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

As I've been excitedly sharing on my blog, 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 Missionary Monday 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.

Learning from Kissing . . . and the Bible

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/6883580230/

Different cultures. Different customs.

Our daughter, about nine years old at the time, was visiting in a friend’s home in a neighboring country. A large group was seated around the table for a meal when a visitor stopped by. The visiting man started greeting with kisses to the cheeks everyone around the table, male and female. When he got to our daughter, she . . . disappeared under the table! The poor man was left standing there with a bewildered expression on his face.

A preacher was preaching a series of meetings in Eastern Europe. He was greeted by so many unshaven men that he felt like his cheeks were bleeding!

A missionary friend confesses he used to try to sneak away from any man coming his way. He now proclaims, “I kiss everyone!”

How I remember those first invasions of personal space! We came to Spain as young adults. (I’m from a hugging family, but this . . . .) One of my Spanish friends—a young woman—hooked her arm into mine and pressed her whole side into me as we walked down the street. I couldn’t get away! In Spain, people greet with kisses on both cheeks. (The farther south you go, the more kisses you get.) Where we live, basically it’s between women or when a young person greets an older woman. It depends, and we basically go with the flow.

The Bible says, Greet one another with an holy kiss. (It looks like the Apostle Paul was a kisser, too! Rom. 16:16; 1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; 1 Thess. 5:26)

Whether or not kissing is the way you greet people in your country is beside the point. But I’d be willing to bet—not with money, mind you—you’ve sometimes felt “invaded.”

Maybe it’s:

• lack of privacy
• being on call every hour of every day
• unannounced visitors—especially at mealtimes
• reptile, insect, and other uninvited animal visitors in your home
• filth (dirt and germs, customs, immorality)
• safety concerns
• open idolatry, demonic activity, pagan customs
• total unbelief in God, the Bible, even Christian traditions—a total disrespect for religion in any form
• persecution

Just as kissed greetings are an invasion of our “personal space,” so some native customs are an invasion into what we know is right. Many are just plain opposite God’s norms.

It’s so easy to view all the culture as sinful. We can see all the people’s habits as wrong. We may look around us and find no good, no positive, no redeemable anything. This missionary philosophy will lead us to this conclusion: the people are without hope.

So, what can we do?

Get a biblical mindset. Philippians 4:8 can be transformational on the mission field. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. We’re to think about and look for the good things!

What’s positive about your adopted culture? Can you find something nice about their clothing, food, frugality, music, cleanliness, agricultural methods, friendliness, architecture, livestock . . . anything? Surely, there’s something positive!

When you think about the good things—whatever they may be—your whole attitude improves. Your heart begins to praise God for the true, honest, just, pure, lovely, good, and virtuous things in your adopted culture. Even if it’s a totally pagan culture—the reason you went in the first place—there is something to be praised in it. You don’t have to compromise your beliefs in Bible Christianity to compliment your neighbors on a fruit tree or beautiful flowers! You’re not looking down your nose at people when they’re teaching you how to milk goats, plant maize, or make their special stew. (You actually get closer to your people when you ask them how they do something.)

You have the Words of Life—the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ!

And they have their own culture.

Oh yes, almost any culture has its bad points. (If you’re honest, America’s culture isn’t 100% pristine either.) Where customs disagree with the Bible, they need to be changed. This happens as Christians begin living more like Christ.

You can actually see that change. Places that didn’t have the gospel fifty years ago have been transformed by the influence of the Bible. People who used to go around naked now wear clothes. Permissive lifestyles have given way to solid marriages. Churches are ordaining native pastors. Second generation Christians live clean, exemplary lives.

If you don’t look for the good in your adopted home, you may become prideful. You might be teaching your kids that your family is “good” and everyone around them is sinful. Neither you nor your children make friends, and you deaden your ministry. You become haughty. And you end up useless to God.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross (Philippians 2:5-8).

The mind of Jesus. The servant’s heart.

Let this mind be in you . . . .

Share the Good News. Jesus saves!

Greet the brethren with a holy kiss.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/6883580230/">Alex E. Proimos</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/">cc</a>