Yesterday was a hard day for me. Having so many in school is now quite overwhelming. I want to do a good job with each one and am finding that hard. Yes, the older ones are mostly independent, but they still need my help. The younger ones definitely need my help. I sometimes feel a second or third teacher would really help! Having RM take over the teaching of the older son has been great, but he really is sacrificing in doing that, so I feel badly for him. I can start to feel anxious about his workload when I think about it too much. Then, on top of all that, my clothing/closet/mudroom situation has exploded on me. We're grateful that some money came in to allow us to finish more work on the house, but it has made my children's clothes homeless for awhile. Clothes for 10 people - no home? It makes for a very messy house and though I've had messier, it is never easy to keep an orderly home at the best of times. I was crying out all day to the Lord to help me keep my anxious thoughts at bay. It seemed if we just had a little extra money, was the thought I kept hearing myself think (sounds like discontentment again.....!) Other people would just hire someone to finish it all off, I would think. Other people wouldn't have to live like this - they could hire another teacher, they could hire a contractor, they could hire whoever they needed and everything could go back to normal right away. Then, at the end of the day, I sometimes read to the little ones a story from Wisdom with the Millers. It was, once again, not for them, but for me. It was God coming down and hearing my pathetic pleas for help and answering through His Word. The story was from taken from a verse in Proverbs. Get ready for this....
"Better is a little with the fear of the Lord
than great treasure and trouble with it." Proverbss 15:16
That was it. In all of the little I was feeling we had, the fear of the Lord was in the house. Great treasure doesn't always mean trouble comes with it, but it often does. I was so grateful for the reminder which I, sadly, so often need to hear. Would I still like an orderly home? Of course, but like I said, I've been here before, in much more disorder when my husband was doing his contract in our home and we made it through that looooong period of time without too much stress. Would I like to multiply myself? Yes, but at the end of the day, even without multiplying myself, I still see each child learning and that's all I can do. Do I still feel a little anxiety that RM is not going to get his work done on time? Well, the only thing I can do there is pray, so pray I do.
Ok, back to Stephanie - Chapter two - Two Weeks of Questions
When Stephanie first arrived at our house, I realized without all the red lipstick, etc., that she perhaps she had the haircut she did for a reason - she had the look of a feminist-type woman who purposely doesn't want to look, well, female! She wasn't wearing makeup either, which was no big deal, but perhaps went along with the look. She was also a vegetarian for the love of animals, I think. Ok, I could try to make special meals, I thought, for a couple of weeks. After finding out a bit about her, I went over what she was likely to experience with us. I told her the order of our day, that I try not to let the kids get away with too much, so don't be surprised if they get disciplined. I told her we're up fairly early and that unfortunately, she would be expected to get up, too. I told her what we were studying and where she might be able to help. It was great to have an extra hand with the kids as I had six at the time, one of them being just a 6 month old. It looked like it was going to be a great week. We were hitting it off already.
The first morning was hilarious. In fact, every morning she was there was hilarious. We found out quite quickly that she, uh, wasn't exactly a morning person. She would stay up late reading and trying to rouse her took a lot of kids jumping on her in the morning. Very funny. So, up she would come, grab her coffee, a shower and then I would send her back downstairs telling her, sorry - go read your Bible. All the other kids were expected to do that for at least a half hour and then they could come downstairs. I don't know if she had ever done that, despite the fact she'd gone to a Christian-type school her whole highschool experience and had attended church most of her life. She was ok with that and decided to start reading at a good place - the beginning, Genesis.
Day 1 of reading was fascinating to her - she had so many questions about Creation, about Adam and Eve, about why God would do this or that. I tried my best to answer her. I think she was reading with new, adult eyes, as she probably had only heard most of these stories from a childhood Sunday School experience and now she reading with a new spiritual awareness. It was neat to be on a journey with her as she read more and more each day. It turns out when she had been in university, she had drifted away from the church. She had left any belief she had and enjoyed the worldly experience university offered for a time, but she found it lacked and towards the end of her years at school, she came to realize, she wanted to go back to church, to see if she could find God again. The timing of her visit was perfect.
During the day, we attempted school, walks, playtimes and then after lunch, I would put kids down for naps and I found I needed to put Stephanie down, too! It was the funniest thing - the poor girl was not used to the rigorous schedule of a large homeschooled family and it was enough to tire her out - I made sure she got her two hour nap each afternoon, just like the toddlers! At night, when RM (he was her mom's cousin, that was their relationship) came up for dinner, we talked and talked. She got to ask him all her questions about the Bible and we loved it. It was such good conversation and made those two weeks fly by. By this point, RM realized she was not a drug dealer and ever since that time together, they have had a very special friendship, too. Over the course of the first few days, she was starting to notice I had some unusual convictions, on everything from marriage, to courtship or dating, to why we did homeschooling, why we did just about everything. She started to ask more questions and more questions and I just did my best to answer how we came to the conclusions we did from reading the Bible. She just couldn't get enough.
Then I gave her a book to read that summarized, in a story form, a lot of what we believed. She ate that book up in a matter of days, which led to even more questions. Now she was starting to ask what I would do if I were her. She wanted to know what I thought about her life after school, as she was just about to finish her teacher's degree. Now we were getting into really tricky, potentially controversial topics. I didn't want to start giving advice on her life that she would one day regret or hate me for if things didn't work out! I tried to keep my opinion to myself, but she wouldn't relent. She wanted to know what I thought she should do. So one night, on one of the last nights she was with us, we sat down together and I remember exactly what I said, "Ok, remember, YOU asked ME. I'm just going to tell you what I think because YOU asked!" We talked for hours that night......
Chapter Three.....Coming soon!
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