One Simple Decision

It's hard to remember exactly when I first began to dream about making some radical changes in my lifestyle. Was it when I was introduced to Phil Lancaster's magazine and website The Patriarch Magazine? It was there that I read many challenging articles about being a leader in my family, about guiding them, teaching them, protecting them and providing for them.

By then, I had already begun to become comfortable questioning the status quo. I had grown up a fairly conservative thinker. Being the youngest of five children, I quickly learned how to follow. If I didn't, I'd find myself left behind. But one simple decision of ours, made over eight years ago, open the floodgates and started the process which led us to where we are now. That was the decision we made to homeschool our two boys.

The homeschool movement in the United States has grown tremendously over the past twenty years or so. There are many different reasons for making that choice for one's family. Some decide to homeschool their children for academic reasons, some for libertarian reasons, some for reasons of safety, and others for religious reasons. But regardless of the reason, they all have one thing in common. They have chosen to go against the flow. They have chosen to buck the majority, the default method of education in the civilized world today, and at great expense and inconvenience, chosen to teach their own children.

This going against the flow, in an area that touches so many aspects of our lives (just ask the non-homeschooling family how much of their daily schedule revolves around the schedule of the local school) does something to one's mind. I think it stretches it, makes it a little larger, makes it a little stronger. Just the process of following a minority opinion would tend to do that I think. And before you know it, you end up questioning other status quo ideas. After the big decision of taking your children out of the local schools, suddenly other questions begin to come up. Questions of lifestyle, priorities. And some how, I found myself more willing to entertain these other ideas. Willing to change my firmly held opinions in many areas.

This process I described, could become pretty scary, unsettling, or even dangerous. It would be easy to become a rudderless ship drifting on the ocean of ideas once one begins to question everything. The thing that saved us from going adrift like that was the firmly held belief that God has given us a revelation of who He is, what He has done, and what He requires of us. And so that we could be certain of what He really said, He had that revelation written down, in what we know today as the Bible.

The Scriptures then became our foundation. The measuring rod by which we would compare the many new (to us) ideas that we began to consider.

Until next time,

Terry - an emergent agrarian