Patience to Persevere

We had one of those homeschooling days today. The kind where you just want to put your kid(s) on the next school bus that drives by. No amount of my patience would ever be enough to deal with the situation at hand. Granted, it is not life or death, but a stretching experience non the less. The root of the problem is woven so tight and so complex, that it seems like an enormous task to untangle it all. If I did mange it, I would find at the center heart issues, theirs and mine. While the trials of homeschooling provide a non-stop opportunity for character building, both for the parent and the child, it is not necessarily a pleasant experience at times.

Through prayer, God will show me the solutions to my tangle of problems to lead me onto a less stressful, more positive way of building character through homeschooling. While I may have to just wait some problems out (like my part-time job), He will give me the patience to persevere if I abide in Him. So, when I start to loose my patience, I have to stop and pray. Also, I need to ask others to pray for patience for me too. Sometimes, like today, He has given me a solution, but I just have to have patience while I get the processes up and running. While the heart issues are there, the problems just bring them out, we can head off temptation at times by applying habits and systems into our daily life (i.e. daily prayer and Bible reading in the morning or a discipline chart). These habits and systems also help our children to build character with less of a struggle. If they knew exactly how much work they had to do today, maybe they would not have whined so much. Sometimes the solution is as simple as your child needing some protein to help them to control their emotions.

Many moms tell me they do not have enough patience to homeschool their children, and their right. I do not have enough either. God has to give it to me, God needs to change my heart. I need to go to God with my problems and ask for solutions. Today may have been hard, but trials are hard. It is the trials that we learn from. It is the trials that God uses to fashion our character. What else would you expect to find on the road less traveled by?