Decisions – Summary: Choices (Part 15)
Categories: Choices, Léo’s Insights 2022-2023
We all face having to make decisions every day. While most decisions are inconsequential, some are very serious, as the consequences could affect others well into the future, particularly in regards to children. It makes no real difference whether you make a peanut butter or jam sandwich or both for that matter, and the colour of your socks will hardly be noticed, unless of course it is different on each foot. But something like deciding to home educate will have far reaching consequences.
Deciding to home educate is a very big decision that will put you in conflict with status quo expectations. However, please remember that if everyone does the same, everyone gets the same. More importantly, the only way to make a difference in this world is to be different. While having different coloured socks may attract attention (our PM comes to mind), home education influences the future by producing adults who think differently from those who followed school, cookie-cutter, think-alike programming.
We all want to be different. That is because we intrinsically know, deep down in our hearts, that we are indeed fully and completely unique. In fact, considering our world has nearly eight billion people and everyone is different causes me to truly admire the incredible wisdom of God. Why would believers ever consider making all their children the same by sending them to be homogenized in a world institution? This escapes me until I remind myself that thinking alike is the objective and purpose of all enemies of God.
Home educating is the only possibility to fully celebrate the individual nature of each child. I should say almost fully, as even when at home, our children will be exposed to and tempted to adapt with conformity. While we all desire to be free individuals, we are also fearful of being different because it comes with a cost. The pressure to conform will aways be there, but we have the most powerful arsenal against it: our faith in something bigger than a world demanding conformity.
In the end, the biggest gift, the most lasting encouragement and eternal directive we can give anybody is the ability to be comfortable with who they are as individuals. In home education, we offer our children the freedom to soar with their strengths as they learn to manage their weaknesses. This can only happen within the loving environment created especially by God for this very purpose, namely the home.
While there may be many compelling reasons to educate your children at home, none is greater than the privilege of directing your children to be comfortable with who God created and to want to extend this comfort and corresponding freedom to others.
That is ultimately why you chose home education, even if you may not have considered it. I say this because it was love for your children and their future well-being that compelled you to home educate. That love can only be translated as desiring what is best for them, and that is best described as being comfortable with who they are and how they can best influence a world spinning out of control.
Invest heavily in this future. Keep your children home until they are truly ready to take on the world instead of being part of its problems.
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