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Blog — SallyClarkson.com

Your Influence As A Homeschooling Mom

"To shape their values and attitudes, build their faith, discipline their disobedience, inspire their genius, nurture their emotions, train their habits, cultivate their character, and set their feet on the path of righteousness.

It is those seized moments of godly influence in your children’s hearts that will make you the heart of the home.

Your influence as a homeschooling mom won’t come from reading all the right books on motherhood, listening to the latest parenting experts, using the 'best' homeschooling materials, or being the best homemaker. It will come because of your faithfulness—because your 'mom heart' is open to God and seeking what he wants you to do as a woman, wife, and mother."

Read more about this in Educating the Wholehearted Child.

Educating the Wholehearted Child
By Clarkson, Clay, Clarkson, Sally
Buy on Amazon

You Are Right Where You Need To Be

What we do when no one else is looking shows the integrity of our lives. To live by our convictions when no one else notices becomes the most important work of all because that choice honors God and not ourselves. What we practice, we become.

Be faithful and give your whole heart to loving your children well. Practice growing in patience, obedience, and gratefulness. Put your energy into the story you have been given right now. You will bear rich fruit in your life as you embody the story and purpose God has spoken into being for you. And you will witness the fruit in your child's life again and again as they grow into their story.

Read more about this in Teatime Discipleship for Mothers and Daughters.

Making Home Discipleship A Priority

"Jesus commanded us to 'make disciples' (Matthew 28:19), and that certainly includes children. Paul, using the language of discipleship, commanded fathers concerning their children to 'bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord' (Ephesians 6:4). Discipleship is not a responsibility you can put off or turn over to someone else. It is a biblical priority.

That is why your responsibility to disciple your children is so foundational to your responsibility to educate them. If you desire to teach your children effectively, their hearts must first be turned to God.

Remember that God is with you on your journey of Christian parenting, and he wants more than anything for you and your children to enjoy his company along your path. Home discipleship is an exciting and rewarding journey on the path of life with your children."

Read more about this in Educating the Wholehearted Child.

Educating the Wholehearted Child
By Clarkson, Clay, Clarkson, Sally
Buy on Amazon

Tea Time Tuesday: Well Lived, With All Your Heart

Click here to play today’s new podcast episode.

Lilacs are out!

Teatime Tuesday (Well Lived Book)

What does it mean? “Loving God with our whole heart.”

Mary shows us a heart given to God.

“Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you.” (Luke 1:28)

Oh, how I wish the words the angel said expressed how God felt about me! Would God see me as the kind of woman He would choose now to mother the most high God? By what means did she find favor, in the hidden moments of her life?

Mary lived in a tiny, obscure village amidst a humdrum life. Wheat was ground, bread was pounded out on wooden tables, crumbs were swept from the floor, children lovingly tended, mother and father presided over the home, the Shema was listened to every day over shared family meals, the Sabbath was kept. Mary lived in invisibility in the moments of an ordinary, obscure life, as far as anyone around her knew. And yet, in the quiet, faithful living of her life, God noticed her. She found favor, pleased His heart.

God always sees even when no one else is noticing.

Imagine being greeted by an angel, in the midst of a normal day, when no one else knew, “Hail favored one.”

What would he find you doing? Believing?

“Mary, do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God.”

Really? She did not have a college degree, a ministry position, or a title. She had never published a book or even spoken in the synagogue. Yet, in the midst of her quiet life, she had found favor with God.

We don't know every detail of Mary's life. The Bible doesn't tell us exactly why He chose her. But there are clues. The mother of Jesus would require a tenacious, engaged faith as in the Magnificat. As his mother, her own life would be in danger. Jesus would be pursued by a crazy king. At every point, people would cast doubt on her irregular, fantastical story.

Like Mary, God is looking for our heart-love for Him, not our perfection. Amid invisibility, times when no one sees or knows what is going on in our lives: stresses from challenging children, loneliness of a struggling marriage, cleaning up one more mess amidst the crumbs of our life, God sees us. It is in these places where “loving God with our whole heart” is revealed.

Planting Seeds For The Future

If there will be a resurrection, an accounting to God for our days and for our children — and there will ­ be — then we must be ready. If He has entrusted us with this charge of raising our children for His ­ glory — and He has — then we must complete our task with diligence. We will only do so if we understand that someday, this story we are living will be told and our lives of faithfulness will be a testimony of our worship and belief in Him.

Our hope is in Jesus. And because of Jesus, our labor is not in vain. We can have hope knowing that God sees us and has appointed us to steward the lives of little ones whose souls will have eternal impact.

Read more about this in Mom Heart Moments.

Making A Difference In Eternity

“Christian homeschooling should not be only about our children getting good test scores, going to college, and getting a job or career. Those are the temporal, not eternal, goals. If we allow our spirit to be distracted by this world, we will miss the opportunity to fill heaven with righteous generations.

Homeschooling is only a small part of the much bigger picture in which God wants us to see ourselves and our children. So much of what we do is temporal and passing, but what we are doing with our children is eternal—we are creating a link in a chain of godly families that will become, by God’s grace, a long, strong chain representing many generations of righteousness.”

Read more about this in Educating the Wholehearted Child.

Educating the Wholehearted Child
By Clarkson, Clay, Clarkson, Sally
Buy on Amazon

Tea Time Tuesday: Leave a Legacy of Love

Click here to play today’s new podcast episode.

“We love because He first loved us.” - 1 John 4:19

If I could point to one thing that truly had an impact in my children, it was giving them a foundation of unconditional love. Generous, overwhelming, words of affirmation, an expectation of forgiveness, acts of service, and many more gestures of love is what opened our children's hearts to listen to our messages about God. A heritage of being loved and cherished is profoundly important in the life of any human being.

Focusing on love as the lens through which I looked at every person who came my way gave me the understanding of how Jesus lived His life. Love is the oxygen needed in our hearts to be healthy.

Surrounded by people who care for their needs, commit to cherishing them from birth to death, wrapping them in the bonds of unconditional love is a legacy that will give them strength, hope and vision through the rest of their lives.

Love is giving of ourselves to the benefit and values of others God has placed in our lives. When we love and touch it predisposes our children to remember the caresses and affection of love and will cause them to be more prone to believe in the love of God when they are teens and we tell them God loves them.

When children are deprived of love as an infant, consequences to their health, emotional stability, understanding and perception of God, ability to hold relationships and even intelligence is effected the rest of their lives.

God created all of us with a deep need to be loved, and a capacity to love generously.

Love done well is expressed in the messy details of life.

Loving them as they are, appreciating the personality that God has given them, restoring them to generous love when they have failed, pouring out love even when they were at arm's length, Sometimes many times a day, became the fuel for building a fire in their hearts to want to love God.

God's word shows the way. God is love.

“Greater love has no one than this than a man lay down his life for his friend.” (John 15:13)

The two greatest commandments are to love God and to love others.

“Love one another and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2)

Has anyone ever loved you too much? Be a vessel of love today.

More on today’s podcast about this and my book, Well Lived.

The Daily Rhythms Of Your Life

Clay and I agree that most of our educational influence came from how we scheduled life and gave it a shape through our rhythms, routines, and rituals. What we practiced every day as a way of life probably influenced our children and their ultimate life messages more than the resources we provided.

A home filled with meaningful rhythms gives foundation to life messages and values. We knew we needed some kind of routine to give order and stability to our ideals. What we practiced every day, all the time, as a routine and expected exercise established deeply held values that shaped our family culture, our sense of “We are the Clarksons. This is what we do. This is how we live.”

Among our daily rhythms were morning devotions, read-aloud time, play and pretend, quiet hour, tea time, 5 o'clock cleanup, dinnertime discipleship, and bedtime blessings.

Read more about this in Awaking Wonder.

What I Hope My Children Remember

Christ's sacrifice on the cross is a clear picture of what it means to be a sympathetic mother. In the same way that Jesus gave up his rights to die for me, I need to give up my rights to serve my children. I need to nail my personal agenda to the cross so I can really see what my children need at any point in my day. I need to give up my tendency to want to "lord it over" them just to control them so I can accomplish my own desires. I need to humble myself so I can reach into my children's hearts without bumping into my own selfish needs and expectations.

Then maybe I can be a servant to them with a heart that can sympathize with them as children. When I enter their world, only then can I truly and effectively minister to them as children.

We forget so many details about our growing-up years. But we remember the people and how they related to us. And for those who loved us and understood us when we were immature children, I think we reserve a special place for them in our hearts.

Read more about this in Seasons of a Mother’s Heart.

Tea Time Tuesday: Anchors for Marriage

Click here to play today’s new podcast episode.

Marriage! There is no one right way. Cultivating love varies with each couple, personalities differ, stories are unique. Yet grace is needed for each of us.

Forty-three years ago, we stood in front of family and friends, made vows before God to love, honor, and cherish one another, “till death do us part.” Graces and sweet memories fill our hearts. We could not have fathomed what the years would hold, how God would use our marriage in our world. Building the legacy of Clarkson, our feasts, faith, music, celebrating life together, making memories, books written, conferences held, cherishing holidays, cultivating our story—there are soooo many memories over the pathways of our marriage.

In some ways, now is our best time. Our partnership before God has endured. Our familiarity with one another’s ways, the myriad years we shared, has given us a precious treasure I could not have understood when we began.

Yet, as with every couple, there were so many challenging seasons to live through. Building a legacy of faith and faithfulness through 24 moves (9 internationally), sharing together births of four children (3 miscarriages), of living through the seasons of sleepless, sick babies, demanding toddlerhood, adventuresome pre-school, golden elementary years, hormonal, push-back teen years, straining into young adulthood seasons, and adults and grand babies.

Storms and winds of darkness swept through our lives many times. Thousands of meals, messes to clean up, illnesses, car wrecks, difficulties galore, hospitalizations, feeling isolated and lonely, mentally ill children, countless “dark nights of the soul.”

Stages of life drained: parenting the special needs of our kids, navigating grief, financial difficulties, midlife doubts, temptation to compare, being petty, anger, exhaustion, disappointment, giving up hope. Life takes its toll.

We grew from immaturity and selfishness toward humility, grace, selflessness, admitting flaws, straining to understand how to love and forgive.

But there had to be anchors that held us fast in storms.

Join me today as I speak of these anchors on my podcast from my book Well Lived: Cultivating Gratitude & Grace.