I am not ready for my daughter to go to school in a few weeks. We have homeschooled her for the last two years, and I have loved it.
Although I love public schools and think they are a huge asset to this nation, I also am an advocate for homeschooling. The one-on-one, being at home, being taught Christian principles away from secular teachings (especially for younger kids), and being able to study what kids are interested in (in addition to the “required” learning) are huge plusses for me.
But we’re not the traditional homeschool family. We never planned to homeschool all the way through high school. We had two goals for both our kids before we sent them to a school.
Goal 1: To set a strong academic foundation. We want our kids to love learning.
Goal 2: To set a strong spiritual / leadership foundation. We want our kids to be a light when they go out, and to not be swayed easily by the world.
We feel like goal 1 was easily met with our daughter.
The second goal is much harder to determine if we’ve met. There’s only one way to know if we’ve met that goal, and it’s to let her stretch her own wings.
This is the goal that has tore me up about sending her to school so young.
My head knows that Christian kids can go to public school young and turn out just fine. I see it all around me. My heart? Needs time to catch up.
I was listening to the radio one day, though, and they were talking about Moses’ mom. They said, “I bet she didn’t want to put Moses in the basket.”
That hit me like a ton of Hebrew-made bricks.
Moses was just a baby when he was sent from home to live among the Egyptians. You can read the entire story in Exodus 2:1-10.
Moses’ mom (whose name, we learn in Exodus 6:20, is Jochebed) had no idea if he’d be eaten by a crocodile, hit by a boat, or killed by an Egyptian soldier – who had been ordered to kill Hebrew baby boys.
Yet she saw something special about Moses and did what she could to save his life. I’m positive she was praying the entire time. Probably crying, too.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit,” Psalm 34:18 (ESV).
God used Jochobed’s faith and worked it out so that his mom nursed him and stayed with him until he was weaned (probably between the ages of 2 or 3 in those days).
During those early years, I’m positive she taught Moses all he could about Yeshua (the name the Hebrews called God).
He obviously knew he was Hebrew, because when he was older “he went out to his people… and saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people,” (Exodus 2:11).
As a fellow mom, I can’t imagine how hard it was for Jochobed to trust a basket in a river. Sure, his sister Miriam was watching, but still. Anything could have happened.
What did happen is a sign of God’s power.
Moses ended up leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the Promised Land – a land they had been promised as their own hundreds of years earlier!
He was given the Commandments, a way to show people exactly what God required of them. This was direct communication with God, and also shows us the need for the Savior – Jesus Christ.
Moses was a foreshadowing of Jesus.
All because Jochobed trusted God and released him into God’s hands.
As a parent, that’s all I can do anyway. God is the only one who can fully teach and protect my children. Even as I homeschool my son, I need to release both kids to the Father. I need to trust Him and His plan.
It is time for me to put my daughter in the basket in the river.
Will I still be teaching her in the time I have with her? Absolutely.
Will I be praying for her? Of course!
And I will be trying to learn to trust God with both my children. He alone knows their futures. He alone has a plan for them. And it’s a bigger and better plan than I could ever come up with.
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose,” Romans 8:28 (ESV).
What are you holding onto in your life? I encourage you to put it in the basket in the river and to trust God to guide it to something better.