Sacred Mundane: The Blog

After many years of slow homeschool days, limited activities, and just two kids, our season has certainly changed. I’m grateful for those years, but now with two teens we are in full-blown activity mode and throwing a couple extra kids into the mix hasn’t exactly slowed the pace.

With cross-country, theater, dance, ballet, voice lessons, and teaching literature, on top of our at-home lessons plus toting around two littles, life feels very full.

Thankfully, seasons that stretch us force us to grow. Here are four helpful habits that help us through our busy season: Read the rest over here! https://simplehomeschool.net/4-habits-that-help/

“Mama, are you overwhelmed?”

It was Justice who asked, looking up at me inquiringly, his little mouth carefully pronouncing the word he’d clearly heard before.

I smiled down at him, “No sweetie, I’m happy.”

And I was. But I knew why he was asking it. I had been overwhelmed. Way overwhelmed. And through over the course of a few weeks, the Lord was showing me how subtle this temptation of overwhelm really was.

Temptation? Overwhelm is not a temptation. Temptations are things like sex and second pieces of cake. Right?

Sometimes. But sometimes our temptations are so much more subtle than that.

It started on our drive up to Spokane. Leaving my family to go away and speak for a weekend is at lot of work. It’s a lot of work to prepare to speak, and it’s a lot of work to prepare my family with everything they need for me to be gone. But this time my family came with me and I discovered the only thing that’s more work than leaving them at home to go speak is bringing them with me to go speak. 😉 I quickly became grumpy and frustrated, and my thoughts, most-certainly not taken-captive, began to run amok something like this:

I’m never doing this again. It’s impossible, this is way too much work to do all of this, I just can’t do this anymore. I’ll let people know when we get back that I’m not going to be speaking anymore.

Ha. Of course even as my thoughts went there, I thought of the wise saying from a woman who has endured more hardship than I can imagine:

Don’t decide to give up running while going up a hill.

Of course.

Last week Dutch had a hard cross-country race. I was worried that he was injured, his form was odd and he didn’t have his usual grin. Gratefully, it was just a hard race. It was hot. It was smoky. He’d had a harder-than-usual training week and he was just plain tired.

But within a minute or two he had his breath, was feeling good, and back to his usual smiling self.

Turns out it was just one hard race. Turns out he’s only 4 weeks into running this much and he could really use more training. Of course.

Can you imagine if, at about 4K into that hot and smoky race he stopped and said, “You know, I don’t think cross-country is for me. This just isn’t my sport. Turns out it’s not as fun as I thought. I’ll go ahead and just let the coach know that I’m done for the season.”

Of course not.

Ok, so what does this have to do with overwhelm?

Overwhelm is the first step toward quitting. It’s a form of mental quitting. Instead of saying, “Wow this is harder than I thought. I’m going to need _______________ (stamina, new strategies, patience, more sleep, etc.). I wonder what steps I can take to be more prepared for this,” it’s telling yourself, “This is too hard, this is ridiculous, no one should have to do this.”

Now of course one caveat: It could be that you’re not called to do the thing. Dutch did piano and baseball as well in years past. He gave it a year or two, and it truly wasn’t his thing. Great. Move on.

But most of the time I’m overwhelmed by things I really am called to do, I just need more training.

Back to temptation.

It’s a temptation to let yourself take that mental step into quitting. It’s a cop-out. It’s a way to blame circumstances which completely robs us of our opportunities to grow.

If Dutch quit he’d never become a faster runner.

If I just quit speaking or homeschooling or whatever God is calling me to do, I’ll never walk in the good works God prepared for me in advance (Eph. 2:10).

I just sent Dutch off to practice with his two water bottles and peanut butter pretzels. He’s learning his rhythm, and I am too. I’m learning that I can’t plan things that take me away from the kids during the days we’re doing school. I’m learning that dinner-prep really needs to be done in the morning. I’m learning a nightly house-reset makes mornings so much better. I’m learning a 4pm snack for the littles goes a long way in keeping us all sane during that difficult pre-dinner window.

Instead of giving in to the temptation to overwhelm, instead of the mental throwing-up-of-the-hands and saying “This is too hard,” I’m trying a deep breath and asking, “What do I need in order to manage this better?”

Shall we try it together?

A friend of mine posted this CS Lewis quote and I knew it was the answer to my prayer:

“Courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

It sounded so much like another CS Lewis quote that I had to read it a second time to be sure it wasn’t the same one. The other one, the one I’d carried close to my heart for years was,

“Humility isn’t so much another virtue along with the others, it is soil out of which all the graces grow.” 

We can’t truly love unless we have humility enough to esteem another better than ourselves. We can’t be faithful unless we have the humility to put ourselves aside in order to remain faithful in a job, friendship, ministry. We can’t be kind, joyful, good, we certainly can’t have self-control, without humility. It is the soil out of which all the graces grow.

But what is this bit about courage? Something resonated deeply about this idea. Yes, it is the form every virtue takes at the testing point. 

So if I cultivate humility, I seek to esteem others higher than myself, I seek to love. At some point this love will be tested. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I’d even say tested to the point that to truly love through the test feels agonizing, too painful.

Or take another virtue. To be faithful when the cost to yourself is staggeringly high … humility cultivates the growing fruit, then courage must come along to bring that faithfulness forth into fruition. 

Courage strengthens the heart of the mother who pushes through the agony of childbirth to bring forth that beautiful child. 

Courage keeps you loving even when you’re guaranteed pain. Courage keeps you moving forward in good works, even when some level of failure is inevitable. 

Last week it felt a bit like every day brought another unforeseen challenge. Often we take these things in stride, right? But sometimes we experience that slow leak of joy. I sat with the Lord a bit and tried to put my finger on what I was feeling. Defeated. That was the word.

I just feel defeated, Lord. It feels like every attempt at anything goes awry. 

I’m so grateful for people who share the Good News in various forms on social media. CS Lewis loud and clear right there in my feed and I knew it was what I needed:

Courage. Of course. All these virtues, the ones I want, the ones I pray for, all of these virtues, at the testing point, come down to courage. Courage to apologize. Courage to have the hard conversation. Courage to say yes even when you don’t how it’ll work. Courage to say no even if means disappointing someone. Courage to be honest. Courage to deny the constant cravings of self and make Kingdom choices instead. 

Last week Dutch ran his first cross-country race. He’s never done anything like this before, and I was so proud of him, a homeschool kids, joining our local high school team. He ran so well! It was all I could do not to just gush happy tears as I watched him with his team, so happy and confident and strong and kind and brave. This is the kid who was so anxious about playing baseball that he ran away and hid in our shop on game day. This is the kid who couldn’t even go to Costco because he was so overwhelmed by people. 

There he went, Courage on two long legs, striding past me across the finish line. More than getting any certain race time, I was proud of him because I knew that this represented so many courageous choices. Regular, repeated decisions to choose humility and courage.

I’m trying to do the same.