As I sit contemplating the week ahead with a lot of new things coming our way, I’m reflecting on the challenges we’ve faced in our homeschool year thus far and where my focus has been. 

What am I treasuring? My pastor shared a lot of wisdom today about living with eternity in mind, and one place he read from was in Matthew 6. After verses about storing up treasures in heaven because they cannot be destroyed like earthly treasures can, comes verse 21: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Where is my heart and what treasures have I been focused on? I admit I’ve let myself get bogged down in the “have to’s” and “what ifs.” I started the year confident in where we were and where we were headed. But when it just…..didn’t work, I didn’t know what to do. I felt stuck. I had put my faith in the wrong things and the wrong things were based in treasures of this earth. No wonder I was feeling exhausted and depleted.

The struggle forced me to pause long enough to ask, “what am I doing and why?” And it was almost like God, waiting for the pause, said, “You’re looking too low. You’ll never find what you need down there. Look up, child.”

Oof. I sorely needed to hear that.

When I finally looked up, I realized that the things we tend to treasure in our children’s education are temporary, fleeting, and sometimes harmful.

Standards (whose?), being ahead or behind (of what, exactly?), curriculum, scores on a test, or how much our child can produce in any given time. 

When time marches on and my child is grown, or when she has her own children, or when we enter Heaven, will standards and curriculum and scores matter?

With eternity in mind, do I care if we use the most beautiful curriculum ever made? Nope. Do I need my child to complete a million worksheets to show she really knows how to do something? Nope again. Do I need a program that promises rigor and above grade level standards? Not really. Will I ruin my child if we take it slow and learn in a way that feels lovely and natural? Definitely not.

With eternity in mind, what is most important? When I looked up, I realized it wasn’t the books, the work, the perfect curriculum, the amount of problems or pages, or whether what I’m doing is “enough.” These treasures, though they may be temporarily satisfying to my fleshly needs, can easily shrivel up and disappear. 

When I looked up, I realized it was my child’s soul, her heart, her mind, our relationship, our family, and most importantly, our path here and how we know, show, and share Jesus.

Looking up put all those stresses over which curriculum and forced production right where they belong – below everything else. All the learning will happen, eventually, in ways that point to our Creator instead of us.

We are almost a month into our school year and still haven’t settled on a particular curriculum for the majors, haven’t even pulled the books for other subjects off our shelf, and definitely haven’t achieved a good flow. We’re struggling. We’re experimenting. Having to stop and start again over and over. And it doesn’t feel great. Sanctification rarely does. But it is freeing. God has set me free from the things that were binding me and showed me there’s a better way.

With eternity in mind, we won’t miss what matters. I know God sees what I don’t. He called me to homeschool and He’s equipping me for the mission. 

I just have to keep looking up. That’s where the real treasure is.

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Matthew 6:21