Home schooling

If you guys didn't know, I go to Sammamish High School.  If you didn't know, I have an English class there that gives me homework.  Also, if you didn't know, I used to be home schooled.  This was a writing project that I did, but I wanted to write more about it, because he only gave me one page to do it.  So here goes.

Up until my 9th grade when I joined Sammamish High School, I was home schooled.  I mostly liked it, because it was a chill environment and it was fairly easy.  Up until about 4th grade, though, I was oblivious to the fact that a couple socially awkward, nerdly home schoolers had spread myths  about the dangers of homeschooling.  It was then I recognized the confused, disgusted look on people's faces when I would tell them that I was, in fact, educated at home.

I would tell them about it, and then immediately try to cover up my sin with a "but it's pretty much the same as public school, just without other people, and my mom doesn't teach me, I have teachers, but if I need help I ask my mom, like public schoolers, and I even play sports and I have a life."

It was too late though.  Weird Al's "Amish Paradise" had already spread to their brain, and they suddenly realized the cause of my stupidity, awkwardness, and acne.  They then had three choices of how to act when around me: to be very liberal, conservative, or normal.

Occasionally, when I showed people my scarlet letter of regular society, they would drop a swear word, or tell me a joke about sex, or tell something involving technology, and  step back to watch the inevitable horror that would soon permeate my facial expression.  Surely I would be shocked that there were bad words in the world, or sex, or cell phones. 

At other times, they would walk on egg shells around me, carefully choosing their words and conversation topics, and never thumbing their PSPs in their pocket or asking me to come play XBOX with them, because I would surely be in question about what an XBOX was, and whether father Jebediah would approve of it.  The conversations somehow would drift towards plowing fields or churning butter, none of which I knew anything about, and they regarded me as incompetent, for I didn't even know how to do what I was born to do.  Attempts at avoiding my harsh judgment were made, so that we could still play basketball together.

Having now gotten past the pain of telling people that I am a nerd destined to be an outcast, whenever I meet a homeschooler, I try to lead the conversations to their life on an Amish farm.  As I notice their disconcerted facial expressions and squirming, I admit to them that I too was once a home schooler.

And then I pull out my cell phone.

Grace.

"You called and You shouted, broke through my deafness, now I'm breathing in, and breathing out, I'm alive again.  You shattered my darkness, washed away my blindness, now I'm breathing in, and breathing out, I'm alive again." - Matt Maher, Alive Again.

Dangle.  We were dead, hard-core.  We had no chance.  We were hopeless, and yet our darkness was shattered, our eyes were cleared, and life was given.  This is awesome.  

And we pass by it.  Everyday, we forget about it.  Just like our previous (or present) life (not talking reincarnation here, folks, more like regeneration), we blindly run to death.  In the words of John Donne, in his Holy Sonnet #1:

"I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;

I dare not move my dim eyes any way,

Despair behind, and death before doth cast

Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste

By sin in it, which it t'wards hell doth weigh;

Only thou art above, and when towards thee

By thy leave I can look, I rise again;

But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,

That not one hour my self I can sustain." 

 

That's just it.  We may not chose death, but we're sure running to it.   "And when towards thee..I can look, I rise again."  Even though my blogs may sound like a broken record, this is it!  By Christ's power, people rise.  The lame are healed, the blind can see, and the dead rise from death. 

 

The dead rise from death!  We can't be good enough to work our way into heaven.  We can't earn God's love.  We will never be able to impress God.  We've grown accustomed to the thought that "God loves good little boys and girls."  And "if you are polite and don't kill people or do porn or lie, then God will love you." 

 

Something is wrong with that.   As Brennan Manning says in The Ragamuffin Gospel:

"Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace."

When you read the Gospels, you will notice that Jesus never hates on the poor in Spirit, or the prostitutes, or the broken, but He comes and completely blows down the self-righteous doors of the hypocrites and the Pharisees.  

 

"For it is by grace that you have been saved, not by works, so that no man can boast."

 

"As Jesus was walking on from there he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, 'Follow me.'  And he got up and followed him.  Now while he was at table in the house it happened that a number of tax collectors ad sinners came to sit at the table with Jesus and his disciples.  When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ' why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?'  When he heard this he replied, 'It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick.  Go and learn the meaning of the words: Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice.  And indeed I cam to call not the upright, but sinners.'

Dangle.  In finishing the sonnet of John Donne that I started before, here's the last couplet:

 

"Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his (satan's) art,

And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart." 

 

God's not giving up on the chase.  So as you go along your way to school or to jobs or whatever it is that you do, remember this:  Grace and mercy are the only ways to draw near to God, trying to do works after works isn't going to do anything.  God's drawing your heart.  Now go out and be drawn.