Children are gifts.

This morning I was doing my usual waste of time checking facebook and have been seeing lots of posts yesterday and today about kids going back to school that just plain make me sad for the kids.

Things like this~

"Twas the night before school started, when all through the town, the parents were cheering, it was a riotous sound! By eight, kids were washed & tucked into bed . . when memories of homework filled them with dread! New pencils, new folders, new notebooks, too! New teachers/new friends, their anxiety grew! The parents just giggled when they learned of this fright & shouted GO TO BED, IT'S A SCHOOL NIGHT!..."

And.........

"Back to reality! No more beach, pools and hearing mom every five seconds!!!"

And mom's talking about new schedules, new lives, time to themselves.............

I am not judging, my heart is just aching for the children......What about the children and their hearts and souls??

Why is it that parents are more concerned about "their" time, and serving others, and training others, when they have these little souls that need them?

I am so confused by this mentality.

I am not saying if you send your kids to school there is something wrong with that, but when I see parents that can't wait to get rid of their kids and get back to their own lives, that makes me so sad inside.

God gave us these children, they are little gifts, not something that is an inconvenience to us and a pain for us to take care of and we'd rather just ship them off somewhere else so we don't have to deal with it.

I wonder how that makes God feel that we think his gifts are a burden and we'd rather shoo them off somewhere else so we can get on with our important lives.  Honestly, what could be more important then training up these little people and loving on them, and giving up our precious time for them?

Is anything more important then these gifts?

The world is just so messed up.  It's heartbreaking to me.

Before you think I am on a high horse because I home school, please remember, my oldest son went off to public high school today. I watched him walk to the bus stop with tear filled eyes, wishing he wanted to home school.

I am not a high and mighty mom sitting here thinking I am all that. Most days I am feeling like a failure of a mom. But my heart breaks when I hear mom's just happy to move on with their lives. Happy that their kids are off to spend 8 hours with someone else.

I fully agree with the words of Ann Voskamp ~

"So to say from the outset, that I do not think in any way that homeschooling makes a family virtuous — and there are other very good options to homeschooling.

Homeschooling is not a formula for perfection, nor is homeschooling a panacea for all the sin in this world.

We’re all messy and fallen and sin-scraped. We and our children are born sinners.

Homeschooling will not fix any of that. Only Jesus and His grace can."

And I also agree with her on this~

"the problem today is that ‘parenthood is no longer lasting as long as childhood‘ — that our children need parents to be intimately involved, moment-by-moment, not till they are only four years old and leave home for school and possible peer dependency, but they need us to be parents until they are fourteen years old and older…. “We need to hold on to our children and help them hold on to us. We need to hold on to them until our work is done,” writes Dr. Neufeld“We need to hold on, not to hold them back but so that they can venture forth.”

For us, forging a deep attachment to parents was a key factor in our decision, so that children had a strong foundation for their own sense of self, saw parents as more important than peers, and as we modeled the preeminence of God in our lives, our children could see too how to live out that faith model.

Where two or three are gathered, there He is also. What I love most about the homeschooling lifestyle is that we are all together, in all our glorious mess, day in and day out. We are not time-torn or fragmented. We are gathered. There is no dichotomy between God and secular: we are making a one-piece life. This works for us. We are real, transparent, and growing –sometimes painfully– with each other, season upon season, and God is in the center, bathing us sin-scraped ones with His Grace. That’s rich."

http://www.aholyexperience.com/2011/05/pros-cons-homeschooling-christian-educatio/

This women speaks my heart.

Our children are only young for such a short time.

My prayer is that moms and dads would take these children for the gifts that they are and love them every second of their little lives. That they would want to pour their lives into these babies while they can. The rest can wait. You will have "your time" when they are grown.

Deuteronomy 6:6-8

 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.