Heaven-Focused Homeschooling

A manifesto against busyness.

Author’s note: This essay is adapted from the keynote address I delivered on June 22, 2024, at the Southern California Catholic Home Educator’s 25th Annual Conference in Costa Mesa, CA. While it’s aimed at homeschoolers (and I know homeschooling isn’t an option or fit for everyone), I think its larger themes—the dangers of constant busyness and need to evaluate extracurriculars in light of eternity—are relevant to families of many stripes. Please enjoy—and share! ~ CCC

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I have been homeschooling for a decade now, since long before COVID made it cool—or at least, less uncool. So I’m no stranger to that battery of questions every homeschooling parent braces for when people discover what we do: Are you qualified to do that? Are you going to continue through high school? What about college? Can they even go to college—or are you going to homeschool that, too? Have you thought about socialization? Are you nuts?

People don’t always ask that last one out loud. But sometimes they do. And in a culture as anti-child as ours is becoming, I guess it’s not surprising that many think homeschooling is a choice only for canonized saints or the clinically insane.

Well, I’m no saint, though I do feel a little crazy some days—usually Monday mornings in February, when you’ll find me eying that school bus with envy and ranting about a certain teenage boy who won’t start his Algebra. Of course, if anyone overhears, I’m not talking to myself. I’m having a parent-teacher conference.

Truth is, I’m not out of my mind or angelic. I just want something better for my kids than what I see on offer at most brick-and-mortar schools. I want them spending their best hours and most formative years with their siblings and me, not some newly minted education major who may or may not share our values. I want them asking their biggest questions about life and God at home, instead of in a crowded classroom where the teachings of Christ and His Church may be ignored or ridiculed. And I want them following a curriculum and schedule of my choosing, that suits their needs, not those of a woke-and-broke educational establishment that views kids as community property and involved parents as a nuisance.

I’m not just homeschooling for the here and now, though. I also want my kids to get the formation they need to excel in whatever God calls them to do and to find beauty in the world despite its brokenness. I want them to draw others to Jesus by living their faith joyfully and without compromise. I want them to grow not only into good citizens and workers but good spouses and parents or priests and religious.

Above all, I want them to become saints. I believe that what I’m doing at home day after day, year after year, matters—eternally. That after a decade of drills on that dog-eared Baltimore Catechism and countless theological discussions over grilled cheese or in the thick of science lessons, homeschooling is preparing my kids in a uniquely powerful way to fulfill the life purpose they’ve been memorizing from that Catechism since age four: to know, love, and serve God in this world and be happy with Him forever in the next. Heaven, not Harvard, is the goal of my homeschool.

Hope: An underrated virtue

I suspect it’s the same for you, or you wouldn’t be spending your Saturday at a homeschool conference focused on the theme of “Love Poured Out.” As I’ve been reflecting on that theme and studying the passage from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans where we find those words, I’ve been struck by how closely they are connected to the hope of heaven. The start of that fifth chapter of Romans is all about our hope for eternal life with Christ, a hope that not only allows us to endure tough times but actually gets stronger the more tough times we endure. Unlike the world’s flimsy optimism, Paul tells us, Christian hope “does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5: 5).

Our hope, in other words, is backed by God Himself and rooted in our trust of His goodness. It grows with every storm we weather. And its focus isn’t on success or serenity in this life but union with God in the next.

This hope, this Christian hope, is crucial to our journey as homeschoolers. After all, homeschooling—like parenting itself—is an act of hope. Every morning, we rise with our kids, choosing not to send them off to school but keep them by our side. We lead them through rise-and-shine routines, maybe exercise and devotions or daily Mass. We review their state capitals and multiplication tables and Latin declensions. We help them navigate topic sentences and geometry postulates, iambic pentameter and the scientific method—regardless of how well we mastered these concepts in our own school years. Then we fill their free hours with playdates and potlucks, parties and classes and camps—all of which we either organize ourselves or handpick for them, since nothing is automatic in homeschooling.

We do all of this in hope, trusting that our hidden sacrifices will bring eternal reward, that the seeds we plant today—even those that seem stubbornly resistant to growth—the Lord will water and tend tomorrow, so they may bear fruit that will last (John 15:16).

We homeschool parents are taking a narrow road. And in the short term, it doesn’t always lead to more impressive results. Sometimes our kids actually look less impressive than typical school kids. They might be shier and more bookish or more brash and bluntly honest. They might be less adept at handling bullies or blending into the crowd, slower to rattle off impressive educational trivia or laundry lists of achievements or their favorite pop culture performers.

That’s not surprising. Homeschoolers invest heavily in education’s intangibles—spiritual formation, the cultivation of character, curiosity, and creativity—while conventional schools tend to focus more on what’s quantifiable: grades earned, awards won, subjects covered, clubs joined, goals scored.

No matter. We’re building foundations, not painting facades. And what makes our perseverance possible is Christian hope. It’s the hope that Paul speaks of in Second Corinthians, where he issues a rallying cry perfectly pitched to weary homeschoolers everywhere:

We are not discouraged; rather, although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Cor. 4:16-18).

Hope in what is unseen has fired and shaped the lives of Christians from the Church’s earliest days. Paul tells the Philippians that this hope for heaven is what distinguishes us from unbelievers. “Their minds are occupied with earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3: 19b-20a). Or as second-century Church Father Tertullian put it, “The resurrection of the dead is the confidence of Christians. By it, we are believers.”

This view comes from Christ Himself. All through the Gospels, Jesus urges us to stop fixating on the goods of this life and start preparing for the life to come. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth. … But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal.” (Matt. 6: 19-20). Or as He advises a few lines later, “Do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ All these things the pagans seek. Your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides” (Matt. 6: 31-33). In case we still haven’t gotten the point, He sharpens it into a question: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his soul?” (Mark 8:36).

That’s a question for us as parents, not just as individuals. Yet parenting is often the one area of life where we struggle most to let go of worldly concerns and comparisons and trust God. It’s one thing to live like flowers of the field and birds of the sky on our own, to sacrifice our own income or status or hobbies to homeschool. It’s another to make choices that could cost our children those things, decisions about their education or activities that could curtail their shot at worldly success—even if we know such success matters less than salvation.

Hope, then, isn’t just a feel-good virtue. It’s a challenging one. It calls us to trust in the Lord and lean not on our own understanding (Prov. 3: 5). And do so at a cost.

A higher call

No one knows that cost better than the martyrs. I recently returned from Italy, where my husband and four children and I spent two weeks visiting dozens of ancient churches and tombs of the saints. Many were martyrs, whose relics are so plentiful in Rome. As I knelt before the blood-stained marble slab where Lawrence was laid after being burned alive, the chains that bound Paul’s wrists as he was led to Rome for his eventual beheading, and the marble sculpture above Cecilia’s tomb of a young girl lying lifeless, her head twisted to reveal the slit through the back of her neck, I was struck by how real, and costly, Christian hope can be.

No wonder it’s our most underrated theological virtue. We focus a lot on faith; we rightly stress the preeminence of love. But aside from deathbeds and funerals, how often do we stop and ponder the power of Christian hope? How much do we consciously allow the promise of eternity to drive our decisions in the here and now—not only life-altering choices like whether to homeschool, but smaller ones about what to add in and what to leave out of our daily schedules? To paraphrase the cliché, if being a Christian were a crime, would there be enough evidence in our calendars to convict us? Or do our lives look as distracted, frenetic, and fixated on worldly cares as everyone else’s, albeit with a homeschool twist?

It’s tempting to think that such questions don’t apply to homeschoolers. After all, most of us have already made steep sacrifices to educate our children at home—sacrifices of time, money, status, personal space. We’re voluntarily doing what led the rest of American parents to the brink of insanity during COVID, at least if all those lockdown memes are to be believed. We spend nearly all our waking hours working for and with our kids, and we don’t get the forty hours a week of childcare that school parents take for granted. Aren’t our schedules already prioritized and sanctified enough?

If busyness and sacrificial giving are the only measures of a schedule that reflects eternal priorities, then yes, I’d say we homeschoolers have nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

But what if Christian hope calls us to something higher—something closer to a martyr’s crown than a lifestyle modification? What if choosing to homeschool is only the first step in building a radically Christ-centered family culture, and it’s actually how we homeschool, and what we do or don’t do with the time we’re not homeschooling, that matters most? What if the Lord isn’t only calling us to reject the idols of selfishness and secularism but also of comparison, productivity, and conspicuous achievement—or of that smug separatism that says we don’t need to prepare our children to engage the culture or bear fruit in the wider world because we can keep them isolated forever in holy huddles and leave the Great Commission to someone else?

These two temptations—to either play the world’s game by the world’s rules so our children can win or to refuse to fully develop their potential in the naïve expectation that they can dodge that world indefinitely—each appeal, in their own way, to homeschoolers. And both reveal a deficit of Christian hope.

Temptation one: Bunker mentality

Let’s address the second temptation—the bunker mentality—first. I should begin by admitting that I’m a fiercely protective mother, probably overprotective. We don’t own a TV and didn’t even when I had my own national TV show. My kids don’t have an online presence and only use the computer to type school papers. I vet their books and activities, and most of their close friends are fellow homeschoolers with moms as vigilant as me, albeit in their own unique ways.

I shelter my kids, alright. What choice do I have? Childhood is a sacred time, and I don’t want my kids wasting theirs trying to understand the hundred-plus genders represented by those ever-expanding stripes on the rainbow flags they see more often than the American flag … or why men in fishnets and falsies must lead toddler story-time at the public library … or why high-ranking elected officials denounce Tootsie-Roll-selling Knights of Columbus as dangerous extremists but defend campus vandals screaming anti-Semitic slogans as brave idealists. Have I thought about socialization? You bet I have; it’s a key reason I’m homeschooling. As my friend’s coffee mug says, “I’ve seen the village. And I don’t want it raising my children.”

Yet I know that someday my children will have to venture beyond our homeschool bubble and navigate the wild, messy world outside. It’s my job to prepare them for that confrontation—not by dropping them in the deep end while they’re still kids, but by gently easing them into fuller knowledge about how our culture got so confused and gradually giving them more freedom to confront that confusion on their own. I need to equip them to defend their values boldly and charitably, to ground them in an intellectually rigorous faith that can stand up to attack, and to help them hone specific skills so they can fulfill their professional and personal callings.

What is not my job—what is not a healthy use of my protective instinct—is to tell my kids or myself that they can dodge the world and its realities forever. Or to say that they shouldn’t bother developing top-notch skills and talents because our culture is so far gone that we Catholics need only worry about protecting the purity of our own faith and the welfare of our own families.

That’s quietism, not Catholicism. It’s a distortion of Christian hope that treats heaven as an excuse to shirk our charitable and evangelistic duties on earth. It betrays a shocking lack of confidence in God’s ability to make all things new as He has so many times before in salvation history.

It’s also a repudiation of Christ’s parable of the talents, where He makes clear that the gifts He’s given us are not only for us or our families. They’re meant to be refined, multiplied, and shared, however humbly, with the wider world. It’s a world that has, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.”

All those lost, crazy, confused souls—the yellers, the haters, all of them: Jesus shed His blood to save them. They matter to Him. So they must matter to us—and to our children.

Temptation two: Busy as hell

If Christian hope demands that we raise children who can live in but not of the world, does that mean we’re free to be as insanely busy as everyone else, as long we’re busy about the right things? That’s a more common temptation than the bunker mentality. But it’s equally perilous.

It starts subtly at first. We launch into our homeschooling journey, excited to serve God and our family in this daring new way—and maybe also a little terrified we’ll screw up our kids. A smattering of extracurricular activities or co-op classes serves as our safety blanket, reassuring us and all our quizzical relatives and friends that our children won’t turn out weird. So we sign them up, tote them around, and for a while, especially in the early years when academics are easier and our original spiritual purposes for homeschooling loom large, it works.

Then the years roll on and holding onto our family’s peace and eternal perspective gets tougher. The kids get older; the extracurricular industrial complex beckons; and pressure mounts to pack their free time with highly competitive, time-consuming pursuits that will dazzle college admissions officers and all those critics who can’t believe we’re still homeschooling. If we’re not already racing to keep up with a jam-packed activity schedule and friends who always seem to be doing more than we are, we’re often nursing hidden guilt that we should be.

It’s at this point, around middle or high school, that many parents quit homeschooling, deciding its à la carte approach to education and extracurriculars is unmanageable. If my kids are going to spend all their time rushing to classes and activities, they figure, why not spare myself the driving and send them to school, where they can get them in one place? So the unique benefits of home education—including what I consider its inimitable spiritual benefits—are sacrificed at the altar of sports or band or other activities that most kids will never pursue beyond high school. The supplements to school now determine the choice of school. The tail wags the dog.

Other families continue home education but with a monster schedule of outside commitments, spending little to none of their homeschooling hours at home. Options become obligations; pleasant add-ons become the focus of family life; and the occasional busy day blurs into frenzied weeks, months, or years. Schoolwork, reading time, free play with siblings, impromptu beach visits and hikes and park meet-ups, family dinners and game nights and rosaries, daily Masses and adoration, even sleep—all start to seem like annoying diversions from the main goal of winning games or landing roles or racking up ribbons and badges and belts. Or, for us parents, of simply surviving another frantic day and getting everyone where they need to be on time.

When this happens, there’s no margin left in our days, no room to respond to God’s surprising will. We can’t hear those whispers of the Holy Spirit prompting us to reach out to someone in need, say yes to an unexpected invitation, or give extra attention to a struggling child. Or maybe we can hear them, but we simply don’t have time to answer. What’s urgent has crowded out what’s important. Fear of missing out has hijacked discernment. And the eternal perspective that inspired us to homeschool has been lost in a cloud of compulsive activity.

This wasn’t always such a strong temptation. Once upon a time, we homeschoolers were too few—and considered too odd—to keep up with the overscheduled, overachieving Joneses. Our kitchen-table classrooms and homegrown social networks were too under-the-radar for most people to know our kids even existed, much less expect them to shine in competitive sports or lard their college applications with leadership roles. Every now and then, some homeschooler would crush a national spelling bee or chess tournament or—in Tim Tebow’s case—a football championship, and America would take notice. Mostly, though, we were ignored by the world of high-stakes parenting and exempt from its pressures.

Then homeschooling hit the mainstream. COVID was a huge part of that, doubling our ranks to nearly three million children last year and making homeschooling America’s fastest-growing form of education. More kids are being educated at home today than in all of America’s Catholic schools combined, according to the Washington Post. In California, where I live, the Monterey Herald reported recently that seventy percent more kids are being homeschooled now than before the pandemic.

That rising popularity has been a mixed blessing. Catholic homeschoolers have more company and options than ever. We’re also more likely than ever to fall prey to the same manic busyness and social-media-fueled status-seeking that’s made a circus of modern family life and produced the most anxious generation of kids in recorded history. Where once independent homeschoolers were the norm, now our kids can join charters and hybrids and nationally standardized co-ops; take classes at public schools, community colleges, and online; and choose from a dizzying array of curricula that seem to proliferate by the day. As for activities, we’re not just joining the extracurricular arms race; we’re leading it. A National Home Education Research Institute study found that the average homeschooler is involved in more than five extracurricular activities. And the National Center for Education Statistics reports that our kids are significantly more likely than others to have a heavy-duty activity schedule.

It makes sense, in a way. We’re used to sacrificing to give our children the best, and we don’t want to hear them complain someday about all those classic kid experiences they missed. Plus, making time for outside activities is easier when you aren’t tied to a conventional school schedule. And most commitments that fill our calendars are genuine goods: pursuits that develop skills and talents, that build confidence and character. The trouble isn’t what we’re doing; it’s how much and how often we’re doing it—and what we don’t have time to do as a result.

What we’re missing

The intangibles we miss when we’re overcommitted are often the ones that attracted us to homeschooling in the first place: togetherness and tranquility, more frequent reception of the sacraments, more space in our days to pass on the faith in that holistic, unhurried way that feels less like checking a box than sharing a gift.

Christian discipleship of our children isn’t something we can schedule or rush or outsource to others. It happens organically, on those quiet, ordinary days when we include our kids in little acts of love that shape souls far more than any soccer game, scout meeting, or co-op class ever could. They are the acts so few of us have time for anymore: pitching in on short notice in a parish clean-up, bringing a meal to a new mom, praying a rosary outside Planned Parenthood, welcoming a last-minute dinner guest, attending the funeral of someone known only in passing. Some are aimed even closer to home, as when we patiently manage an explosive child’s umpteenth meltdown or pay an inconvenient visit to a cantankerous-but-lonely elder or do more than our share to help a spouse who seems overwhelmed.

This is the hidden gold of Catholic family life, the place where dogma and Scripture come alive before our children’s eyes. It doesn’t shine on a resume; fool’s gold often sparkles more than the real thing. But it shines in the eyes of the only One who counts, the Father who sees in secret and will reward us (Matt. 6:4).

One of the greatest rewards He gives is an increase in hope. It’s a virtuous cycle: The more we leave room in our days to be available for God and His surprises, the more we find ourselves focusing on holiness and heaven. A spiritual director I knew once compared the inspirations of the Holy Spirit to a child bringing his mother flowers. If she makes a fuss and gives a kiss and pulls out her best vase the first time he shows up with some scraggly daisy plucked from the backyard, she’ll soon find herself inundated with another and another, a rapid succession of bigger and more beautiful blooms, until she has so many her kitchen looks like a floral shop.

It’s the same with the Holy Spirit. The more we make room for His leading in our schedules, the more we respond to His daily nudges and act on them instead of scrolling past to the next distraction, the more light and inspirations He sends. Soon we may find our hearts and families on an entirely new and more life-giving path, beholding vistas we’d never have seen if we’d kept our eyes down and kept running the hamster wheel of constant busyness.

Count the cost

Of course, hopping off that hamster wheel takes courage—especially if nearly everyone we know, including our homeschool friends, seems to be hopping on. We may worry that if we give God too much time and attention, too much latitude to lead us down that road less traveled, He’ll hang us out to dry. We don’t say that of course. We know we’re supposed to trust God. Yet it’s in the nitty-gritty of how we structure our days, of what we make time for and what we skip, that we—and the children watching us—find out what we really value in this life … and how much we really believe in the next.

Our hope in heaven is more convincing if it costs us. And if we let it shape our schedules, it will cost us. There’s a price to be paid when we prioritize the spiritual, when we opt for more quiet or prayer time or more frequent Communions and confessions and holy hours or more service projects or celebration of the liturgical seasons. Sometimes our kids will miss out on something fun or feel out of step with their friends. They may not excel to the same degree in sports or music or whatever their chosen pursuit because they’re not making it their all-engrossing focus. They may not make the winningest teams or land the best roles or get into the most selective colleges. And the world may see their more modest achievements and assume they’re less gifted or hardworking, or that we didn’t know or care enough to help them succeed. As for those naysayers who thought we were nuts to homeschool, they’ll probably feel vindicated. And they’ll probably tell us so.

It’s hard and lonely sometimes on this road less traveled, turning down good things for the promise of something better. It’s so much more appealing to believe we can have it all, that God and worldly success can be equal priorities in our lives and we need never choose between them.

That belief is common among today’s most popular Christian speakers and writers, who often get popular by preaching Christ without His Cross. Live your best life now, they tell us; that’s all God wants. Sometimes they seem to even have the saints on their side, as when they repeat those well-known words of second-century Church father Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” What they leave out is the second half of his quote: “And the life of man is the vision of God.”

The vision of God. That’s the beatific vision. Heaven.

Irenaeus isn’t telling us to live our best life now. He’s saying our best life comes next. Heaven, and getting ourselves and all those we love to heaven, should be our focus—our priority.

Practical tips

So what does that look like in the day-to-day? It’s different for every family. I haven’t mastered it myself—I’m a work in progress—but I can share a few things that have helped our family.

One is creating a family mission statement, something my husband and I did shortly after we became parents. It’s short and clear, focused on the unique ways the Lord has called the two of us to use our gifts and serve Him in the world, and on our overriding desire to be and to raise saints.

We’ve returned to that statement many times through the years. It’s something of a North Star, guiding us through the fog of changing stages in our children’s development and our own lives and careers. When some new opportunity presents itself and God’s will isn’t obvious, we can check it against our mission statement and ask: Does this fit with what we already know to be God’s call for us as individuals and as a family? Will saying yes to this make us more likely to grow in holiness? Is this a help to heaven—or a distraction?

Beyond our mission statement, there are other practical questions we ask when faced with a time-consuming new commitment: Are we investing in something that enhances our children’s education or in a skill or talent they are likely to enjoy and use later in life? I’m not talking about something that will merely prepare them for the next rung on whatever ladder they’re currently climbing—the next select soccer team or scout badge or dance recital—or even something to get them into college. Rather, is this something that could pave the way to a future profession or vocation, that could make them better defenders of the faith and the dignity of human life, or help them figure out what they want to do when they grow up? It doesn’t have to be perfectly useful—my kids have been playing violin since age five, and I don’t think any of them will make a career of it—but is it something that could become a lifelong love, that could feed their souls and lift up others over the long haul? If it checks one of those boxes, we feel better about the sacrifices it’s sure to entail, even as we’re careful to still limit how much time we invest and realistically assess what we’ll give up to make it work. New commitments, in other words, must earn their way onto our calendar.

It helps if we have some non-negotiables already in place. These can change from season to season; our kids’ changing needs force occasional adjustments that keep us flexible and leaning on grace. But our bedrock priorities remain the same.

Take the example of daily Mass. When my kids were little, continuing my pre-parenthood routine of attending Mass every day was more an occasion of sin than an opportunity for grace. I’d spend the entire liturgy in the back of church shushing, cajoling, refereeing, and threatening my four squawking bundles of joy, while fielding stares from all directions in a church that was pin-drop silent—except for us. I’d leave exhausted and irritable, worn out before my long day with littles had even begun.

I eventually realized, with the help of a wise spiritual director, that God was calling me to respect my limits and be obedient to the duties of my state in life, which didn’t include daily Mass with four kids ages four and under. So I started praying with the kids at home, and began morning devotional routines that became a favorite family time and still endure to this day.

As the kids aged, we tiptoed back to daily Mass once a week or so. Then COVID hit, the shutdowns dragged on and on, and when they finally lifted, all of my children had received their First Communion and we were feeling a greater hunger for the Eucharist. So one daily Mass a week became two, then three. By late last year, we were hitting 7 a.m. Mass every day, and we haven’t stopped since. We’ve experienced immeasurable blessings from giving God those first fruits every morning as a family. And yes, we’re also dog-tired sometimes. But the day just doesn’t seem complete anymore if it doesn’t include Mass. It’s become a non-negotiable in our schedule, and any activity that would derail that routine for long is a non-starter for us.

Seasons change, of course. In a few years, 7 a.m. Mass may no longer work, and we’ll need to choose another time or split up and attend separately. Maybe other family devotional habits we have—our Thursday afternoon holy hours, our first Friday Masses and gatherings with our Catholic homeschool group, our weekly outings to visit my mom in the nursing home where my husband works—will need to be adjusted. Being clear about our priorities doesn’t mean we can’t be flexible. The key is discernment.

The discernment rules of Saint Ignatius of Loyola have been a great help to me in this regard—especially his rules for the second week of his Spiritual Exercises. These rules are designed to help souls in a state of grace who have already committed their lives to the Lord but are still prone to mistaking apparent goods for real ones. We know from Scripture that the devil often disguises himself as an “angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). So, Ignatius says, we have to be careful not to jump at every attractive opportunity and carefully evaluate and pray to avoid the subtle snares Satan uses to confuse and mislead us. Ignatius’s rules are a treasure trove of wisdom that I think every busy parent should have at hand, and I spend an entire chapter unpacking them in my newest book, The Heart of Perfection.

The Heart of Perfection also deals with other common obstacles to good decision-making, all of which were battled and overcome by the seven recovering perfectionist saints I profile. Among those obstacles are people-pleasing and the denial of our limits of time and energy, the concern for human respect that goads us to follow the crowd instead of God’s leading, the rigorism that wrongly convinces us Jesus always wants us to choose the hardest thing, and the self-reliance that tempts us to believe God values us for what we do rather than who we are—and to pass that lie along to our kids. I don’t have time to go into all of the saints and personal stories included in The Heart of Perfection, but you can read that book if you’d like to know more.

Hope’s power

For now, I’ll leave you with a glimpse of the power of Christian hope that I was given recently, on another, very different family journey that we took not long after returning from Rome.

It was a road trip to Kansas City. My husband and four kids and I loaded up our Suburban and drove some 2,000 miles each way—with my husband and I taking shifts on the way there and me driving the kids alone on the way home.

We were traveling to visit my brother, my only sibling, who has stage four thyroid cancer. The doctors told him when they broke the news that it’s inoperable and incurable. The average patient lives only three to six months after diagnosis. My brother’s diagnosis came three months ago, on Easter Monday. He’s 53.

The thing you need to know about Tom—or Tommy, as I’ve always called him—is that he’s the strongest, healthiest guy you’ll ever meet. He’s six-foot-four, a former college football-player-turned-entrepreneur who liked to bench-press 600 pounds in his free time while overseeing the marketing agency he co-founded and championing the athletic and business careers of his five kids, two of whom went to college on sports scholarships, and one of whom is still in high school.

Tommy was taking his 16-year-old son to an out-of-state wrestling tournament and on the verge of selling his company for a nice profit when he popped in an urgent care because of some lingering hoarseness in his voice. The doctor found a 9.5-centimeter tumor in his throat wrapped around his carotid artery. Tommy’s kids—who range in age from 24 down to 16—say they can’t believe it, because they grew up thinking their dad was an actual superhero. Invincible.

By the time we arrived in Kansas, my invincible brother—the charming life-of-the-party with movie-star good looks who tells side-splittingly funny stories just like my late dad—was barely able to speak. He was breathing through a trach, sleeping two to three hours a night, and begging God for six more months with his wife and kids.

We talked a lot about heaven that visit, my brother and me. He’s always had a strong faith. He’s also had a very busy and successful life, full of the world’s pressures and pleasures and perks. Now, he said, the things that mattered so much to him a few short months ago—business, image, success—no longer even register.

Tommy’s leaning hard on his faith. We’re all praying for a miracle, and I’d appreciate your prayers for him, too. But as we sat in the sun watching our kids frolic in his pool, he told me that the promise of heaven—the hope that his suffering will bear fruit in eternity and that Jesus will be there to greet him with mercy after his death—is what he thinks about night and day. Heaven, for Tommy, isn’t abstract or theoretical. It’s as real as the blood he coughs up every night, as necessary as the air he struggles to gasp through that hole they cut in his windpipe. What Jesus did for us on that Cross feels more urgent, he said, than any of the goals or goodies that consumed his time and attention before cancer came knocking.

We know this, right, you and I? We learn it at the deathbeds of our parents and grandparents, while watching our children suffer hurts we can’t heal, while nursing our own heartaches and losses and grief. We know that life is short and what counts in the end is Christ—eternity, and the promise of spending it with Him and all those we love.

Our schedules—our choices about what to do and what to skip, about how to spend these precious hours we’ve been given with our families—can lead us closer to heaven or farther away. If heaven is what matters most at the end of our lives, then isn’t it worth orienting our lives around heaven’s priorities now, while we still have time? And sacrificing whatever it takes to keep Christ first in our families—and our homeschools?

We can begin today, by opening our ears to the subtle whispers of the Holy Spirit nudging us in new directions and opening our minds to the possibility that the plans we made for this school year may need to change to align more fully with God’s will.

If we allow the hope of heaven to transform our lives that concretely, we’ll be able to look back when our homeschooling years are over with no regrets and look forward with hope to that eternal homeland which “eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has ready for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

So let’s do it. Let’s continue joyfully walking this narrow road together. And let’s continue encouraging each other to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus all the way to the end.