I write for homeschoolers to motivate and help other moms avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made. The writings are positive and encouraging, so they may leave you with a false impression of my family.
I’d like to set the record straight. We are not the perfect homeschool family. I am not a super mom that has it all together.
Most of my life I have run on a performance treadmill attempting to earn love and acceptance from God and others. The result has been a mess.
My childhood was difficult. I was often left alone (due to family illness) and as a result sexually abused for over a decade (from age five).
The shaggy hairstyles, bell-bottoms, rock and roll, make-love-not-war seventies welcomed my rebellious spirit. My life was broken – littered with hurts, failures, and mistakes.
My sweet godly Grandmother was faithful to plant spiritual seeds in me. Each summer I spent time with her I saw Jesus in her love. I longed for a relationship with God and talked to Him often.
Seeking Acceptance in Religion
I became a Christian as a teenager and deeply wanted to follow Christ. But I was full of shame and guilt, enslaved in bondage, unable to accept love and the forgiveness God offered. The treadmill kept me from freedom to enjoy the blessings of God. I married at 17 and had four children in five years. I was determined to raise my children in a Christian home.
In my zeal, I went from the life of a sinner to a religioholic (an alcoholic is preoccupied by alcohol, a workaholic is preoccupied by work, I was preoccupied with legalistic religion). We joined a legalistic church and went every time the door was open. If we missed a service, the guilt would drive me to volunteer for something else. I kept the nursery during church and taught Sunday School. I wasn’t fed much spiritually because I was busy earning love and approval. Artificial rules and regulations sucked the love of God out of our family.
Recycling the Misconceptions
I sincerely thought I was on the right path. I tried to control our family with my lists of Christian rules. Church attendance and Bible studies were duties. My husband was rejected by the church because he drank beer on weekends. After that, he had several affairs; he finally abandoned us and we didn’t see him for 15 years.
I was completely rejected by the church I served. I was told, “I must not have been submissive enough.” It was a small church and I think they were afraid to have a single mother with four children and no income.
I emphasize with the millions of single mothers in America struggling to feed their children every day. I was raising four children without child support for six years. We slept on mattresses, ate meals off a cardboard box, skipped many meals, and collected soda bottles in ditches to buy medicine. I was desperate to feed my children. I worked waitress jobs and even got a job in a nightclub for a while. The churches we visited were afraid of us or too legalistic for a divorced mother. After a few rejections, I stopped trying to go.
I joined the Orlando Police Academy when I found I could work off-duty jobs for good money. I was a scrawny 110 lbs but I made it through the academy. I was able to work 80-100 hours a week which I needed to to pay for child care for four.
I then married, this time to a man with an unsavory past, but he promised to take us to church and he did. We were involved in a mid-size church without all the extreme legalism. I had three more children. I worked hard toward the Proverbs 31 goal and we began homeschooling. Our family was dysfunctional, as most families are, but I was determined to work hard and protect my children from the evil world.
Externally we appeared to be a godly family, but internally each of us was unraveling.
I passed down unhealthy habits of performing to earn love and acceptance to my children. Instead of teaching the love of God, I taught them (by actions, not words) how to run on the performance treadmill and jump through behavioral hoops. While I was running on this treadmill I had a judgmental attitude towards anyone who wasn’t on the same treadmill. I was extremely critical of myself and others. Where is the love of God in that?
Homeschooling brought in new artificial rules and regulations (wearing dresses, baking bread, using the right math program, the number of school hours, etc.). I had new rules to follow–maybe this time I could get it right! I was willing to work hard. I truly believed I was on the right path, but the fruit proved otherwise. When my children hit their teen-age years they rebelled.
I was in deep denial. My closest friend once told me, “If being in denial was an Olympic sport, you would be a gold medalist!” My formula for coping with the dysfunctional mess went something like this:
- Step 1: Denial (Pretend there is no problem or pretend I don’t feel the way I feel)
- Step 2: See some of the problem, blame myself, wallow in shame.
- Step 3: Work harder, try harder
- Step 4: Fail.
- Step 5: Blame myself, wallow in shame.
- Step 6: Lose it.
- Step 7: Blame myself for losing it, wallow in shame. Emotional collapse.
That marriage ended in divorce. My adult children struggle with the consequences of our broken family. Ten years ago I married a man with two daughters and together we had two more children (now 7 and 8 )
These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
(Mat 15:8)
I’ve repented and apologized for those many years that I was wrapped up in this spiritual self-reliance and cheated them of the joy of life in Christ. By God’s grace we are all in different stages of healing.
We Needed Relationship Not Religion
Jesus came to give us Life– it has nothing to do with our ability to perform. The Christian life is dwelling in Him. We need to simply enter His rest and watch the freedom from our mess begin to unfold. As we dwell in Him we become transformed into His image, being changed by His glory. Without the Vine to bring nourishing sap to the branch there can be no fruit.
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Heb 12:2.
I love the way Mike Yaconelli explains this:
Spiritually is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spiritually is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spiritually is not about perfection; it is about connection.
The way of spiritual life begins where we are now in the mess of our lives. Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spiritually not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws, but because we let go of seeking perfection and instead seek God the One who is present in the tangleness of our lives.
Freedom comes from knowing truth – and the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Freedom does not mean lawlessness. Freedom in Him is freedom from shame and not from responsibility. We have a responsibility to submit. God’s Spirit can do His work only as we yield to Him. Jesus came to show us the love of God; when we yield, that love flows through us.
Our standard of conduct should be holiness (Col. 3:1). We are not without law but we are under “the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2), the law of love (James 2:8), and “the law of liberty” (James 2:12).
Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience. (Heb 4:1)
In Christ is the storehouse where God has placed all the “treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:1–5). Spiritual fruit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control–beginning with the knowledge of God through Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Getting off the performance treadmill was a long, complicated, and messy process. I had a lot of shame and assumptions to overcome. God took me on this journey to learn of Him through the Hebrew roots of Christianity (which can also turn into legalism if one is out of balance) to prepare me for His plans for me. I got to know Him by dropping preconceived ideas and assumptions. I learned of God’s grace through the wonderful stories in both Testaments.
Not everyone goes this particular route. But no one experiences real spiritual fruit until they have accepted His love.
You will trust God only as much as you love him. And you will love him not because you have studied him; you will love him because you have touched him—in response to his touch…Only if you love will you make that final leap into darkness. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Brennan Manning in Lion and Lamb
I continue dealing with the consequences of my life of sin. It’s a journey and we have come far, but we have far to go. It’s easy to lose focus and rely on working overtime to please God through our good works and righteous behavior. But we can never do it in our own strength.
At the very root of all Christian life lies the thought that God is to do all - that our work is to give and leave ourselves in His hands, in the confession of utter helplessness and dependence, in the assured confidence that He gives all we need.
The great lack of the Christian life is that, even where we trust Christ, we leave God out of the count. Christ came to bring us to God. Christ lived the life of a man exactly as we have to live it. Christ the Vine points to God the Husbandman. As He trusted God, let us trust God, that everything we ought
