What I Learned from My Homeschool Room: People Are More Important

As I’ve been excitedly sharing, we have been converting our garage into two rooms–a larger homeschool room and a smaller storeroom. Recently we took a midyear break from school, and we hoped to finish the room so that we could move in when school began. We worked feverishly nights and some days to paint, lay tile, and install desks and bookshelves. Even the kids helped. We were so excited.

We turned their clothes inside-out and let them paint with us one day.

Although christened the “Schoolroom,” our secondary purpose for that room would be to house visitors. We get lots of visitors, sometimes of the overnight kind, and we were having to get pretty creative about where to put them.

Little did I know that what I thought would be the room’s secondary purpose would actually be its first! Woman may plan…

But God knew.

When Seth worked on his day off to lay tile…
and stayed up the next night until 3:00 AM grouting
and still frantically painted and drilled desks into the wall on the 4th of July before our teammates came over for a “holiday”
and when I stayed up late organizing books on shelves,
God knew that we needed to get that room done.

For the first day after we could potentially call it “done” (though we still have lots of things to do for it), we had a guest!–of a sort of long-term nature.

A girl we knew remotely is in a crisis pregnancy situation, and we took her in until she has her baby. After that, we are not 100% sure what’s going to happen, but this situation should last until about mid-August.

Our new family member joins us for family devotions. She is turning out to be a very easy guest!

Over and over I have begun a post for Ita Vita on how missionaries must be flexible, how flexibility is a requirement for this job; but I’ve never finished the post. My plans for the post got interrupted. 🙂 (I wanted to write something along this line: Ready for Anything.) Maybe this post about my changed plans is the best example of that thought.

It is anti-climactic. We were so excited, and I was going to try to make a pretty, efficient space for our instruction. I was anticipating the move away from the kitchen table, where the children distracted one another sitting elbow to elbow listening to me teaching one phonics while the other worked on math, and where the littles generally created loud chaos. I know that a schoolroom wouldn’t have fixed all of those That’s-Life Problems, but I was excited nonetheless.

And then, crash. In the space of an hour, my hopes, in part for a haven from outside interruptions, were exchanged for one of the biggest invasions of privacy you can get–a long-term house guest–from a different culture.

One of the difficulties of living in the village is that it saps your energy over time–the constant borrowing and asking for things or help, the incessant knocking and visiting and interrupting–basically, feeling like you lack privacy–an American essential that is almost assumed in an independent American’s lifestyle. So it’s a sacrifice to open up your home–your only hope for an escape from the fishbowl-live-in-a-glass-house type of a life.

BUT–it must be done. People are more important. Their souls are more important. If in this way, we can help a young couple to strive to be pure from sin, to have a child instead of an abortion, to mature spiritually and emotionally into adulthood, and to prepare for a God-honoring marriage, what is the loss of a little privacy to all of those eternal values?

Give. No rights. Take up your cross–daily–and follow Me.