Pressure Cooking Taking Place
by Sandy Hancock
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I know what quality homeschooling does for students. There's plenty of evidence of what it does. Research shows quality homeschooling produces superior students in all venues. Quality homeschooling produces superior citizens. I mean superior here not in the sense of being arrogant towards those who cannot. I mean superior in the sense of Daniel in the Bible, who showed a king what following God's will does for your ability. I mean superior in the sense of the man without stain or blemish who came to us and then washed our feet and then our sin-stained lives. I mean superior in the sense of being fully developed to serve God and mankind. In other words, I mean living your God-given destiny.
What you rarely hear about is what quality homeschooling does for the parent. THAT's a rare treasure. Quality homeschooling is a pressure cooker with you, the parent, inside the cooker. Hundreds of articles will tell you that you are doing it wrong if you feel the pressure. There will be 10 steps to doing it better or 7 ways to stop the stress or 9 things to change to make it super simple so that you and your whole family can dress alike and eat bread made from wheat you planted, harvested, and ground this morning. Don't believe it. There's only one thing to do: realize you are in God's pressure cooker for His reasons for His timing.
Steadily the pressure increases so that we each begin to see our weaknesses, and then we have the time to ask God how to fix them as well as the time for us to work with Him on that. It is just as if one has discovered a small leak in the roof after a light shower. Fix it now, before the hurricane comes and the constant pressure of the pounding rain widens the hole and the whole house becomes lost to the storm.
When the gunk of your life arises to your mind, don't stuff it down! Don't say, "I can't be like that.....mustn't do X, or Y, or Z. I'll push it down, down, down."Instead, pray, "God, I AM like this. Sin DOES exist in my life. Cream that gunk from my heart and set me free from it."
The Apostle Paul (I think we call him that because we like people to have two names) referred to this. He said, the older he gets, the more sin he realizes he had.
Don't fear the gunk arising. It's a good thing for gunk to do if....you ask God to cream it off your soul. It will come in dribs and drabs; you'll think, "I thought all that was dealt with, but here it is again."You see, we don't realize how deeply sin affects our lives, how much toll it takes on us. In fact, we can't bear to see it all at once. That's what would happen if we faced a holy God without being cleansed by the blood of Jesus....we'd die eternally.
The gunk is in your heart from years of walking your own way. Remember that in God's ways, even doing good that He didn't set for you to do is sinful. The righteousness (what we think is good to do) of man is as filthy rags before Him.
Don't fear the gunk arising. Ask God to cream it off the top. It will come in dribs and drabs (sometimes it has to be said twice). Instead of fearing the gunk, think, "Here's another little fleck of that gunk of ____ that I used to paint a room of my heart. Cream it off, God, that the room can be more Yours."He knows how much scouring of the old paint you can take at one time, how much you can stand being removed at one time.
Over the last more than 25 years, I have watched the homeschooling moms come in all bright and eager, jump into the pressure cooker, and come out all tender and sweet and ready to serve. It's a good thing, God's pressure cooker is. Sometimes He opens it a bit, tosses in some more ingredients that you wouldn't have been able to bear earlier. Sometimes, when He opens it a bit, He removes the bay leaf or some other little thing that had a big effect. He can use other pressure cookers, but the homeschooling one is a steady, long service one that produces superior quality moms and dads and guardians, too. We love working with you during this process, and we know this: It is good to live in His timing and not flee His pressure cooker if you want to come out just as He planned, a well done, good and faithful servant of the Lord Most High.
