Home Schooling Envy

Community or Competition, Salute Other Dads or Sword-Fight With Dads

In what way does our pride figure into rebellious attitudes and actions around other Home Schooling families?

That question came up this morning in a certain living room in Grants Pass.

I confess: My lack of submission to other home schooling Dads; my lack of submission to them to learn from them, to be ministered to by them.

■They’re better at communicating vision to those under their charge. I’m in rebellion due to my envy of them about this.

■They’re better at plodding with the week to week home schooling schedule. I’m in rebellion propping myself up before others with my fits and starts about my duties with respect to home schooling.

■They’re better at specific emphases that are academically related, in the very places where I fall short, and I again, I try to prop up myself to have the appearance of having my academic act together.

As a Home Schooling Dad, I know I am supposed to lead—that’s vision. As a Home Schooling Dad, I know academics require the line upon line mentality, slow growth and seedtime and harvest actions—that’s plodding. As a Home Schooling Dad, I know that I should be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound with respect to knowledge—that’s the academic thing.

So I find myself all too competitive with other Home Schooling Dads, and envious, and routinely seeking justification before God and men by the doctrine of comparison. It’s the phony reformation doctrine of Justification By Comparison. I use the standards of men to justify myself. How wrong-headed, how wicked! Home Schooler—heal thyself!

God’s gracious and just reward to us—to me, in Christ Jesus, is His perfect obedience to God’s law. His work is credited to us, so that we stand before God as if we ourselves had kept that law perfectly. Our Lord’s washing us with His atoning sacrifice at the cross is imputed to us, so that we stand before God as if we had atoned for our law-breaking. All is grace. His justification is all that matters!

Lord, bury the Home Schooling-fuel for pride and envy. Teach me to honor Dads, to submit to them, to learn from them. They are my counselors, not my competitors.

G. Mark Sumpter