Today’s podcast episode is part of our occasional series, Voices from the Conference. We use these episodes to highlight one of the speakers or ideas that came out of last year’s conference. Today Cathy McKay will be sharing her plenary talk “Distinguished Difficulties” with us. Enjoy!
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Distinguished Difficulties plenary handout
Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and today’s episode is part of our occasional series, Voices from the Conference. As you probably know by now, we at A Delectable Education host a virtual conference in February of each year, hopefully bringing some inspiration and encouragement to what is notoriously a dark stretch in the homeschooling year…at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere.
A few years ago, a worldwide pandemic forced us to move to the online format, and we discovered some benefits we wouldn’t have otherwise. Not only are Charlotte Mason educators from all over the world able to join us due to the virtual platform, so many have personally written to share how they wouldn’t ever be able to get away for a conference or retreat except online.
We are so grateful to be able to pour into the broader Charlotte Mason community in this way, however, we know that many are still not able to participate, and even those that do always long for something more and that brings us to the Voices of the Conference series. We use these episodes to highlight one of the speakers or ideas that came out of last year’s conference. We hope you enjoy this little taste of conference and getting to know one of the speakers. We would love to have you join us at the next ADE conference in February.
Today Cathy McKay will be sharing her plenary talk “Distinguished Difficulties” with us. Enjoy!
Cathy
Well, hello, I’m Cathy McKay. Welcome to my library. My library’s in my backyard and my backyard is in Australia.
I share this with my husband Steve. We’ve been married 23 years and we are so glad to have our six children, five sons and a daughter. The eldest is 20 and the youngest is seven. We’ve been homeschooling for about 14 years now and it’s been the last eight years that we have been growing into the Charlotte Mason Method, incredibly helped by her. And Charlotte Mason’s help to us only continues as our children grow out of homeschooling into their independence and young adult life. It really is an education for all of life.
I’m also so grateful for the work of Emily, Liz, and Nicole over the years through their podcast and this conference to help us grow in our understanding of the philosophy and method and how to do it. I’ve been part of this conference in one way or another for the last few years since it began and I am very grateful. It is such a privilege to share this time speaking about these ideas with you now.
Before we start talking about distinguishing between our difficulties, let’s look at the conference blessing together. These are the words that God gave the priest Aaron to speak his name and his blessing over the people of Israel, and through the Lord Jesus, we get to enter into that blessing also.
The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
And together we say amen.
Well, I love long-term gardening, perennial landscape planting, the kind of gardening where you frame a view, where you have a three dimensional space that you are working toward with different levels of plant growth, contrasting foliage and textures, harmonious tones. It’s not a produce garden that needs turning over every few months, but something where the planting takes years to grow into itself. But the beginning of this kind of gardening is really demoralizing.
You start with rather miserable plants that are awkwardly spaced because they need to be spread out so they’ve got room to grow, and it can take several years before they fill that space. So it doesn’t always look good when you’re beginning. And some plants need to be established when they’re dormant – deciduous trees or roses. And so you go to a whole lot of work to prepare a garden bed and then you plant a leafless stick in the ground. You’re tempted to add in some high interest, high impact things of immediate visual impact. But those things tend to be a waste of money in that long term perennial sort of garden. And they undermine the vision that you are holding for the long term.
A friend comes to visit ’cause they know how hard you’ve been working, but there’s not much to see. There’s a lot of mulch, a lot of empty space and some leafless arboreal skeletons. It can take a few years before it looks any good. But in these early stages, the biggest risk comes when those bare dormant leafless trees capture the imagination of sword fighting children. And I have a family of boys who make swords and all their friends come over. There might be 40 of them at a time and they’ve all got swords. Children mistake dormancy for deadness and they go to war. It happens every time I plant a tree and every winter thereafter. It’s amazing that any of them survive.
It’s only as we begin to understand more about the nature of a deciduous tree that we can understand where there is hidden vitality, where there is freshness just about to break through with the next season’s growth, life in what looks modest. It requires understanding, imagination, patience and humility. And I wonder if we tend to encounter our work as mothers and educators in the same way. We’re easily discouraged by smallness, the spaces not yet grown into, the dormancy. We want the fresh and living way, but we’re prefer that it look and feel like a well-established mature garden. When we don’t understand the nature of growth, we can misdiagnose our difficulties.
There are some very strong maternal desires that we have – the desire for reassurance and confidence, the desire for simplicity, and the desire for things to feel better. We are doing a hard job and we want to be enjoying ourselves more, and we want to feel like what we are doing is legitimate. We also want our kids to be enjoying themselves more, not always for their own sakes, but sometimes because that’s when they’re easier to be with. They’re more enjoyable to homeschool when they are enjoying what they’re doing. I know of plenty of moms like me, when we want things to feel better, when we want to tune out from the difficulty. When we’ve hit a hard moment in a morning lesson, we pick up our phone, we go and do the easiest thing we can think of, which is we start to scroll, often hiding in the bathroom with a block of chocolate. Then we see the families whose lives look like lives we want, people who seem to be having a much better time than we are. We see pictures of how we wish we felt.
The family that spends all day in deep leather couches with floor to ceiling bookshelves and a dog that doesn’t stink, or the homesteading family carefully shaping sourdough on bespoke kitchen benches with a litter of puppies next to the antique stove and wearing hand sewn linen frocks. Or we see the adventurous world schooling family, the family who have no home, the wilderness wanderers. They’re tanned, they’re toned, they’re together all the time without the burden and paraphernalia of a stationary life.
Over the top of these gorgeous images are words. Words about feeling a certain way about kids falling in love with learning, falling in love with books, falling in love with reading words about how childhood needs to be a time of wonder or play, imagination, wildness, freedom, words about interest led learning about education being fueled by children’s curiosity. Words telling us that children need to be released from exertion so that they can be free to pursue their passions. Words about how mothers will be so much happier and at ease if we just give in and give up the things that are difficult, the dead things like philosophy and method and narration and schedules and effort. These gorgeous cliches plant doubt with one hand and offer false hope with the other. They cause us to interpret our difficult feelings as a sign that we’re doing it wrong, that we are ruining our kids and wasting ourselves, that the effort is unnecessary or worse, harmful. At that moment we’re tempted to drop the books, the lessons, the schedules, the expectations, the ideals and the principles. Insta-educational philosophy tells us that discomfort is not part of the Fresh and Living way.
When we are struggling, it is so easy to find someone in our pocket waiting to tell us what we want to hear. That things will get better if we just quit the stuff we don’t like. That things will be better if we give into our feelings and give into our children’s feelings. We put our trust in a mum whose influence comes not from her sound principles, not from decades of experience, but from her excellent taste in wallpaper, from her on point branding, from her beautiful palette, from her teaching what our itching ears want to hear. This longing we have to feel a certain way about our life and this expectation that we ought to feel a certain way, that we need to keep changing things up until we get the feeling we want, these undermine our ability to be thankful about what is happening in our families. They also steer us off the path to finding the real solid mature joy.
Cliches tempt us to think that a living joyful education is only happening when we have certain feelings, that it can be gained apart from difficulty, that happiness can be gained by distilling just the beautiful parts of life by honing in on the enjoyable. But Charlotte Mason says happiness comes of effort, service wide interests, and least of enjoyment. And when people put enjoyment even of beautiful things in the first place, and indeed in place of all else, they miss the very thing they seek and become in feeble in body and fretful and discontented in temper. From Charlotte Mason’s perspective, the cliched advice to reduce our lives to only the beautiful and enjoyable parts, the parts we and our children are excited about, is bad advice. It’s a failure to recognize the nature of things. If we do that, we’ll miss the very thing we are longing for when we’re hiding in the bathroom with chocolate and Instagram.
Today we are going to look at some of the cheap easy comforts on offer to us. We are going to think about how to distinguish between the different kinds of difficulties that we face. And then we’re going to look briefly at some better ways of finding refreshment.
So why do we love cliched educational maxims? Well, we latch onto cliches because they meet our desire for simplicity. They are easy, succinct ideas, not well thought out principles, and they usually do say something true. They appeal to something we care about. We want our kids to enjoy good things, to love learning, to have a childhood of wonder or play, imagination, wildness, on freedom. We want them to be interested and invested, setting forth the tendrils of their mind in many directions. So when we see someone offer one of these things in easy words, we are attracted to that. We look for easy words, giving us an easy way to something we want, and a cliche will usually take one good thing, one of the things we want, and make it the whole.
The cliches we are barraged with, even when they quote bits of Charlotte Mason, end up running in contradiction to what she says. The cliches distort our sense of proportion. Ms. Mason writes often of how when we lose proportion, we are susceptible to all sorts of trouble physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and psychologically. If we build our lives only around what comes naturally to us and our children, we grow flaccid. If we only go for the things which look impressive now, we’ll miss the bigger, slower going trees.
Let’s talk about falling in love because the most common cliche that we take as a given is that our children need to fall in love with learning, fall in love with reading, fall in love with books. And in an education that is based on living books it sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? It’s hard to argue with the goodness of children having an appetite for reading. There is something about the child’s desire to read that might show some awakening, some appreciation for things unseen. It can be a sign of a growing in a life. It’s good that our children always have some avenue of wholesome enjoyment and self-contained, independent, inexpensive occupation open to them. These are good gifts to welcome. But is it also perhaps that we love the idea of our children falling in love with things because it sounds simple and effortless. After all, we’re desperate to have a life that gets the good results but feels easier along the way. Something that looks alive and thriving right now.
Is it because our children are easier to manage and they’re easier to homeschool when they aren’t resistant? Is it partly about what is pleasant and convenient to us? Is it partly about our sense of security and accomplishment? After all, our skeptical friends and family can notice and applaud when a child shows an enthusiasm for books. We want some sign that this risky, costly, difficult choice to home educate is working. We are in a hurry to taste fruit. We want the ease and assurance of having our children besotted with the things we require of them.
And yet this cliche is the most common source of anxiety that I find among my friends and amongst the moms who come to my library. We take on this idea, this benchmark, that our children need to fall in love with what they’re doing – with reading, with learning, with books – that anything less than infatuation is a sign of deadness. We go to war with the leafless tree.
Now the books we’re giving them and the things we are doing might well be dead, but they might not be. It’s possible that we are offering living books and a living method, but that the child’s relationship with that knowledge is still dormant or yet to even germinate. The key is for us to understand more, to understand more of the Charlotte Mason method and to understand more about our children, and then we can tell the difference between dormancy and deadness.
Several worried moms I’ve spoken to are concerned that usually their mid middle grade sons are too busy playing outside or making things in the shed to wanna come in and read for leisure. But these moms, once we start talking or acknowledge that the sons do enjoy stories they read aloud together as a family, they are reading good books as part of their morning lessons. And so this cliche, this thing this, this aspiration for a certain feeling is undermining good homeschooling mothers’ confidence in what they’re doing. They’re not seeing the richness of what is actually happening for their children because they, they think that something more intoxicating is meant to be on the horizon. The cliches keep causing moms to undervalue the goodness. It undermines their confidence when all that’s missing is a feeling.
CS Lewis in Letters to an American Lady writes this. Now it might cause us to blush a little, but I think he makes an excellent point for context. Jack is writing to this woman when she’s going through a time when she seems to feel that God is not near her. Louis writes: “The act which engenders a child ought to be and usually is attended by pleasure, but it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure, there may be sterility where there is no pleasure there, the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul, it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence of the Holy Ghost, which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super added gift for which we give thanks when it comes.”
Might we say that it’s not the sense of being in love with reading that matters most, but the reading itself? Isn’t it enough that our children actually read and read a great variety of worthy books steadily over time, than that they feel a certain way about their reading from the start? Children can form a meaningful relationship with a field of knowledge without being immediately and constantly infatuated with the books by which they gain entry into that field. Children can be nourished by words, by ideas, by beauty and stories, even if they don’t have a compulsive relationship with books. Pleasure doesn’t have to accompany every moment for there to be life-giving work going on.
Do we long for our children to fall in love with other basic human functions to fall in love with eating, to fall in love with sleeping, to fall in love with breathing? No. We make good provision for these things regardless of how our children feel about them. The same needs to go for books. The intellectual food that comes to us through books is a human necessity. We are spiritual creatures with an intellect that needs varied nourishment. How we feel about that food doesn’t change our need for it. Our responsibility as parents is not to conjure up a passion for reading, but that we ensure our children do read. Our job is to provide a voluminous and varied feast. Our children’s feelings about the feast will be as varied as the dishes on the table.
Well, Charlotte Mason is optimistic that we’ll nourish children will come to have a delight in reading and a living relationship with the knowledge that comes through living books, but that delight isn’t a necessary starting point. She comments on John Ruskin’s education in this way” “As for books, we are told how Ruskin grew up on the Waverly novels on Pope’s Homer’s Iliad, many of Shakespeare’s plays and much else that is delightful. But he does not give us an instance of the sort of thing we are looking for – the sudden, keen, insatiate delight in a book, which means kinship until he’s introduced to Byron.” She points out the sudden keen insatiate delight in a book. But note that Ruskin had a rich literary diet before that insatiate delight was quickened. Pleasure in reading is lovely, but there can be seasons of fertility apart from pleasure. It is a pleasure that children are trained up to sometimes gradually over time. It is what we are educating towards, and it is something which is quickened when we are not expecting it. It sprouts up much like happiness and friendship. It sprouts up when we are not watching, from soil of wide literary nourishment from sound habits and vital atmosphere.
When we prioritize how our children feel about reading rather than the reading itself, then we are vulnerable to shortsighted advice. Many folk encourage us to choose only the books which kids like and have a present enthusiasm for. They discourage us from exerting ourselves and from giving books that will require the children to exert themselves. They also promote a false confidence that if a child does have an infatuated reading behavior, if they sit and read for 16 hours a day that they’re doing well. The quiet danger of cheap cliches is that when our children are exceeding in one good thing, reading a lot or having a funnel sort of deep interest, we take false confidence and prematurely relax our provisions. I’ve been there myself. Long before I met Charlotte Mason, I felt like my work was done when my 7-year-old would sit and read all day and, unbeknownst to me, sometimes all night, I assumed that a child with a voracious reading appetite would grow to be a voracious reading adult and that there was nothing left for me to do but to leave that child undisturbed on the couch. Now what I didn’t realize is that my child wasn’t practicing the habit of reading. They were practicing the habit of doing whatever they felt like doing.
The cliches encourage us into the ease of just giving into what comes naturally giving into compulsive behavior. Disproportionate appetites doing one good thing at the exclusion of other good things. Disordered loves. In Ms. Mason’s volume Ourselves she helps young people and and their parents see the devastation that happens when a person allows one appetite to rule the whole kingdom.
So what happens when our children don’t feel like reading anymore? What happens when just doing what they feel like doing is applied to another activity 10 or 20 years down the track? It’s reasonable to expect that our children who aren’t besotted with reading, who don’t start out with this great bookish enthusiasm, but children who have the steady habit of reading every day as part of their morning lessons and their family culture, that they will develop a consistent habit of reading and of pleasure in meaningful reading over time. Ms. Mason helps us place not too much emphasis and weight on the child’s feelings in their early life about reading. We’re not meant to overinterpret their immature years. You can’t see the glory of 50 summers in a sapling.
Well, we have a range of difficulties as homeschool moms, and it is those difficulties that usually make us vulnerable to the shortsighted, simplistic cliched advice. So let’s spend some time distinguishing between the difficulties. Time and again, Charlotte Mason reminds us that true enjoyment, the sort of thing we are working towards in our education, can’t be gained apart from effort, both the child’s effort and the parent or the teacher’s effort. Our work is to put our children in touch with a whole wide world full of things. Things they haven’t yet come to be interested in, things they don’t yet know about, things they’re not yet enthusiastic about, things that are fresh and living, but perhaps still dormant to them. Contrary to most cliches, Charlotte says “this living education cannot be left to chance or to the child’s own immature powers.” If we are to fulfill our God-given responsibility towards our children, we cannot just follow the easy path of our child’s lead or the limiting path of our own maternal taste.
It is difficult to introduce new things to someone who isn’t yet interested in them. It’s difficult to make these provisions. It’s a wonder required of us and it often does not at all feel practicable. Both understanding the work and doing it are an effort. This is a difficult thing, but it is a difficulty and exertion that leads to ease and joy. These difficult efforts nourish the expansion of the child into the fullest expression of their personhood. This effort expands their capacity to enjoy, to enjoy both God and his world. Charlotte says, “in proportion to the range of living relationships we put in his way, will he have wide and vital interests, fullness of joy in living? In proportion as he’s made aware of the laws which rule every relationship will his life be dutiful and serviceable? As he learns that no relation with persons or with things animate or inanimate can be maintained without strenuous effort will he learn the laws of work and the joys of work?”
This fullness of joy is not the kind of cheap happiness which is bought by cutting out difficulty or by just going with the superficial immediate interests of ourselves and our children. This full kind of joy comes from understanding that all pleasures are connected to some kind of strenuous effort. We are working for joy. The full joy we’re educating up to isn’t a passive consumerist life of just doing what we feel like doing, but a life that expands and spreads vitality, giving goodness, service, and joy to others. It’s a life that is serviceable because the child has grown to have a sense of doing the right thing at the right time, not just whatever they feel like doing. Enjoyment that comes by cutting out effort is cheap, temporary, shortsighted, selfish, and foolish. Distilling life just into the easy, enjoyable parts reduces life and it reduces personhood. This necessary good life giving kind of difficulty is meant to be a feature of our everyday life.
It is the everyday work of overcoming inertia. Anything, even things we enjoy sometimes feel unappealing when we’re at the starting line. If we try to get rid of everyday effort and discomfort, we will be yoked, our children will be yoked, to an inert life. In home education, Ms. Mason says “there shouldn’t be a single day which passes without some kind of strenuous effort by the child.” That is how children grow strong. Both we and our children learn to overcome by overcoming. Pleasure is the fruit of that kind of difficulty. It is an effort which grows into enjoyment. It’s an experience of weakness which develops a power. It feels like death, but there is life breaking through.
When we’re facing a hard run in our families or one of those mornings where you wanna quit on a lesson and hide in the bathroom in Instagram and chocolate, then perhaps it’s worth asking whether it’s hard because the children are actually in the long process of learning to overcome. Is it hard because we are faithfully training attention? Is it the difficulty of facing weak wills, our own weak will and our children’s weak wills, and strengthening our own will and helping them strengthen theirs? Is our difficulty the effort of helping our children learn the freedom of not being a slave to their feelings, the effort of helping them develop the muscle memory, the lived experience of choosing to do the thing they don’t feel like doing, and then finding the surprising pleasure that happens on the other side? The effort of helping them become rightly ordered, proportionate people, wise people. It is hard. Is our difficulty the effort of training up to the power of enjoying more, the sort of enjoyment we’re longing for. In the moments when we want to take our shortcuts through the cliches?
We need to see past our feelings in those hard moments. Like healthy natural childbirth, there is a kind of pain and labor that means things are progressing. If we can learn to see past our feelings, we’re better positioned to help our children do the same. When we can overcome our desire just to give up in the middle of a maths lesson, then we help our children see what it looks like to persevere. A hard morning is not necessarily a failing homeschool. It might be the family which is doing exactly the thing it was designed to do. So don’t misdiagnose that kind of difficulty. Don’t mistake dormancy for deadness.
But there is another kind of difficulty. It might be that we’re having a hard time because we are cramping our children. When we haven’t learned to exercise mastery in activity, we make things harder for ourselves and our kids. When we haven’t understood our children, when we’ve not understood the nature of the work or the principles by which we’re meant to fulfill our responsibilities, when we haven’t understood what each subject looks like from the acorn to the oak tree, sometimes things are difficult because we’re overtaxing our children and overtaxing ourselves. While the child is meant to experience some sort of exertion every day, we are not meant to allow any one part of the child’s person to be overexerted.
Sometimes things are difficult because in order to make it simpler for ourself, we’ve adopted resources or practices that are wooden and that lack vitality. We’ve signed up to something that meets one of our maternal needs for assurance or confidence or simplicity, but it doesn’t meet the actual needs of the child. And where there’s a lack of life, where there’s a lack of living ideas or living method, things will be harder than they need to be. It will not be the productive kind of difficulty. Sometimes our children, as Liz and Emily and Nicole have said, sometimes our children are rightly pushing back against a dead method.
Another reason we might feel like our work is unbearably hard is perhaps because we’ve not spent time understanding our own landscape. In The Secret World of Weather, Tristan Gully talks about how weather forecasts are given for a really large region, making true observations about what the weather system’s expected to do overall. The problem is we don’t experience the weather 200 feet in the ground, several hundred miles at a time. We are on the ground, we are in a particular spot. And the same weather system can feel very different depending on the physical geography around you. So the way that the weather interacts with one patch of earth will be different from what the same weather pattern does just a few minutes away. And in some ways I wonder if our bewilderment and difficulty with some of Ms. Mason’s principles and method happen because we don’t spend enough time understanding our own landscape, the physical geography of our own lives. The principles are true, but we might need to mitigate and allow for some features in our backyard, which absorb more radiant heat or funnel wind differently than in our friend’s yard 10 minutes away. Again, the solution is not to give up. It’s not to go for cutting corners and simplicity, but to understand more.
And understanding takes time. It’s a process. We need to be patient. It is normal to have to take time to figure it out. While we need support and we need to help each other learn and understand more, no one else can do the figuring out for us. We need to be willing to engage in that kind of difficulty so that we can get rid of the unnecessary kinds of strain.
The final kind of difficulties that we need to distinguish – other hard things that we cannot change. While there might be some earthworks we can do in our own landscape, while there are some things we can understand and improve in and increase our capacity for, there will be some provisions, some very hard things which the Lord God has ordained for us. The limited resources that God has allocated to our family, the trials we must persevere in, the tensions we have to live with, the things that we cannot fix. Some of these things make perfect execution of a Charlotte Mason method impossible, and we all have them. These are the things which thwart and frustrate our hopes, our ambitions, our plans. These things that we would never have chosen for ourselves are places where God’s gracious, wise, loving, abundant, holy, verdant provisions are proven in our weakness. These difficulties make it very obvious that any fruitful outcome in our family isn’t because of our cleverness and competence. It is all the Lord’s triumph. Every difficulty of any kind is a gift. It’s a reminder in a moment of time to lean hard on the living God because he is the only hero in his story. Our homeschool exists to display the glory of God and he’s supremely displayed when he enables the work we do get done, and when he covers over and provides in the absence of things that we can do.
Well, if we’re going to receive difficulty, instead of trying to run away to cheap comfortable cliches, how do we refresh so that we can persevere? How do we refresh in a way that sustains the work rather than undermining it? Perhaps the first step is to stop trying to get away from the hard things to adjust our expectations about what life is meant to be like. Life is harder, homeschooling, mothering is harder when we think it shouldn’t be. Things are more miserable and frustrating when we are trying to eliminate effort and get rid of difficulty, when we’re besotted with falling in love with everything. Don’t believe the lies that difficulty is damaging. We believe in a sovereign God who uses all things to achieve his glorious purposes. And every difficulty comes to us from his hands and he’s met with his provision.
The principles that make a Charlotte Mason education vital for our children need to be applied to us also. Short and varied episodes in our days. Instead of escape, we just need some change. We need variety to refresh. We need an increasingly connected life, an increasing connectedness with beauty, with story, with ideas, with art, with skills, with knowledge.
We need to have things to see and do and think about apart from our feelings. The more nourished we are, the more power we have to redirect our thoughts, to change our demeanor in our difficulties. Charlotte gives us an example of a person in the throes of discouragement.
She says, “the sameness of his duties, the weariness of doing the same thing over and over fills him with disgust and despondency and he relaxes his efforts. But not if he be a man under the power of his own will, because he simply does not allow himself in idle discontent. It is always within his power to give himself something pleasant, something outside himself to think of. And he does so, and given what we call a happy frame of mind, no work is laborious.”
We’ll have a meetup to talk about some of the concrete things we can plan to do so that the everyday expected difficulties when they hit, we know what to do with them. So sign up for the meetup if you wanna talk about how we can practically do some of these things.
Perseverance is done one moment at a time. Lewis says that every moment of suffering, the exact present never really is intolerable. It’s when we import meaning from the past and the future that it becomes unwieldy. So we need to learn how not to spiral, but how just to take one moment and use one moment of difficulty as a chance to depend and rely on the Lord. And of course, all the diversions in the world are useless if we don’t do the thing that really matters. To cry out the living God, to meet us with his strength and his provision in our difficulty, instead of trying to run away from it. It’s proximity to him that gives us peace.
Notice our conference blessing. It’s all about what God is doing. It’s he who blesses and keeps. It’s his face shining in favor, favor not secured by what we do or don’t do as a homeschooling mom, but favor, secured, guaranteed by the work of the Lord Jesus in our place. It is he who is gracious. It’s he who is giving us his goodness undeserved. It is his countenance we need, fellowship and union with him, which is provided, secured by the Lord Jesus and applied by his spirit in proximity to him. He gives us peace. And this blessing comes right in the middle of the difficulties. The Instagram, chocolate in the bathroom difficulties. Instead of running away, we get to run to him.
God bless you and keep you.