Messing With the Wrong Guy

Three cheers for the codger!

Free Market Education

Scary how Greenhut's sort of thinking is going mainstream (see previous post on Jonah Goldberg).

I wonder if the NEA has a contingency plan for this. Chances are that it would be like so many other disaster preparedness plans: hopelessly out-of-date (Call President Nixon and demand...) and completely out of touch with the people it's intended to protect (authorize additional payroll deductions from your salary to fund emergency lobbying...).

Stuff like this always pops up over the summer while school is out and parents are weighing their child's safety and evaluating their options. Still, I'm glad to see this stuff out there. It's time to question the public school monopoly on funds used to educate children. People have a right to a free market, especially when it comes to such an important task as educating their progeny.

Random Thoughts

Sorry I haven't been able to write much lately. Here's just a few of the things I've been thinking lately. Call them "mini-posts."

• My son is into zoology. His favorite channel is of course Animal Planet. In all the time he and I have been watching, I have yet to encounter an animal with the quality of laughter (hyenas don't count, unless they know some inside joke).
• A kitten is a cat before it learns dignity.
• Technology is only as useful as the next idea.
• That being said, I still want a laptop for my birthday. It could help me reach those next ideas.
  
• Children will never remember your annual salary. This is both a blessing and a curse.
• My grandfather's last career was insurance sales. He had trophies lining his shelves. They were up there, collecting dust for years as a shrine to his industry long after he was gone. I would trade the lot of them if I could have had one afternoon with him where I knew I could trust him not to get angry. I bet my father feels similarly.
• I'm going to hug each of my kids tomorrow.
• Lightning is cool, but I like the smell of the rain better.
• I wish my lower back pain wouldn't make me walk funny.
• If I had a remote beeper for locating the remote control, I'd probably lose that too. No one loses cell phones that easily because you can call them.
  
• No one understands that medicine is a developing science, especially no one in pharmaceutical marketing firms.
• Not bad for 20 minutes.
• Homeschooling parents who buy curricula in hopes of making up for some perceived deficiency in their teaching skills are like a bunch of balding men buying Ferraris. What you have is who you are inside, not the other way around.
  
• If Archie was smart, he'd ditch the snob and marry Betty Cooper. I mean, could it be more simple?
• Some of these mini-posts are good. Your experience may vary.
• A good Secretary of Defense would commission a weapon that would disable/destroy car subwoofers.
  
• I shouldn't write after midnight.
• I shouldn't eat after midnight either.
• Oh well.
• Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

What Would Be Different If I Had Been Homeschooled?

I should preface this with the statement that I'm not recriminating my parents for their choice to put me in public school and then private school. Still, I sometimes wonder about how my life would be different if I had been homeschooled. At the time, homeschooling was much more unusual and had a lot of unanswered questions about it. But my experience homeschooling our children leads me to wonder what might have been.

I imagine that I would be more creative, at least. Instead of driving me toward the sciences, I might have balanced it out with more of the arts and humanities. I had a knack for understanding the language of the King James Bible and therefore reading Shakespeare. I wonder, would I have been a good Henry V or simply adequate? Given that my performances onstage were limited to supporting roles, it remains a mystery.

Would I have discovered my calling to write much sooner? Probably, I would have. Perhaps we would have caught my learning disability earlier if I had the amount of individualized attention presently enjoyed by homeschoolers. Ergo, reading would have been easier and my passion for writing would have had much more time to grow.

I think my struggle to understand my relationship with God wouldn't have been as hard. Given all the teasing that goes on in class-based schooling, the rejection and heartache that I faced (not entirely uncommon), I had trouble believing that I had value, that Someone loved me as I was and that I had a reason to live and a cause to fight for. I didn't realize that I was a child of God, a son and not a servant until I was nearly a decade out of high school. I believe that if I had been more sheltered as a student, this discovery would have been easier to accept and given me a direction to go as a young man.

On the other hand, I know enough about writing that a time-travel paradox can quickly become cliche and wondering about what would have been is not always the best use of time. Really, things could have been much worse. My parents could have taken less interest in my education and my life. My mother and father reached out to me at a critical time and probably saved my life by investing their time in me. Additionally, there is some value in doing it wrong; I see how much better doing it right and I believe in homeschooling much more because of my experiences in public and private schools.

I believe God knew what He was doing. Like Gena, Treon and so many others, I needed to experience these things to know what other students continue to endure. Is this a valid argument for all children to be in government schools? Not really. That's like saying that a man should steal to know what criminals go through or that a woman should sell her body to know what prostitutes go through. The criminal aspect of such a comparison is also valid because what is going on in today's schooling is criminal compared to the benefits we've found in homeschooling. Violence, over-crowding, curricula disputes, moral training and even attitude problems are all improved when parents are able to choose homeschooling.

Homeschool Vs. Public School

Jonah Goldberg just published a piece on Townhall.com called Do Away With Public Schools. While the NEA is loading their cannons, let me point you to another target. A friend from Colorado Springs forwarded this little piece from the Gazette:

No place like home
For educating your kids, that is

On May 31, Evan O’Dorney, 13, from Danville, Calif., won the Scripps National Spelling Bee held every year in Washington, D.C. But that’s not the real news, part of which is that O’Dorney is home-schooled. The other part is that he’s the third home-schooled winner of the Bee in the past six years.

To put that in perspective, you need to know that there are about 2 million home-schooled children in the country, which represents about 3 percent of the school age population. Yet home-schooled children represent some 15 percent of the finalists in the Spelling Bee, and about the same percentage in the national geography contest for like-aged children.

Why the disparity? Well, studies show a 20-30 percentile point gap between public school students and home-schooled students . . . in favor of the home-schooled.

There are other revealing differences between public school and home-schooled students, among them that some 74 percent of home-schooled graduates between 18 and 24 years old voted in an election in the past five years, while public school graduates of similar ages voted at a paltry 29 percent rate.

The key factor in all of this, homeschoolers believe, is the role played by parents. Homeschooling takes enormous dedication and concern. Home-schooled kids aren’t smarter, obviously, than their counterparts in public school systems. They’re just brought up in a disciplined atmosphere, taught responsibility, shown the long-term advantages of a quality education, and, not least, are expected to learn. And behave. What child would not prosper under such a regimen?

Yet whom, do you suppose, fights the idea of home-schooling so strenuously that a nonprofit advocacy organization, Home School Legal Defense Association, has sprung up to defend parents’ rights to educate their children at home? If you said it’s the same people who oppose vouchers, charter schools, and any attempt to provide educational choice for children and their parents — teachers’ unions and the public school system — you’d be exactly right. We also might note that homeschool opponents are vociferous in trying to deny the use of certain public school amenities — speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy — to homeschooled children. This, of course, despite the fact that those parents also pay taxes, and thus provide financial support to the public systems.

Fortunately, HSLDA has been so successful in fighting off government — i.e., union — intrusion into educational choice that the number of home-schooled children is growing at between 7 percent and 15 percent a year.

This all seems somehow appropriate to bring up during the graduation season. A huge majority of the home-schooled children now graduating will proceed to college, where they will, if the past is a guide, continue to outperform their public school counterparts. That’s not only the real news, it’s the good news, an uncommon coupling in this business.

As for the ossified public school system, an old refrain from a Pete Seeger tune comes to mind: “When will they ever learn?”

Now, I don't have their sources for all the figures (might check HSLDA), but it certainly rings true with what I've been hearing about homeschooling since my family started homeschooling. Teachers' unions and school boards may not like the homeschoolers, but I have yet to see them truly refute that homeschooling yields superior results.

We're not just talking raw intelligence or knowledge. Kids are coming out of homeschools with better (notice I didn't say perfect) moral center, a confident bearing as a peer to adults rather than an outsider and a significantly better direction for their lives. This isn't part of my Reasons to Homeschool, but it's a good supplement to it.

Kelsey Smith: Bad Things Still Happen To "Good" People

I'm not interested in grandstanding this, but my heart goes out to the parents, especially the father, of Kelsey Smith. With the same breath, I realize that it could have been someone I loved turning on the surveillance video being kidnapped and brutalized.

Kelsey Smith should have seen the joy of her wedding day, the tears of joy at seeing her newborn child's face, held her child's hand as she walked to the park, raised and loved a family with her husband and then grow old together. That's how it's supposed to be.

Not now. Not for her.

And we all take a collective sigh of relief that it wasn't our child.

Everyone, except Kelsey's parents.

I have long realized that the true victims of any murder of a believer are the ones that are forced to go on without her. They sat in a church today and instead of giving their daughter away to a young man, they had to let her go into the arms of the Son of Man, Jesus. How are they supposed to go on? What joy do they have in their future? Is there anything left now?

For God's sake, yes. We have a hope and a future, a blessed hope and a higher calling. We live and move and have our being in Him. He is the one that feeds us daily with every word from His mouth. We may have lost our loved ones, our ability to work or our life savings. But, if we lose these things now, what real trouble is that when we come into our inheritance as children of God? These light and momentary afflictions are worth it, truth be told, and are far less than what we all truly deserve, a living death in hell.

Does that make it all better? No, it doesn't. But focussing on this present world and assuming that it is all that exists is a mistake. We have pain, very real pain while we are here, but that pain will fade with time. We need that eternal mindset to help us live with the heart knowledge, not just the head knowledge, that we will not always suffer. The heartache and grief from any loss is significant, if only to remind us that our hearts were made for heaven, not earth.

Someday, this will be a memory. Until then, Kelsey's parents have one hope: to cling to God with all their strength.

Huckabee Impresses

I'm not into politicking as it's typically thought, but I was very heartened to read and view this about Huckabee.

Small Fish and Barley Loaves

Being poor isn't fun. I just thought I'd report that. I don't like wondering about our mortgage each month or our utility bill. In political language, we are "materially disadvantaged." Financially, we have never been worse off; praise God! We are rich in faith...

Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?

When we are weak, that gives God His chance to show up in a dramatic and physical way. It seems to be God's pattern. He loves to use those who are needful to bless them and others. He loves to take just a little bit and turn it into a fantastic blessing. We see it with the loaves and fishes. Phillip says to Jesus, "Eight months' wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!" Yet Jesus distributes five barley loaves and two small fish, a young boy's lunch, and everyone had "as much as they wanted."

Something else sticks out in my mind on this. John recounts,

When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.

Jesus used abundance from God, but did not allow the wasteful use of God's abundant blessing. Note also that there were 12 baskets, matching the number of disciples. Each disciple was blessed with his own abundant gift to bless himself and others later. All from a few loaves and small fish.

I trust Him to take care of my family, too.

An Inconvenient Poll

As a follow up to my post earlier, I just found out that two-thirds of America believes creationism is.... TRUE! I nearly fell out of my chair. All the effort to brainw--I mean, educate us into believing that macro evolution is a law of the universe just simply wasted.

This is a catch-22 for public school advocates. If they say that the two-thirds is wrong, and they likely will, they will have no one to blame but themselves. If they admit that they're right, and that's not very likely, they'll have to explain why they've been actively suppressing the truth for most of a century. This is one poll they just want to go away.

Gore's Cake-brained Premise

Al Gore is still at it. Here's what I don't understand. If the Earth's ecology is so precariously balanced as Gore and some scientists claim, how can the Earth be the result of random chance and time as these same scientists believe? You know what they say about having cake and eating it. It's more logical for Intelligent Design scientists than for Darwin's adherants to believe that we're fiddling with God's air conditioning.

Seeking Life In John 1

Because I’m in a place in my life where things are hard, And because I need the Word more than I need to write, I’m going to devote a lot of my writing in the near future to examining the Scriptures.

There are a lot of people who have years of training at doing this. I do not. I barely know how to use Strong’s concordance. But one thing I do know: I’m his child, and if my father’s written me a letter, then I should be able to understand at least some of it. However, I do this with a little trepidation. I know that some will interpret my selections of Scripture in a different way than I do. I also know that there are others who value their own experience in the Scriptures too little. I do not do this with the intention of engaging either of these points of view. I’m not up for debate. I know “Jehovah’s Witnesses” who could argue in circles, leaving you wearing your pants on your head. I’m not looking to persuade anybody. I’m merely trying to worship my God by elevating the Scriptures through my own voice.

Let’s begin…

I’m aware of the pitfalls of paraphrases. Yet, I love their ability to cut through all the rehearsed religion and get down to the real substance. There’s no replacing that. No place Is more evident in the paraphrase that The Message by Eugene Peterson gives to John 1.

The Life-Light
1-2 The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from day one.

I love this. Instead of the standard of rehearsed, “In the beginning was the word in the word was with God and the word was God,” we get four simple words. “The Word was first.” First? First before what? First before everything! John emphasizes the primacy of God, embodied in His Son, Jesus Christ. Before everything else, there was Jesus. Before the sun, The earth, the moon, the stars, or the billions of galaxies of stars, there was the Son of Man.

3-5 Everything was created through him;
nothing—not one thing!—
came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn't put it out.

Eugene Peterson really nailed it on this one. It’s succinct and each line is so foundational literally to everything else in the world. But what John is also saying is that in order for him to tell you the rest of the story, you must first accept that there is a God.

I also think, writer to writer, that John had one killer case of writer’s block. He must of wandered around Patmos, or wherever he was, for days trying to get his mind around this concept. Clearly, in the three years of Jesus’ ministry and in visions since then, John had experienced something that he was truly struggling to put into words. We also see this in the fact that the Gospel of John is not like one of the three synoptic Gospels, meaning from roughly the same point of view. John talks in elements, simple illustrations really, to try to get this amazing truth across to his audience. I believe that the Gospel of John was mercifully included for those of us that didn’t get the other three.

Later on in John, a similar “difficult moment” emerges when Jesus is trying to convince his disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Jesus repeatedly says, “I am the bread of life.” It really shakes the disciples up, and many people leave Him.

By including both of these, I believe that John is trying to get us to wrap our heads around something that I’ve only come close to summarizing: It’s all about Jesus. All of our life, our energy to live and breathe and walk and sleep and dream and eat and do anything else, comes from this… the Son of Man. If that’s where all of our life comes from, shouldn’t every aspect of it reflect His attributes? It should. That’s the direction John is leading in, yet I think he’s also trying to point out that life does not always reflect God’s attributes. This is the darkness at the end of the passage above. It doesn’t reflect God’s light at all. It’s dark, sinister and evil. Just like the earth is half in light and half in darkness, its inhabitants also experience God’s Life-Light and the death-dark. It’s not God’s doing. It’s ours. We brought the night with us when we sinned and chose to serve ourselves. We rejoice in broad daylight and cower in darkness. We turn toward God and embrace his warmth and we also turn toward the night and endure the chill. Every one of us does this to some extent, saved or un-saved, bonded or free. But Whose we are makes all the difference.

6-8 There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light.

John the Baptist came to call people to repentance, to make a straight path for the Lord. Those who wanted God flocked to see him. They were baptized, symbolically dying and turning to God for their new life in Him. They hungered after God’s warmth and light. Just like I do.

Listening, Living and Loving

Thanks to everyone hanging in there with me. It seems I have one to two good days for every three to five bad days. With doctors changing medications, it's a wonder I'm still able to sit at a keyboard for a little while and concentrate. Sending the kids to quiet time helps though.

It's been a struggle lately. I'm still in conversational prayer with God, but trusting in His provision for our daily lives is difficult. It seems the difficulty increases in inverse proportion to how much time I spend talking to Him. He's my Master and without Him, I'm lost. I need Him, I covet and crave time with Him and when I don't get it, no matter the reason, I know things aren't right and I suffer for it. This is why I want a retreat center. I want to show others how to embrace Him and become God's own. He will put me in that position when the time is right, but we're doing everything we can to prepare for it.

Our ministry received it's 501(c)(3) status from the IRS and I've been investing some of my limited time alongside my wife in planning a couple of retreats this year. Retreats are so intentional; they must be planned and laid out with specifics and details. It's easy to lose the forest for the trees and lose track of why we're doing it in the first place, to help others to communicate with God and draw near to Him. So much anxiety and pressure is relieved when we call on Him. The faith of my father and the prayers of my mother and grandmother stand as a testimony to help me realize how critical to really living it is for us to have a deep and rich relationship with God. Jesus said, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." It's the relationship made possible by the Good Shepherd laying down his life for the sheep (us). I want others to know Him the way I know Him.

As far as daily trusting Him goes, I should also say that God is faithful. Despite my disability of Degenerative Disk Disease and Fibromyalgia Syndrome and it's income-limiting effects, we have never been wanting for food, medical care or shelter. Our home is still in great shape and we are current, at least for today. God meets all of our needs when we need them, and He even covers some of those wants that we know are not required. We are truly and richly blessed under His care. All glory for this belongs to Him.

I also get a good dose of help from my home group. We started it wanting to bless others but I would say that we are the ones most richly blessed. Maintaining a home isn't easy, but my friends from our home group have helped incredibly with our needs, both financially and with a generous amount of hard work.

My life, I guess, is full of small circles of loyal and loving friends, family and confidants. My children are clothed, fed and not worried about food or other things children shouldn't have to worry about. My wife is a beautiful and loving woman, supportive and faithful. I am the richest man in the world for these things.