others’ can be friends or it can just as easily be the local support group, or email group/message board or curricula. I think the key is that peer pressure of the homeschool variety can happen whenever we take our *seeking* eyes away from God and look to others. Ultimately, it isn’t about what everyone else is doing or using or how they home-school as that is all external- it should be about us and the work of God in our hearts.

I think that this homeschool peer pressure is real and it does exist. I think a lot of us have been taken in by peer pressure at some stage or another. Sometimes it takes us to hit the (home-school) pit or rock-bottom (burnout for some???) to realize that we are all individual and need to put our eyes back to God. In this home-school journey where a lot of our results are not directly seen, we look for reassurance as this provides a certain measure of comfort. We do this because we no longer have delegated the responsibility of teaching academics to a school or teacher and that responsibility is ours now and we don’t want to muck it up. However, using the person next to you, or another family is not THE measuring stick we should be using. We need to go to God and allow Him to direct our path.

Lord, draw us to you. Bring our hearts back to you and show us when we are using something else as a yardstick.