On cleaning up cobwebs

I used to always think, “Wow! What an amazing coincidence!” when the pastor’s Sunday morning message corresponded with a devotional I’d read that very day, or when a topic I was reading about for a weekday Bible study class ended up being discussed in our Sunday morning small group... and then I wondered, why am I surprised by this? God’s Word encompasses and is applicable to every area of our life, no matter the topic; His Word is never contradictory; and much of His divine plan for our lives and wisdom for living is repeated over and over again (just in case we missed it the first time, which we usually do) throughout the Bible, in various passages, books, subtexts, and parables.

Yet, I still get tickled when I read a blog and it just happens to coincide with the passage of Scripture I’m studying, which is exactly what happened (again!) this weekend. My friend, and worship leader (er, I mean, lead worshipper) at our church, wrote about the evidence of self-examination. If we claim to have examined our way of living, and profess to be making a change… well, we might convince some folks just by our self-proclamation, but those closest to us will know the truth, for they either will or will not see the evidence of the change.

Our Sunday morning small group has been studying the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. These books not only provide a fascinating history lesson, but are also rich with application for right living (specifically, how to overcome fear and obstacles in our quest for obedience).

After some fits and starts in their attempts to rebuild the city walls, Nehemiah comes in, gets them organized, and, under his strong leadership, they rebuild the wall in 52 days (which they’d been working on for some 70 years at this point!).Upon its completion, Ezra the scribe reads from the law, and the people have an incredible revival – a six-hour worship service that culminates in one of the greatest prayers in history (see Nehemiah 9). They are so moved, so convicted, so determined to live right, that in Nehemiah 10 we read that they signed a covenant, promising to keep God’s commandments.

As I prepared to help lead the discussion on this, I turned to Warren Wiersbe’s most excellent commentary, Be Determined. He opens his discussion on Nehemiah 10 with the following story:

In a certain church, there was a man who always ended his prayers with, “And, Lord, clean the cobwebs out of my life! Clean the cobwebs out of my life!”

One of the members of the church became weary of hearing this same insincere request week after week, because he saw no change in the petitioner’s life. So, the next time he heard the man pray, “Lord, clean the cobwebs out of my life!” he interrupted with, “And while you’re at it, Lord, kill the spider!”

When I read that, and then read my friend’s post on self-examination, I thought, “How true this is for us!” We take a look at the superficial messes in our life, those pesky cobwebs, and ask God to clean them up, all the while ignoring the true source of the problem – the spider!

When we pray for God to help us tidy up the messes in our life, are we serious about making the changes necessary to keep it clean? So often we try to keep that spider as a pet. We wipe away the cobwebs and try to destroy the evidence of the spider, but can’t quite seem to bring ourselves to remove the spider itself.

As my friend points out, some people will think we’ve exterminated the spider. We get ourselves ready for our guests by cleaning the cobwebs out of the corners and off the chandeliers, and they come in and think, “Wow! You really have it all together!”

But our family, the ones who spend the most time with us, who live with us day after day… they know that the cobwebs keep coming back. They know the truth.

So, as I thought about that, I wondered about my own sticky webs of deceit I’ve been spinning… the ideas that the spiders I have hanging around aren’t all that bad, not really a problem, only occasionally bite me and leave their venom coursing through my veins…

Hmmmm, on the other hand, maybe it’s time to finally call in the Orkin man.

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These spider pictures were taken in our backyard, around our AC unit. This friendly little orb weaver had made quite a home for herself and her two huge egg sacs, right under my oldest son's window. He's no pansy, but the thought of hundreds of little spiders hatching and possibly crawling into his room was more than he could handle.

On the completion of our first project

I thought you might enjoy seeing our cuneiform tablets – the one planned activity my son and I actually accomplished this week.

OK, so we didn’t get a 3D solar system mobile made, and we certainly didn’t try to rebuild the ark in miniature… but we did get to squish and squeeze and knead clay, then roll it and squish it and roll it some more… and then, when we got tired of that (and, frankly, I think we were both having so much fun that would have been enough!)… but, when we got tired of doing that, we used our wedge-shaped craft sticks to attempt cuneiform writing.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I’m afraid. Like his mother, my son sat paralyzed with indecision over what to put on his tablet. “I can’t do this!” he wailed. “I don’t know how to write in cuneiform! I don't even know what to say!”

Once he saw that I was just “making it up” (after trying and failing miserably myself at copying the symbols in our encyclopedia), he tentatively scored the surface of his flattened piece of clay, then grew more confident, and tried creating his own versions of the chicken scratches known as cuneiform. I thought he did a pretty terrific job.

On time... and the lack thereof

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
- Pogo (Walt Kelly)

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Time seems to be my enemy these days. There is so much I want to accomplish before the end of our school year, but I am clearly not going to reach my goal. Every day we seem to run out of time and end up leaving one or more items “undone” on our list of subjects or activities.

Make our own cuneiform clay tablet? Not today. Create a 3D mobile of the solar system? Uh-uh, no time this afternoon. Build a scale model of Noah’s Ark? Not happening.

(OK, I made up that last one. I never intended to do that. Granted, it crossed my mind... but only for a moment, I swear!)

Actually, I don’t really plan all that many activities. I did plan for the cuneiform tablet project, because it was actually do-able (a little bit of air-drying clay, a chopstick, and a rolling pin to flatten the clay into a tablet shape, and you’re ready to go). But it’s more than just the fun activities that go by the wayside.

In part, I believe this is because I set some pretty ambitious goals for each day, perhaps bordering on unrealistic. Can you cover math, reading, writing, grammar, spelling, Bible, science, and social studies (history, culture, geography) every day? What about fine arts? Handwriting? Typing? Phys Ed?

At the same time, I don’t know how much time to allot for certain activities or for teaching a new concept. Should math take an hour? Should it take more? Less? If I plan on math only taking an hour, but we really spend 90 minutes on it, is that because I overestimated the amount of work that could be accomplished in an hour? Did I spend too much time on introducing the concept? Did I assign too much seat work? Or is my son simply wasting time daydreaming, dawdling, and generally procrastinating? (This last possibility is most definitely a contributor factor to our time problem, but not the sole cause.)

Veteran homeschoolers keep reassuring me, “Don’t worry! You’ll figure it out!” In the meantime, the perfectionist in me feels like a complete failure because we aren’t even coming close to completing our daily “to-do” list. I hate looking at my weekly lesson plans and seeing all these unchecked boxes and circled items with a big fat ? beside them – as in, when we will ever get back to this?!

If I were going to be perfectly honest, I’d have to confess that time, itself, is not the enemy… rather, it is my inability to wisely manage the time I do have. For now, I’ll chalk some of that up to being a novice at this homeschooling thing. Y’all are buying that… right?