Last week I talked about how the enemy would like to capture the hearts and minds of our nation’s children. It seems natural then, to conclude my thoughts with “Remove your children from the government schools immediately and homeschool!” which has been said more than once on various conservative platforms. But is that a perfect solution?
Training Tomatoes -- Photo by cottonbro from Pexels
“Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.”
~Proverbs 22:6
This Bible verse was a constant theme during our homeschool years. Many times we saw it used as an actual Conference theme. It was the promise we clung to, believing wholeheartedly that if we as parents spent our time during our children’s formative years raising them up, it would be a good investment. This morning, Eric and I read that verse again and took a look at it from the other side of homeschooling, after having already reached the finish line, and asked ourselves the hard question, “What do you think about this verse now?”
There was a math exercise we’d seen someone do, positing the idea that if hostile unbelievers continued to abort their children and true believers in Jesus did not abort but had large families, then in x number of years or in a number of generations, we could take over the world. Oh it was fun to think that, but as you may have noticed, those who really do want to take over the world are not content to let us outnumber them and are very quick to bring out their killing strategies, be it viruses, vaccines, or cluster bombs.
In any case, many of us homeschoolers had decided that it was actually beneficial to have large families, so birth control wasn’t an option. On the whole, we would feel sorry for those who could only have two or three kids and we co-oped with them so their kids would have peers. Large families were fun for group learning, gave us enough players for a baseball team, made short work of raking the fall leaves, and for the Haley’s, it gave us an opportunity to have a family choir that had several gigs in the region, even paying ones! -- before some of them got married and moved away.
Did homeschooling them for over 30 years pay off? I mean, spiritually. They could be great mechanics, artists, writers, ballerinas, or farmers, but real success is when they are all still serving God with their whole heart.
So, evaluation time. Does homeschooling work?
Two out of eight of our kids have been divorced and then remarried. This was not supposed to happen, but I can be comforted knowing that it wasn’t our kids who brought that on. And yet, one of those ex-spouses was another homeschooler. Hmmmm …
All eight of our kids are still going to church. They are all going to a Christian church. Some are Calvinist churches and some are Pentecostal churches. But three out of eight still attend Calvary Chapel churches like the ones they were brought up in. Coincidentally (or maybe not), they are the three of our kids who graduated from two years of Calvary Chapel Bible College in Indianapolis.
It’s likely that if we’d had more boys, we’d have more Calvary Chapel families. Often, the daughters ended up in whatever church their spouse was attending. But many of our kids have been / are in ministry positions. And they all love Jesus.
Our grandkids also love Jesus, and are ready with the answer when a question is posed in Sunday School. (We’ve had some come to visit and that was the report from their teachers in our church.)
All of our grandkids and great grandkids have had at least some homeschooling and most of them are exclusively homeschooled.
But some of our kids have slipped from time to time. Our children are not angels, but neither are their parents. (See my other blog posts, where I discuss some of my sins and failings … ) We just rejoice in knowing that this time has been brief, and then they have beaten a path back to Jesus. Like King David, who honestly failed but was called “a man after God’s own heart,” our kids valued their relationship with God and they weren’t away very long.
But sadly, this is not the case with every homeschooling family. We personally know some families who were teetotalers, whose children now openly drink. Some homeschool kids declared that they were gay. Some have left God and become Buddhists or anarchists. Some struggle with mental illness. Some ran away from home and married people their parents would never have approved of.
The Duggars, one of the most famous homeschooling families in the world, had a son who was convicted of possession of child pornography. Their reality show was toast with that revelation. It was never meant to be an X-rated show.
What happened? Is this verse not true?
“Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.”
~Proverbs 22:6
There are three possibilities:
The verse is not true.
We don’t understand the verse. Like maybe it doesn’t mean he will never depart from it.
Some of us maybe didn’t do the training part right.
Oh we could get smug and point fingers in judgment at other families, but how would that ease their anguish? Smugness doesn’t look good on anybody.
Is there a possibility that the verse is not true? Oh, some will say that it’s out of context. But practically all the verses in Proverbs are standalone principles. And we know that God’s Word is true.
“The entirety of Your word is truth, And every one of Your righteous judgments endures forever.”
~Psalm 119:160
So we can cross off #1. That means we need to take a closer look at the verse.
There are many possibilities why some of these things happened in the families of our dear friends, and their cases are far too complex to pinpoint a single reason why. We want to say, “But all these kids were raised in the same family, with the same parents, and with the same kind of training. Why did one experiment with drugs? Why did one run away?”
“And why do I have a ‘black sheep’? Where did that come from?”
Sometimes environmental and circumstantial issues contribute to the problem. Your child may be more at risk if he lives in downtown Chicago, or if his parents are newly divorced, leaving him with the homeschooling parent only part of the time.
Some families we knew took in children who had been in the foster system for a while -- and it apparently affected their own kids. Some families suffered the death of a child or a parent.
But there could still have been some errors in the training process. The child could have felt that the parents were too restrictive or too lax. Or sometimes there could have just been things going on at home that only the family knew about. But we know pastors with prodigals, worship leaders with prodigals, and more than one set of twins who went separate ways.
Our Lord Jesus didn’t address the “why’s” when He told the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11-23. He knew it is human nature to sin, whatever the reasons. The father in the story just showed compassion to the son who left home and returned penniless. It was not a fault or failure of the father -- he actually was a picture of our Heavenly Father, and you know He doesn’t make mistakes!
Here’s the thing about that verse: It says, “When he is old.” Years passed in the story of the Prodigal Son. But the father never forgot His son. When he was finished living a degrading lifestyle and had had his fill of it, the son returned to the place where he had been trained -- to his father who loved him.
It is possible that we didn’t do something right when we trained up our children.
Like tomato fences that were supposed to keep the plants growing in the upward direction, maybe the vines were able to creep under the fence on their own and stretch out into the yard when we weren’t paying attention. Maybe we planted them in a place with not enough sunshine and water, and the fence made little difference.
But we must realize that humans have a choice, and that includes our offspring. We can spend much time with our children and then come to find out that for reasons of their own, they are exercising their right to a free will. Then, it is our job to keep them in prayer, to continue to love them, to pray for them, to wait at the end of the driveway watching in case they might be coming home.
No, homeschooling is no guarantee that our children will never sin. It is not insurance against insurrection. It is a long-term commitment, longer than 13 years, far into adulthood. For the father of the prodigal, it was until the time “when he came to himself.”
But I do recommend it. To answer my own question, homeschooling is not a perfect solution, but it is a good one. There’s a much better chance that your child will clutch those principles you taught him in your homeschool day after day, to pull himself out of the muck and the mire if and when he finds himself there. Our God is mighty to save.
If you love your children, teach them JESUS while you still have them.
Dear Father in Heaven, You are the one who puts us in families. Families are Your design for the training of children. Child training these days is tougher than ever, but with Your help and Your Word, it can be done successfully. And so we pray for those who are still doing it, those who have prodigals, and those who are just embarking on the voyage. Let them prosper who love You, and who hope that their children will too.
For it’s in Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.
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