Surrounded

One of the best things about homeschooling is also one of the hardest. 

The people are ALWAYS there.

Wiggling, squirming, complaining, demanding, requesting, laughing, tickling, name calling, wont-stop-touching-you, incessant question asking, never a dull moment, don't want to do my chores, he stole my legos, he ate my legos, don't kiss my butt, always there. (Literally, kisses are for cheeks. Not those cheeks. You have to teach toddlers everything).  Sometimes it makes me want to scream. 

\Other times, I feel like a kid at the beach with a candy bar. What could be better?

But a lot of the time it is really hard. The important thing to remember in this struggle is that you are not alone. (Ha, like you could ever forget that!) It's not just those crazy, messy, needy children that surround you. They are easy to see. What is hard to see sometimes is the vision. 

When we hold these little hands in ours and we wipe these snotty noses and we answer the same math question for thousandth time, it's easy to think that these are little things. Well they are little things, but they all add up to something extraordinary.The work we are doing is God's work. 

He said that whatever we did for the least of these we do for him. It's kinda hard to imagine wiping Jesus' snotty nose. I don't even know if he had a snotty nose or if he walked in Divine, snotless, health. But when we do these things for our kids, we are serving the king of the universe. When we lay down our lives for another, we are doing the greatest act of love possible. We may not see it as a big deal, but I am willing to bet that the great cloud of witnesses are cheering for us when choose love over selfishness. 

There's that verse in Corinthians that I learned, "Love is patient".... There is another translation that says, "Love suffers long..."  I think that is what we do when we raise up our children. We suffer long. Sometimes the days start too early and end too late and darn it, like the Proverbs 31 woman, our lamp never even goes out. Sometimes we feel that we don't have any more to give and we don't know how we can make it through each day, but by God's grace, we do. 

I've always appreciated when Danny Silk said, "Love looks like something." That is so true. Sometimes, when you are called to the home front- to raising kids, that love looks like being surrounded by needy people. But if Jesus is any example, then we are in good company.