Wellbeing

Relax and Have More Fun! They HAVE to Love You!

/ Lori Lawe / 3 Comments

What if people HAD to love you?

I figured out what my family REALLY thought about me lately, and it was a bit of a shock.

Here’s what happened.

We were reading an excellent book together as a family.

Caveat: Before you get the wrong idea of us all drinking hot chocolate and stringing popcorn and cranberries by the fire as we each take turns reading aloud together, singing a song between each chapter, aka Little House on the Prairie style, no, it wasn’t like that. It was an audiobook played in the car during our day-long drive to visit extended family. The book just helped us not to want to kill each other.

Setting the mood.

Anyway, the book was excellent. It was called Jesus Revolution. I would highly recommend it*. We all got into the story, and even the child we initially had to bribe to listen to the story with us asked for more!

At one point in the book, the author, Greg Laurie, is described as having something like “deep spiritual depth and a bit of an unpredictable, crazy personality. You never knew what he was going to do next.”

My husband looked at me sneakily out of the corner of his eye, smirking. “WHAT???” I asked. “What are you smirking about??”

“Oh,” he replied, looking away casually, “just something said in the book.”

“What??” I protested. “I’m not…!” And then he laughed, and there was a muffled chuckle, I think, from the back seats.

So I guess my family thinks that his personality describes me!

Hmmm. . .

But that’s okay because my family HAS to love me.

What do I mean, you ask?

Well, we homeschool them, so we read to them from books that say things like this:

Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it.

The Message

Then, we go to a church where they read the same stuff.

At church, they HAVE to love you, too! If you find people who don’t love you there, find some others to love. You’ll find true believers who promise to love you no matter what your personality – even the “unusual” ones – whew!

So we can finally relax and have fun.

We’re loved!

And this reminds me of what we did last night. I bought a gift for my family – well, sort of. Okay, yes! I did buy it for myself and pretended to give it to the family!

It is called The Adventure Challenge. You scratch off an “Adventure,” and then the family HAS (Yes, teens, that word is “HAS”) to do the Adventure together. Last night, we strung out yarn as an obstacle course through the basement, and we had to go through it as fast as we could, being sprayed in the face with water each time we accidentally touched a string.

It was fun.

And my superhero outfit? Yeah, I am wearing a bathing suit over the top of my leotards. And yes, the big “S” on my shirt WAS made a spur of the moment. It helped me go faster!

I even got first place!

Before any of the others went, I was ranked first, that is.

So relax! Make your teens do fun and crazy stuff with you! If you’re unsure how, try making “fun” a prerequisite to “food,” for example! They’ll thank you later (Okay – maybe MUCH later).

Your kids are loved, too!

And that was the message of the Jesus Revolution book, actually. It was about a bunch of crazy hippy kids who were overcome, in some cases literally, by the love of God. That love overflowed to others and transformed a nation (Even Time Magazine did a cover article about this movement on June 21, 1971).

So go ahead and be the real you, whatever that looks like.

They HAVE to love you!

Blogpost Footnotes

* If bribing your kids to watch a movie with you is less expensive than bribing them to read a book, the movie Jesus Revolution can be rented here.

Despair In Family Relationships? Try Listening To This Astonishing Guy*

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

She rejoiced.

It happened!

She danced in the field that summer morning, praising her maker.

What He promised, quietly, with a whisper of love, that He would guide and comfort, HAD materialized.

Here is what happened.

At the women’s gathering that day long, long ago, this good mother poured out her heart to another.

The tears racked her body as she openly shared her fears.

Generational problems pursued her family. Her grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, sister, and auntie bathed in the pool of these problems. None of them had figured out how to get out of this pool, dry off, to dance in that grassy place in freedom.

They all felt like they were drowning instead.

How would her relationship with her daughters differ from what was experienced by every other family member?

The despair of this situation overwhelmed her.

They bowed their heads, these two women, and prayed together that day so many long years ago.

And God spoke, in the recesses of this desperate mother’s heart, a strategy and plan to walk in freedom, step by step, to carve out a new path from the dysfunctional road all her family member walked.

I’ll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.

The Message

And she was joined in marriage to a man who also longed to walk a new path, the one that Jesus walked ahead of them and beckoned them to follow.

And they did.

And years later, when their first child leaves home, they look back with a cool drink and remember the pain and branches across the path of the road they followed Jesus on. They remembered their hair and clothes full of the pieces of branches, yet their hearts grew larger each day as they learned, through following Him, how to love a little less selfishly, and pour more of their lives out on the other.

And He healed their union, their diversion from the path the others in their family travelled, with a different destination.

Their relationships with their children were healthy.

Not perfect.

Each member of this small family worked through and argued past, chopped chunks off each other, as a sculptor does to a piece of art.

But their path led to healthier relationships.

This couple celebrated the new lineage of increased unity that bonded their family, as they were all refined by this artist, Jesus.

And they danced together in that grassy meadow, this small family, for something new had risen from the depths into life.

Does anyone dare despise this day of small beginnings?

The Message

Blogpost Footnotes

*Also known as “God”

Value The Comfort Of Fear More Than Freedom?

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

That meadow in the sunlight. The place where we dance and feel free. The place outside that smells of wildflowers and the freshest air.

Where is it?

I lost it in the busyness of life.

Instead, I am inside, head down, working on my computer. Was that a rat scurrying in the distance? I didn’t have as much weekend time to deep clean as I would have liked.

Where did my dream of what life was supposed to be like vanish?

I live in this tiny apartment created by my fear.

What if?

I don’t have time to wander outside with my backpack, eating the apple I distractedly packed along the way. How can we stumble upon life’s meadows if we don’t have time to look for them? What does it look like for my eyes to search the most distant horizon?

I forgot.

Jesus opens the door in this stuffy room. The open door beckons me outside. Come for a walk with me, He offers.

And the pile of to-dos stays on the desk as I walk and then run outside with my friend, Jesus.

My legs felt weak, and I stumbled as I laughed, breaking into to run.

I haven’t used my legs for a while.

All that sitting and worrying has caused my muscles to atrophy a bit.

But as I run with Jesus in that place of rest, I feel my legs, arms and lungs growing more robust.

The Lord replied, “I will personally go with you . . . and I will give you rest

Ancient Text

I can see further when He beckons me to look at the far, far distant horizons. My eyes hurt from the strain. I hadn’t lifted my vision beyond my overwhelming concerns for a while.

I can sense my muscles are more substantial, my bones sturdier, my thoughts sharper. I feel more like the human I am meant to be after spending time in the spiritual clouds.

And it’s going to be okay.

Because when I walk, hand in hand, back to that tiny apartment with Jesus, he holds a button attached to a long cord that snakes to my apartment. The button can ignite the fuse attached to the dynamite that explodes the tiny apartment I used to live in, the one confining me by my fears.

It’s not that my fears have left me but that I have left them.

Jesus gives me enough food for today to live in freedom.

And I’m snatching up this food and eating my fill.

I’d rather fly.

You?

Don’t Attend Church Looking Bad – How To Look Good!

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

As you know or can presume from the style and classiness of these posts, I have excellent taste.

Ahem.

And I hesitate to point out, most reluctantly, that in this post, the exact BRANDS and style of clothing I was wearing were noted for interested readers! (I mention that cautiously and with true humility, of course.) In this post, I describe the fancy hat collection I am developing for use in my old age.

So yes!

I CAN EASILY advise on how to look good!

So, HOW do we look VERY GOOD at church, you ask? Great question! I’m SO glad you asked! Ahem!

First, set aside your pride and go ahead and have a big ‘ol ugly cry at church. Seriously! I describe my own (rare) undignified moment here.

You’re welcome.

But wait, wait, you ask, “How does ugly crying make us look good?” It seems the opposite would be true! You hang on my every word, waiting to discover how to lock and seal this seemingly disparent advice into a philosophically coherent indisputable argument.

I’ll explain.

The more we air our neuroses (sorry for the analogy, but it’s like flatulence), the less we smell bad! Seriously! Now, you know that I never even like to MENTION the word flatulence, as described here. However, the analogy fits SO perfectly.

When we hold in, er- what SHOULD be aired – the inside of us smells terrible, though the outside has no odour. Okay, this analogy MAY be breaking down a bit, but you get my point, I think? If we HOLD IN our neuroses, and pretend everything is okay when it isn’t, the inner neuroses pick away at us, and the rotten stench that all of us carry around with us festers there, though often we are the only ones who can smell it.

(If you think you always smell good, have you ever wondered – “AH! What IS the meaning of my life?” – JUST before you fall asleep? If so, that’s a case in point. You are more messed up than you let on, too!)

So, let out the uglies! A little cry at church is just the thing. You’ll find that people who love you bring you a Kleenex and a pat on the shoulder.

They may not be able to help you much, but they genuinely want to, which counts for something.

You see, at church, God COMMANDS others to love you. Now, granted, NONE of us are that good at loving others, but some have figured out how to channel a morsel of God’s love for us through their arms into compassion.

These are the people we can be honest with, and -no surprises here – they have already taken their turn in the ugly seat.

They are not surprised by your big cry!

And somehow, expressing what we feel is enough to keep the evil dragon at bay for a while.

Knowing that someone is praying for us helps too.

Add a little time with the Father to ask Him a bit more about WHY we were neurotic freaks at church last week and He gives us the Kleenex that is the softest kind that dries all of our tears because His Kleenex is fragranced with hope.

At church, they will read to you from a book, and it may say something like this:

For everyone. . . fall[s] short of God’s glorious standard.

Ancient Text

And this will put a bounce in our step and hope in our hearts.

We’re not as neurotic as we thought!

Well, we are if we dig deeper, but that’s for next Sunday.

The point is, we’re not sucking in our guts anymore, pretending our way through life.

‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’

CS Lewis – Letters to Malcolm

Whatever we bring to the light can be healed.

Whatever we hide infects us, rotting away at our insides.

So let’s let our neuroses out!

And maybe after we’ve let out some of the uglies, we may shift the direction of the ship we are sailing a little closer to true north.

And as we go about our week, we’ll find we are starting to smell better!

We’ll look better, too, through God’s eyes.

When Seeking a Simple U-Turn From Drowning To Delight

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Homeward Bound, Again

A cacophony

My head explodes from the noise

Quiet!

The mundane and the repetitive and the

Scrambling over one another

The pressing down of the other

Must STOP

At last

It is quiet

My boots crunch the spring needles

And I finally feel peace

Alive

Look!

A spring visitor with her mate

Chirping at us, welcoming us to

Our own home

A home we forgot to visit

“Come hither!” she beckons

We remember our true home

And journey deeper

Into the forest

Your heart and mine

Beat as one now

I left my idols at home

My schedule

My dominion

My distractions

My crutches

I am a vulnerable beast

Among others

Walking

Remembering my true home

You

Guide me

Comfort me

Show me what you see

Give me a glimpse through

Your telescope

Of the distant mountains

Snow melting

Rivers filling

It is spring

Get ready

Forget about what’s happened;
    don’t keep going over old history.
Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.
    It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?

(Says God) in The Message

Ah! I’m The One Ruining My Relationships! How To Find Freedom

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

When I was a child, I learned of a true story of a married couple fighting about

. . . wait for it… 

whether the toilet paper roll should go on THIS way

or THAT way.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what they were fighting about had nothing to do with toilet paper.

They were fighting about control.

Unfortunately, even WHAT they had control over, at this level of debasement, ceased to have meaning. They just both needed THEIR WAY. It sounds a bit like hell on earth, and in fact, it is.

A fictional demon character states his goal of hell on earth this way: “All the healthy . . . activities . . . which we want [them] to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return. ..”

CS Lewis in Screwtape Letters

As a young adult, I had seen many relationships that ended up this way.

I wanted to learn how to have healthy relationships, so I prayed I would be transformed. I asked God to make me a perfect person who could find a perfect spouse and we could live happily ever after. But in God’s frequent way, He did offer one key

not in a flash of deep, fervent prayer, but by using real life to sanctify me. 

This path was a more painful route.

Here’s what happened.

I was journaling one day, and in that season, I tended to journal about my problems to process them. I felt God asking me to journal for another 10 minutes after I would have normally finished journaling. And God asked me to do this every time I journaled that season. At first, I didn’t know why I was doing this, but I obeyed. And very soon, a painful pattern emerged.

I had many unrelated problems that I was journaling about, but each situation had the same root that caused frustration, anger, or irritation.

Control.

Everything I was upset about ultimately boiled down to “How can I get my way?”

Ouch.

Now, I am from a good, Matriarchal Italian family, and let’s say that I knew how to choose my friends and boyfriends so that I could get my way. For example, when I was a child, my dad, in despair over his inability to live harmoniously with my mom, once asked for advice. “How do you and your friend Amy get along so well?” he asked. I effused the wisdom I had intuitively gleaned from 10 years of watching my female relatives and responded with this sage advice: “Sometimes, I let us do what Amy wants.”

I liked having my way all the time.

Here’s the kicker – In that season as a young adult after examining my journaling, I realized that I had to CHOOSE to give up a good thing for me – getting my way almost all the time – for a BETTER thing – having a CHANCE at having a healthy marriage. 

And I must stress that it was NOT EASY for me to not have my way all the time.

More often than I’d like to admit, it’s still not easy to lay down my way when Jesus speaks softly to me, directing me and showing me a better path. However, I want to trust Jesus more fully because He longs for me to soar into my fullest potential.

And somehow, this continues to be the place where, against all expectations, I flourish.

Our human desire for power is never to be underestimated. Our compulsive desire for control is never to be swept under the rug. Our fleshly desire for influence, ascendency, and dominion should never be ignored. If you don’t know that you hold a sword in your hands, you will wound someone. And the one who becomes wounded may be you.

Christine Westhoff in Reframing the Prophetic

God, help us to have the wisdom to exchange what we cling to for something better, the gifts You long to give. Help us to unclench our hands long enough to receive Your gifts.

You’ve observed . . . when people get a little power how quickly it goes to their heads. It’s not going to be that way with you.

Jesus Christ (the guy almost 1/3 of the world claims to follow) in The Message

How Death Of This Plant Creates New Life In Us

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

The amaryllis is slowing diminishing in size and splendour, and shrinking back to that mysterious place in its pot where life begins.

My amaryllis blossom will be no more very soon.

You plant a “dead” seed; soon there is a flourishing plant. 

The Message

And like all death, the point is not that there has been a death but that a new season is beginning for those who carry on.

Plants take time to grow. He has time to wait. And though this amaryllis flower has no voice, God spoke quietly, inaudibly to human ears, through the life of this ordinary bulb when it flowered for the first time in twenty years, as described here.

This flower is a megaphone, taking the inaudible sound of the voice of Jesus from deep, deep within the earth and transforming His words into a glorious flower that our eyes can perceive.

The flower has no mouth to magnify the words spoken by God, and yet its life points us to Jesus, to the place in His heart where inaudible sounds are translated to the muffled sounds that we pick up and examine and ask each other to help us translate.

This flower is another clue on the journey.

Are you ready to go on an adventure with me, dear friend, and to try to unpack what God may be whispering through the life of an ordinary plant, one that blooms for as long as we can stare at our watches, unhurried, before it’s life is consumed, once more in darkness?

This flower teaches us how we should live, our lives erupting as a firework from below ground, to just as quickly be extinguished as the fire of our lives burns out, and we return to dust.

And this silent flower has spoken so loudly to my soul that an awakening has occurred deep, deep within. Do you sense it, too? Come with me, friend, on a journey of waking up, sitting up, opening our ears, getting our legs to move and run, and learning to fly.

And as is the case, whenever the most important lessons are to be grasped, we find our most significant clues in the things the world ignores. I sent this plant on its last stop before the garbage dump, not once but twice. I didn’t have patience for the things that required me to be transformed before I could perceive them.

This amaryllis plant became my teacher.

A series of blog posts (if I remember to write them) will describe what this plant taught me so far, including:

1. It’s not our lives that matter, dear friend, and we comfort each other once we have the strength to recognize this truth. And yet, when our lives produce an aroma like fresh bread, that strengthens another, God’s orchestra produced from the instruments of each life overwhelms the darkness. This symbolic orchestra is our hope.

2. Sometimes, God upturns the soil of our lives. This uprooting is chaotic for us and disorienting. But this is also where we find hope.

3. Where is God about to grow a new leaf in your life? We can never tell exactly where the amaryllis will sprout leaves, only that it will, eventually, despite all apparent odds, sprout. Everything living must grow.

Can you remove the rocks where He may be hovering over the waters or the soil, about to spout new life in you?

4. Do you need a friend who can help you lift the rocky burden that stops the new life from flourishing, where His Spirit is hovering? We need those who see in the Spirit when we are looking for our eyes on the ground next to us. We need a doula or a medical doctor to help us give birth. Journeying with others is safer for the life we carry. Who is on your team?

5. The thing that kept me awake at night back then, that my community and I pleaded with God to change, is the amaryllis that has grown through my softened heart this season. Noticing how God watered, tended and then showed us a new leaf sprouting in our past hopeless situations or dry amaryllis pots gives us faith for the next impossible thing He whispers.

God, give us faith for the hope you long to spring forth from our dry amaryllis pots. You have enough breaths from Your Spirit of guidance and encouragement for every seemingly hopeless situation. Give us eyes to see further than the mundane ordinary.

3 Common Responses To God’s Clues – Choose This One

/ Lori Lawe / 2 Comments

My child said she saw an angel.

And so, children sometimes peel back the curtain of heaven for us to quickly glimpse before the curtain is closed again. All we have left is a memory. What is our response to hearing stories that seem to push us into the realm of the divine, whether we want to go there or not?

Will the divine moments that we hear about be wasted on us?

There are three typical responses to another’s spiritual experiences: we become blind, jealous, or thirsty.

Most commonly, we become blind. Like a beautiful pristine camping spot, one mountain range further than we usually travel on our summer holidays, we won’t go there. It is not within the realm of our routine.

And so we are unable to see.

WAS there ever a pristine camping spot one mountain range over, we wonder, years later? WAS it an angel she said she saw? And then we are distracted again by our lunch.

The second most frequent response to stories of divine encounters is jealousy.

Instead of falling on our knees in worship and petitioning for a similar outpouring of the divine in our parched lives, some of us will compare. The soil of our hearts hardens just a little bit. That didn’t happen to ME.

They must think they are SPECIAL, we reason. They must assume they are MORE SPECIAL than ME. Often, that idea hadn’t crossed their minds.

But we’ve already tossed the implications of the divine moment in self-righteous indignation.

The third response, that very few travel, is a recognition of our spiritual thirst.

This heart response is gas for our car. We understand that each of us is offered an adoption certificate into the family of God, which comes with a royal inheritance. And from that identity, we can petition the Father, on our knees before Him, and ask, “Can You please pour out the divine in my life, God?”

We can beg Him for water because we see another who seems to have found a drink.

He always has more water.

I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God.

The Message

God, soften the soil of our hearts equally through the encounters we experience in ourselves and those we hear about from others. Thank you that we can come to You with our doubts too and that You meet us exactly where we are. I pray we stop trying to stuff You into a box.

Keep waking us to a deeper understanding of your love, I pray.

How To Be Brave At The Dentist’s And Doctor’s

/ Lori Lawe / 1 Comment

I was having considerable dental work done, about a 3-hour appointment.

I brought my audiobook so “I can pretend I’m somewhere else,” I told the dentist. I was listening to a dramatization of people who were persecuted and even martyred for their faith. That audiobook helped to put my own relatively minor suffering in perspective.

And yet, as the dentist said, “This is the part when I’m like a woodpecker,” and placed a metal rod on my teeth which he then proceeded to hammer on like a mallet, I felt slightly… uncomfortable.

I sensed Holy Spirit in the room, almost like He was sitting beside me, wanting to hold my hand.

It used to be surprising to me when God wanted to speak or envelope me in His love.

But not anymore.

At that moment, I briefly remembered some ridiculous things my daughter feared. One summer, for example, she was scared of house flies and would not go to the park or eat outside without screaming as this terrifying flying animal approached her. I brushed off her fears and told her to move on.

And yet that’s not how Holy Spirit treated me with my concerns, which are so tiny in the scope of life.

Every time the dentist gently smashed me in my face, I could sense my adrenaline rise, and then I could sense Jesus comforting me. Like a roller coaster constantly about to head uphill, he smoothed out the hills and valleys of this experience so that my roller coaster ride was less bumpy. As I fearfully clutched His hand, He calmed me repeatedly so that the essence of this experience was the peace of His comfort.

He seemed to be holding my hand.

When the ordeal was over, the dentist and dental assistant commented that dental work would be much easier if more patients were as calm as I was.

I couldn’t have been more shocked.

“Who, me?” I wondered, looking around.

God of all healing counsel! He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.

The Message

And God, may I be the comforting presence to another’s fears next.

And so, what are the easiest ways to be brave at the dentist’s or doctor’s?

I have no idea, unfortunately, however three clues we can glean from this recent experience are:

1. Listen to audiobooks about people who die for a cause they believe in while people are deliberately maiming you. It helps! Try this one to get you started.

2. Practice picking up the clues of God’s presence in your life, and talk to a trusted friend about your questions and experiences.

3. Ask Him to comfort you and hold on tight when Jesus surprises you by showing up in your life.

God, may You comfort everyone reading this at their upcoming medical appointments more intimately with your soothing words, voice, and tangible arms of love. We pray for strength for today with the challenges each of us faces. Help us to learn how to more fully lean on You when life’s challenges come, we pray.

Make Your Homeschooled Kid Look Like An Idiot So They Ace The SAT

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

I was frothing at the mouth again, spewing words of dissent, grumbling to myself. My husband was sitting next to me in the car, waiting for my spaz to end. This tantrum was my regular 3-month routine.

I had gotten more report cards for my kids.

And I wasn’t happy.

Our kids excelled in some areas, according to these report cards. However, some of the grades reflected ME as a homeschool teacher more than my KIDS as students. I hadn’t been toeing the line again.

And my kids were getting the academic spanking.

However, if, as a homeschooling parent, we TRY to do every little thing that the school system asks, we will end up as blobs of discouragement, unable to get off the couch again. The system is designed for us to fail. As homeschooling parents, we must set sail in a new direction, slightly off-center from the true north the school system uses.

And so our kids may look like morons for a while.

For example, after I exited from the Canadian public school system in Grade 12, I had honor roll status and the coveted knowledge of about 200 years of European settler’s Canadian history, which had been drilled down my throat at least weekly for 12 years. I hadn’t realized that other countries had histories, too! And some of their histories were longer than 200 years!

So, I CHOSE to have my kids learn world history more often from a challenging, classically based curriculum.

Therefore, their Canadian social studies grades plummeted for a while.

However, their social studies grades were assigned assuming they hadn’t done ANY socials instead of reflecting that they hadn’t studied the EXACT socials curriculum recommended in that grade.

Whatever.

And it’s not just social studies that follow this pattern.

Our school systems are based on Greek methods of learning*, where we dissect learning down into thousands of pieces, and they divvy out hundreds of “goals” for a SPECIFIC age level to learn. Check out these PLOs (fancy word for goals) for Canadian students for each grade. Studied astronomy in Grade 4 when your kid was actually interested in it instead of in Grade 3? Zero on their report card.

And so I was frustrated.

We solved this little problem by not telling our kids what report cards were until high school. It’s surprising, in retrospect, how infrequently their public school friends mentioned report cards. So, our kids “skipped” viewing their report cards for about a decade.

After seeing their early report cards myself and having my little verbal spaz that my husband happened to be near enough to hear, I had a nice sugary iced latte (my therapy of choice), and then my husband and I talked about other things. This routine was just another homeschooling rhythm we observed. We didn’t have to discuss the details.

Years later, when our first child graduated from high school, she aced much of the SAT, an average score among her classically trained students. (The SAT is a standardized test taken by, generally the top 30% of academically achieving students. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either. I was public schooled, too.)

Dorothy Sayers wrote about this effect almost 80 years ago.

Classically trained children don’t do as well as other kids early on. They don’t have time to systematically jump through every hoop and complete every learning goal assigned to them. They are too busy learning to think.

Later on, they often do comparatively better academically than their peers.

Maybe encouraging our kids to read hard books** and then reading challenging books aloud really pays off in the long term.

And even though our kids LOOK like geeky academic superstars, we all know that academic prowess is not the PRIMARY goal for our homeschooled kids.

But if we do want their brains to flourish to their full potential, maybe encouraging them to look like idiots for a few years is not such a bad idea.

Sugary latte, anyone? (Sugar is one of my coping tactics to help me not follow the crowd. WEREN’T YOU LISTENING earlier in this post when I first mentioned my iced latte?! What? NOT EVERYONE listens to my every word? Oh well. I can feel a bit better about myself because at least my kids are smart.)

Sure, I’ll have a double caramel iced latte, too.

Thank you!

You’re welcome!

Good luck!

Blogpost Footnotes

*Much has been written comparing the Greek and Hebrew educational philosophies. For a brief summary, check out this talk.

**My daughter is reading The War with Hannibal by Livy (circa 200 BC) as I write this. Hey! Flaunting ego is the path to true success, remember!