I haven’t thought much about homeschooling for 20 years. 
I was homeschooled from birth through high school, then I went on to college and then on with life. But when my best friend said, “I’m planning to homeschool my kids, what do you recommend?”, I started to process my experience: the many good things and some bad things and what I would want to do differently. I even found the online posts of the hurting, often angry people who believe being homeschooled ruined their lives. I identified some of the problems they were writing about in my own life–and I could also see how Jesus had intervened in my life to rescue me from those lies and weaknesses, even when I had no idea I needed rescuing.
And then finally I asked Him about it in my dialogue prayer journal.
He said, “My little one, your problems do not come from being homeschooled; your problems come from being born outside of Eden. They are not preventable, but they are redeemable. I AM the Answer, I and I alone. Not the ideas about Me, not even the truth about Me, but the actual reality of Me intervening in your life. I know your story feels nothing like the stereotypical testimony or the story of the prodigal son, because you are so much more like the older brother than you are like the prodigal son. All of the homeschooling community you were processing about is like the older son, the son who stayed home. They were the families who stayed home to try to please Me and be righteous. They worked hard in the field. And the kids who went to public school and experienced bullying and drugs and partying and drinking were just like the younger son in the story, from the drinking parties to the pigsty.”
I responded, “Wow. That fits so well.”
He continued, “And neither brother can save themselves. They both need to encounter the love of the Father. It doesn’t matter whether you went out into the world or stayed home. It doesn’t matter whether you are like the public school kid complaining that you got bullied into a pigsty or the homeschooled kid complaining–just like the older brother in the story–‘You never let me see my friends!’ Nobody has found the good life until they encounter the love of the Father. And once you encounter the love of the Father, it doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter if you smell bad because you were in the pig manure of obvious wickedness or if you are dripping with sweat from your self-righteous performance laboring in My fields and hating every minute of it, you both are invited to MY party just the way you are. You always have been and you always will be. I love you.”
I could only say, “Wow. Wow wow wow. I love it. Thank You.”
I could have thought we were done there. But He went on to add, “But I will let you do something really, really special, because you are My storytelling princess and I trust you. I will let you give My story a happy ending. Because the story the way I told it doesn’t have a happy ending. It ends with the father pleading with the grumpy older son outside the party. What do you add?”
I started to cry tears of joy and I said, “OK… In my happy ending for Your story, the older son who is me wraps his arms around the father’s neck and hugs him and looks into his eyes and says, ‘I need You. I need You to forgive me just as much as my brother does. I have never left home and I have never stopped trying to be good, but I still need You to save me from myself and take me into Your celebration. I can’t make it by myself. I am nothing without You. And none of my performance or my homeschooling matters in the light of Your love. And I want to go to the party You are throwing for the whole world and love everyone with You just the way they are.'”
Then I threw the ball back to Him and asked, “And then what happens?”
He grinned. “Then the Father who is Me picks up the ‘older son’ who is you and spins her round and round and says, ‘I have been waiting for 2000 years for someone to make My story end that well. I love it. I will celebrate it forever. The end.’”
This is the story that is 2000 years in search of a happy ending, the story of the son who left home looking for a party of love and acceptance and the son who stayed home trying to earn a party of love and acceptance–and the Father who threw a party of love and acceptance and sent Jesus to tell the story and invite us all to His party just the way we are.
Where are you in the story?
And how does it end?
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