Organizing Your Homeschool Day for Grace {Not Pride and Your Own Agenda}

Welcome back as we continue our 10 Days of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Homeschooling! 

Today we meet Michelle from Beautiful Mess,  continuing the topic of over-planning.. to the point of organizing God and His Grace right out of your homeschool day! (Or, how not to…)

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Organizing Your Homeschool Day for Grace

{Not Pride and Your Own Agenda}

One of my favorite sayings before this deconstruction of mom began: “Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Hmmmm, kind of selfish and rude, don’t ya think? What part of that would Jesus really like? My guess is none of it!

Let me lay it all out there on my clean dusty table. I am not a neat freak in my home. If you were to visit you will find socks, shoes, dust on the table and probably my clothes piled in a corner of my room waiting to be folded. If you were to ask my husband he would tell you “I do not know how she can be so organized with homeschooling, schedules, priorities, blogging, planning activities but cannot keep her clothes hanging up in the closet or in the dresser drawer.”

I began questioning self-organization when other moms kept asking me for organizational tips in their homeschooling, schedules and even blogging. I did not see it as a negative thing until some were reading my blog, listening as I talked about curriculum, schedules, organizing and began saying “I am not sure I can home-school, you have everything so organized….”and my answer would be, well that is how my brain works basically translating into TYPE A personality: always a sense of time urgency, competitive, multi-tasking and sinfully prideful, not a great combination if you ask me which is why I am deconstructing!

Root of the problem:

Is being too organized a bad thing? After all, being organized frees me from chaos or does it? Do I have room for God to run our days or am I so type A that there is no room for his Grace to enter our home? Now, do not get me wrong I even set a time in the early morning hours to be in His word but here is the catch~I was so focused on what my day looked like, what goals we had to reach, what time we had to begin and end that my focus was taken off the Lord during that time. How sad is it that I actually disciplined myself to get up, begin the morning in his word but I was not present with our Holy God~I wasted so many good hours to be with Him.

Deconstructing Me~signs that I needed to change, besides the obvious!

• My calendar is for the year, that’s right, every lesson plan, field trip, event, family event, birthday, goals, and I start planning the next year about 3/4 of the way through our current year. There is rarely room for anything not planned. In fact, I get frustrated when something comes up and I say “why did I not know about this 2 months ago.” Really?
• Labels on everything–nuff’ said!
• Work-boxes and more storage bins for all the home-school stuff.
• When I spend 30 minutes trying to figure out which bin or folder to put stuff in.
• When you ask your friends to wait on you because you just noticed there are papers not filed for the day in the proper home-school folder or bin.
• When everything is filed in its proper spot but you cannot find it~true story!
• When you spend more time making lists than you do actually doing them

Can you just see the enemy here?

Our enemy wants to overwhelm us, our thoughts, our actions and our minds to keep us from God. Satan attacks us even when we think we are doing good things or what we think are good.

I have spent the last few months in this deconstruction process. The first thing I have done is pray hard asking God what He expects of me for homeschooling. The evidence is overwhelming~He wants balance. He wants me to be organized and disciplined in His word and everything else will fall into place. He wants me to have room for the unexpected Grace in our lives. He wants no distractions from Him even a mom who is overly organized! He wants me to have that time to just be still with my children, my friends, my husband and although I did that my mind wandered to the next organized task I had to plan, organize and finish! There was always a sense of pride that came with each goal met, which is sinful in his eyes. In the Bible, it speaks of being prideful:

“His pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the LORD his God.” 2 Chronicles 26:16

“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16-18

I pray that we all find balance in His word and in our homeschooling journey. May you find joy in your days with your husband, children and friends in this moment! Are you displaying stubborn pride in your days like I have? Are you so organized that you have no room for Grace? Or are you so Disorganized that you have no room for God because you are constantly putting out fires from the chaos?

Michelle is a home-school mom with a short, deep attention span, hyper-energized with an incredible husband and 2 boys & she is thankful God saved a “Wretch like Me!” Visit her on Twitter or either of her blogs: Beautiful Mess or Body By Vi.

Image Credit: Ducks in a Row: Some rights reserved by John-Morgan
Image Credit: Prayer : Some rights reserved by khrawlings

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Thank you for following along on our journey through 10 Days of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Homeschooling!

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To find ALL the blogs participating in this run of “The 10 Days” Series, click the image below, a collage of photos for all 28 ladies participating. You’ll be blessed with tips on how to handle bad days, cultivating curiosity, teaching with Legos, and much, much more. Many thanks to iHomeschool Network for organizing this fun blog hop!