Peniel

About six years ago, I started seeking God on a more intimate level.  I have referenced this time period many times in my blog.  It was when I decided that a more deliberate relationship with God was what I wanted more than anything.  And yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that my life appeared to go to hell in a hand-basket soon thereafter, but I never lost my faith and my devotion to God.  Instead I learned to love Him with an unquenchable love that will usher me into eternity with Him.  So I am not upset with the turns my life has taken.  I do not question God's work in my life or the trials He allowed me to experience.  I still consider it pure joy when I face trials of any kind that test my faithfulness to Him and prove His faithfulness to me.

So around the same time that I started opening the door to God and asking Him to shine His light into any darkness in my soul, He also placed a desire in my heart.  The desire to homeschool my children came on rather suddenly and quite firmly.  As a former schoolteacher, I naturally assumed my children would be students in the kind of classrooms in which I taught.  I had not even considered another option.  But here it was, so firm in my heart.  And just in time, too, as my son was preparing to start Kindergarten in a few months.

Along with all the marriage books I was reading at the time, I started reading parenting books as well.  My son was five and my daughter was two.  I realized, with a painful sadness that there was so much I had neglected to do for them as a parent.  Oh sure, I loved them to pieces.  I played with them all day, I read to them, I sang to them, I took them to the park, I baked with my son and took pictures of all his antics and made scrapbooks and just thoroughly enjoyed being their mother.  It was a joy that could not be compared to anything else the world had ever offered me.

But after prayer and study I realized there was so much more to parenting than having a good time.  There was a sacred purpose, for instruction and training and setting examples for them in the way I responded to God and to others.  I found that it was a privilege and a duty to prepare my children not only for the success in this world but for service in God's work.  I knew that there would be no greater parenting joy I could ever experience than to bring my children to the throne of God and see Him place the crown of eternal life on their heads.  I start to cry, even now, as I recall that image that changed my heart five years ago.  The image of God crowing my own children and welcoming them into His love because I heeded the call to train them for His Kingdom and not the kingdoms of this world.  I experience an overwhelming emotion at the thought of Jesus blessing my children.  Seriously, I'm going to need a moment before I can continue writing.  I just want to savor that image for a bit longer....






Okay... all better now.  I've wiped the tears off my glasses and face and am ready to continue.

This call to raise my children, to educate them and to prepare them for God's work hit me with conviction.  I knew that the privilege to raise my children should not go to any other adult.  It was God's gift to me and to them.  I began to share my heart and thoughts about homeschooling with my then-husband.  But it turned out he was adamantly opposed to the idea and rejected it very quickly and forcefully.  It wasn't an option.  No way.  Don't ask again.

The difficulty for me was trying to balance what I perceived to be God's leading and the need to be submissive to the leadership in the home.  I had a very dear friend argue with me for hours about how I need to be submissive unless the husband does something against God's will.  I felt she was very, very wrong.  Because discerning God's will can be an arbitrary process.  Who's to say what God's leading really is?  She was suggesting that I needed to be firm about who was guiding our family.  And I needed to submit to God, not my husband.  She argued that if God instructed me to homeschool my children, I should do it regardless of what their father felt about it.  Oh boy.

So yeah, I knew that I had to somehow respect the authority in my home but I still couldn't seem to balance it with God's direction.  My husband and I fought, a lot, about this topic.  He seemed ridiculously closed-minded to me and wouldn't even consider exploring the topic of homeschooling.  I argued that this topic warranted prayer and study since God had placed it in my heart.  He argued that he knew what God wanted and that was the end of it.  I couldn't see evidence of a heart-led relationship with God in his life so I couldn't trust him.  I figured that since I was the one praying and studying for hours a day, that maybe that gave me the right to assert my will in this situation.  But that was presumptuous and disrupted God's balance.  Even as I saw the disruption, I didn't know how to handle it.  I KNEW my husband was proceeding incorrectly.  He wouldn't even pray about it.  We talked to two marriage counselors, and both asked him to articulate his reasons for not even being willing to try a homeschooling approach.  He was unable to and insisted that it would go his way.

I got to the point where I hated the desire that God had placed in my heart to educate my own children and I begged Him to remove it.  I begged Him with tears to take it away since, at this point in the struggle, my son had already been in school for over year.  I forcefully started pushing the idea of homeschooling away.  Sometimes I'd get to the place where I would say, "You know what?  This isn't worth fighting for; I suddenly hate the idea of homeschooling; the topic is too devastating to the home.  I give up.  I'm done!  I won't fight anymore."  But every single time I got to that place, I would run into a random stranger on the street, in the grocery store, wherever, that would, without prompting, start to tell me about the joys and benefits of homeschooling.  I was so tired of the ride!  I just wanted to get off.  And yet it seemed like I would never have that chance.

How could God push something onto me that I wasn't capable of accomplishing?  Seemed like a sick joke to me.

One day, in a meeting with a prayer counselor, my husband finally agreed to study the topic with me and consider it.  I felt such a sense of hope that God's will would finally be accomplished.

That hope was short-lived as I quickly realized that he had blatantly lied about his willingness to consider it.  He was just trying to end the counseling session.  I would bring research or books or curriculum options to his attention and ask him if he wanted to look through them with me and he would get angry, instantly, and shut down the conversation with, "I already made the decision.  We are not talking about this again!" and would walk away.

I felt painfully trapped and utterly devastated.  And so foolish to think that I could have hope.  On one hand, it seemed God wouldn't let it go.  On the other hand I couldn't make it happen.

Oh, and let me not forget to mention that once my son started school, I saw he was suffering with sensory sensitivities and couldn't function once he got home from school.  He required noise-dampening headphones on the 30-minute drive home from school because his sister was happy and cheerful and he couldn't handle the noise.  He would fall apart and start to act like his blood was boiling; he would hide himself in his room and do a painful throat-scream until little blood vessels started to pop on his face in little red dots.  Other times, he would go to the backyard and talk to himself for upwards to an hour in an effort to decompress from the overstimulation from school.  And so I wouldn't get to actually see my son until after dinner when we had to do his homework.  He had no ability to behave and would cry, "I can't do it!  I try so hard to be good at school ALL day and when I come home I can't do it anymore!"  My heart was breaking for him and had no time or ability to even address his sensitivities.  All these things, his father ignored and said he saw no evidence of them since by the time he got home from work, my son was doing much better.  As his mother, I knew what he needed and I felt it was my duty to make sure he got it.

So I did the worst possible thing and the thing that prolonged my misery and pain:  I decided to take control.

I couldn't take another step so I told him that as his wife and helpmeet, I couldn't stand by as he risked something greater than himself by neglecting a promise he had made in the presence of the Holy Spirit.  He, himself, claimed that the Holy Spirit was evident in the prayer counseling sessions.  So I figured I'd ride that for a while.  I was at such a loss that I had to find whatever I could that would grant me the control that I felt I needed in order to right this terrible wrong.  In retrospect I am utterly ashamed of my actions and the arrogance I displayed that said, "I will now hold you accountable before God."  I can't even believe I'm admitting these things but they need to be shared because these mistakes should not be repeated.  By anyone.  Ever.

In my feeble defense, keep in mind that he had abused his authority over me for years and years and a person gets to a breaking point where they either "fish or cut bait."  I felt like I had no other option.  I felt like I couldn't even breathe in that home sometimes.  I had no voice.  No rights.  I was worthless.

So I withdrew my son from school and began to homeschool him.  His sensory issues practically dropped off the map and I felt good about the decision in that regard.   But my husband was not happy.  He was not generally an angry man; he preferred the passive-aggressive approach to hurting me.  But in this situation, he was angry.  Angry beyond words.  That was also the same time I changed the light fixture in my kitchen.  I had told him for three years that I had horribly insufficient light in our dungeon of a house and needed light because I literally felt depressed without it.  I had replaced many of the bulbs in the fixtures around the house with daylight bulbs in an effort to address this growing depression in my spirit and it really actually helped.  So I pushed for a light in my kitchen too.  He ignored my pleas and said that he didn't need it.  So I bought a fixture and installed it myself and he was angry, even though it really actually helped boost my spirit.  I told him that from now on, if he ignored my needs I would just take care of them myself.  That was the new status quo.  But it also compounded the ever-growing tension in the marriage.

After I took my son out of school, I was met with discipline from God, over and over.  And I spiraled into a terrible and dark place where I was fighting God on everything.  He tried to get me to see that controlling the situation was NOT what He was aiming for.  He wanted me to give it up to Him and let Him lead.  But I was angry, so very angry and I would yell at Him, "YOU told me to homeschool!  YOU wouldn't let it go!  YOU are the one that made me realize that this was a privilege and a sacred duty!  And yet YOU are not doing ANYTHING to make it happen!  I have prayed for TWO years and you have done nothing!  How will you EVER accomplish your will if you don't DO anything?"

The more I fought Him the more the enemy seemed to find avenues into my life.  I encountered a darkness I never thought I would ever have to witness, not just from my heart, but from those around me too.  The entire world seemed to be caving in on me and so I found myself clinging to God as my lifeline ever more deliberately.

In all areas, God kept begging me, Let go and let me.   And so I did.  Because I had nowhere else to turn.  I let go of nearly every struggle I was facing.  My ability to give it up to Him was becoming a reflex, in all but the area of my children.

But He repeated a promise He'd given to me two years prior, Give me your children and I will give them back to you.  I promise.  Let ME be the one to arrange your schedule and your life plan.  Please.  Just let it go!

I fought until I was broken.  And when I didn't have the will to fight God anymore, I surrendered.  That autumn I let their father put both kids in school.

I was devastated and felt like I had fought for nothing.  All those years.  All those tears.  Wasted.

I laid there on my bed, facing my ceiling and said, "I'm done, God.  I can't figure this out.  They are your children.  Please accept my resignation.  I'm so done."  But only then, was I finally able to see the tender face of God.

Two days later, God prompted me to leave.  I wasn't ready to go but the prompting was firm.  So I left.  I said goodbye to my kids, arranged after-school care for them and went to our summer home, an hour away, to see what God was wanting me to do next.  I was without my kids for five weeks. I spent many, many nights longing to hold them and play with them but I knew there was something else God needed me to see and to learn.  I saw my kids on the weekends and treasured every moment but looked forward to the moments I was sharing with God.

In that time away, God revealed other things to me that I had not known about and the decision to file for divorce was presented to me and it protected me and my children.  They came to live with me in the summer home and I have been homeschooling them ever since.

But it's not just the battle of homeschooling that I feel God won.  There was a larger picture I couldn't see.  I believe God was using the situation with my kids to win me over.  Because I will fight to the death for my kids.  And if I can surrender them to Him, then I can surrender anything.  That's where He wanted me to be.  That's what He was trying to teach me.  Homeschooling was just one piece of the pie.

I look back at those painful times of fighting God and realize that all He ever wanted from me was to surrender my control to Him because He saw what was really at stake even though I could only see what was right in front of my eyes.  He knew what He was actually protecting me from.  And no, that is not a topic for the public blog.  But this testimony needed to be shared.  For me.  I needed to do this, finally.  As a reminder for myself and an encouragement to continue to trust God.

This is my stone of remembrance.

Oh, and 10 points to anyone who can figure out the significance of my blog title.  :-)