Sarah Mackenzie (00:10): Summer break, it's often not much of a break, right? Even if you find yourself with a little less on your plate, anxiety and second-guessing have a way of filling the gaps. So today, let's take a bit of a vacation, just you and me. You ready? (00:43): Welcome to the Read Aloud Revival. I'm Sarah McKenzie and this is the show that helps you make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books. Now, summer break can be a great time to find some rest and relaxation, maybe even some peace, but to turn that peace into something that lasts into our new school year, we can't just take a break. I mean, do homeschooling moms ever really take a break? We need to break free, really, from the stories and the fears that keep us mired in anxiety. When homeschooling moms ask me for advice, they rarely need advice. What we all need isn't advice, it's reassurance. The context and the care that gives us a chance to take a breath. We need to let go of the anxiety or the fear that's at the root of this question, "Am I doing enough? Am I doing a good job?" So that we can trust ourselves and that we can trust that the Holy Spirit will in fact guide us as we raise our children. In this episode, I'm going to share some of the wisdom that has helped me find that reassurance, and you can think of it as a little vacation for your homeschooling heart. Now, first, a quick reminder that this is both an audio and a video episode. If you'd rather watch than listen, head to readaloudrevival.com/video to visit the Read Aloud Revival YouTube channel and go ahead and subscribe while you're there. (02:18): One of the perks of RAR Premium, which is our online community at Read Aloud Revival, is something we call Circle with Sarah. Throughout the school year, I host a private podcast and mama-only live events on Zoom, that are dedicated to supporting you in your work as a homeschooling mom. Well, the RAR team has selected some of our favorite clips on this theme of rest and reassurance, on letting go of anxiety, and we're going to visit those today on the episode. So let's begin this little vacation with a big question. How does a person who knows they are loved act? Many of us struggle with feeling like we have to earn love both from our families and from God, and coming from that perspective of needing to earn love, I think it's no wonder that it can be really hard to rest. Well, earlier this year I spoke with Joy Clarkson about her book, Aggressively Happy, for our RAR Premium Mama Book Club, and it was Joy who told me that she was trying to behave as someone who knows they are loved would behave. Here's how Joy put it. (03:33): Give me ideas on why performance-based love is something so many of us struggle with. Joy Clarkson (03:39): Probably because a lot of us were loved in a way that indicated that the love was dependent on our performance. Sarah Mackenzie (03:45): Yeah, we were [inaudible 00:03:47]. Joy Clarkson (03:47): Yeah, I was going to say, I think a lot of us that was just the experience you had, and that doesn't mean because you had terrible parents. Human beings are human beings, so a lot of us, I think that's our experience and that's reinforced to us over and over again by the world that we live in, that the more we accomplish, the more money we make, the prettier we are, the more it's expressed to us that we are lovable. Sarah Mackenzie (04:13): Yeah. Joy Clarkson (04:13): And so I think that that is, to go back to the theme again, it's a story that is told to us so many times that we begin to tell it to ourselves. Sometimes even if you have a community and a family around you that doesn't tell you that story, I think that story is so strongly inscribed in our culture that it's hard not to tell yourself that story. Something I've been thinking about myself is the kind of difficulty of getting it into your bones, even if you know it in your head. And I think one of the things that helps me do that is not waiting for the feeling, but acting like I think a person who knows that they're loved would act. Sarah Mackenzie (04:54): Oh wow. Yeah. Joy Clarkson (04:55): I know that seems silly, but my mom used to talk about acting towards God like a securely attached toddler would act towards their parent. And I think that there is this sense of, if I think about someone who knows they're loved and how they would act, they would ask for help. They would not be hard on themselves all the time. They would be gentle and open to asking for affirmation and love, and I think that is something that has helped me, is to act like I think someone would act who knew that they were loved. Because I think also the thing with that is that if you're acting like someone who doesn't feel that they're loved, sometimes it cuts us off from a lot of the ways that we could actually then experience love and then rewrite that story for ourselves. So I think acting like a person who thinks that they're loved would act allows us also to receive more affirmation and security. Sarah Mackenzie (05:48): Joy is such a delight and I highly recommend her book, Aggressively Happy. Now, as I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons summer break can feel like a challenge is that it's prime time for worrying, at least for me, because when we're not focused on squeezing every last bit of learning into our day and keeping up with all the schedules, there's a bit more time for our minds to fixate on all the ways we're not preparing our kids for the rest of their lives. And that's when I remind myself, and today I'm also going to remind you, that we're not responsible for meeting all of our kids' needs. Nor can we meet all of our kids' needs. That in fact was never our assignment. (06:37): So one of the things I think that is really helpful to remember is that we're not actually responsible for meeting all of our kids' needs. We think we are, but that was never actually our job in the first place. So we tend to worry about, "How can I meet my kids' needs in their academic life, in their schooling? How could I meet their needs to make sure they're learning enough math to go to college, and that they can read on grade level, and that they can write an actual paper that somebody could read and understand or even legibly enough that somebody could read it." We worry about those things. We worry about their health. We worry about whether they have friendships. We worry about how they're growing in their relationship with Christ. We worry about all these things, but actually our job was never to meet all of their needs, and that feels like a negative statement, but it's actually really positive. (07:28): One of the things we really want to highlight and remind ourselves of is that the greatest commandments, we know this, the greatest commandments are that we love the Lord with all of our heart, our soul and our mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the things that we know are the greatest commandments, and so if we were to think about our homeschool and our kids' education in service to that, then we would think that education is for love. Love of God, and love of each other. Everything that we do in our homeschool is for that purpose, because that is our purpose. That is the commandment. Another way of saying that education is for love is that homeschooling is all about relationships, relationships with God, with each other, and with ideas because that connection between each of us, our kids, all of us, and God, our connection between each other and then our connection with the ideas that we're encountering, that is actually the heartbeat of homeschooling. That is a heartbeat of education no matter where your kids go to school. (08:33): It's just that in homeschooling we have the ability to shape it a little bit more than we would if they were in school, right? Speaking of letting go of worry and reminding ourselves that we won't and can't meet all the needs of our kids, we began last school year at RAR Premium with a Virtual Circle with Sarah Retreat, where I suggested that we all do fewer things as consistently as possible, putting relationships first. When it comes to homeschooling, and just about everything else, honestly, the axiom, less is more, it really is true. However, we can be really quick to say that and a little slower to implement it, right? Because what does doing fewer things really look like? How does doing fewer things prepare our kids for the future? Can it really be that a less rigid approach to learning can lead to more opportunities for growth? In this next clip from the Circle with Sarah Retreat, I talk all about that. It matters so much to us, homeschooling does, and doing a good job for our kids. (09:48): It matters so much that we want to make sure we're doing it well. We want to make sure we're doing it right. And so the FOMO isn't just a fear of missing out, it's a fear that we're dropping a ball that really matters. That's why it feels so important. Earlier this year, I sent out a survey. Some of you took it, probably a lot of you took it. It was for homeschooling moms who've been homeschooling for at least 10 years. 726 moms responded. About 20% of the respondents have been homeschooling for over 20 years, that's amazing. And I wanted to know, what do you wish you had done more of? What do you wish you had done less of? What would you tell your younger self? And overwhelmingly, the responses were very similar things, and we'll be talking about a lot of these things, but one of the things that the survey respondents said over and over and over again is, "I didn't wish I had done more of anything. I wish I had done less. Do less worrying. That's what I wish I had done less of." (10:53): Well, doing less is really good advice. That's really solid advice. It's also not super helpful when you're looking at a full year ahead of you. You've got your kids, whether it's be one or three or seven, however many kids you have, and you're like, "Okay, and I want to make sure that I'm not dropping any of these really important things. They need math, and reading, and writing, and spelling, and geography, and history, and science." And I can keep going for a long time. "And I want to make sure they get all those things. And I don't want to drop any really important balls, so do less of what? What are the things I can do less of?" And it reminds me very much of the advice that you get sometimes in recipes. (11:33): It says, "Add salt to taste." And now I'm sure a lot of you who are here are great cooks and you're like, "Yeah, so then you just add salt to taste." But for people like me, I'm using a recipe for a reason. I'm using a recipe because I'm like, "Add salt to taste. Like what?" That's literally why I'm using the recipe, because I don't know how it's supposed to taste. Also, sometimes that advice comes in the recipe, and I was making meatloaf and it's like, "Add salt to taste." As I'm mixing up the raw meat. I was like, "I can't taste it." By the time that I've added salt, it's a little too late to change it based on its taste. Anyway, just saying, it's not that helpful, add salt to taste is not helpful. It's not helpful advice in a recipe to any of my food bloggers out there. (12:28): And it's not helpful, it's in the same way that for homeschooling moms to say, "Do less is great." If an experienced homeschooling mom tells me to do less, she better give me a little more. Are we talking a tablespoon or a teaspoon and where do I cut it? So let's talk about that a little bit. What do we actually mean? And I think part of the thing when we talk about doing less, we're worried about doing less because we don't know what things we can cut without having a negative impact on our kids. I want to make sure my kids all have what they need to succeed in their future lives. That's what we want. We want to make sure that our kids have everything that they need to succeed. So let me tell you a little bit about my older kids, and I think this is going to illustrate maybe why this is so hard, why it's so hard to know what to do less of. (13:19): So this is my oldest daughter, Audrey. She just graduated from Franciscan University, Steubenville, with a degree in English, magna cum laude, just saying. And I'm allowed to brag, right? I didn't do any of it. So let's see, she is going to graduate school next year in Scotland. She has a huge heart for missions. Now you can probably imagine that spending eight weeks in Uganda was not something that I put in her mind to do, but it's definitely something that she felt very called to do. So she is the kid who was always very close to me growing up, close to me emotionally, but also physically. I could pretty much touch her at any time of the day if she was awake, because she was very close, nearby. She was just always nearby, I just thought, how this child is ever going to be able to live her life without me, I do not know. (14:17): And interestingly, here and now as an adult, she is traveling the world. She's spent a semester in Austria, she spent a few weeks in France in some of her later homeschooled high school years, and she spent eight weeks in Uganda last year on a mission, and she's always looking for more mission opportunities. If we could rewind, tell 20 years ago, Sarah, like, "Hey, your oldest kid is going to need things that she needs for the mission field, because that is definitely where her heart is and where she's being called. And also she wants to be an editor, so maybe give her some things to make sure that she's ready for that." I'll tell you, when she told me that she wanted to get a degree in English so that maybe she could be an editor, I was like, definitely possible that we should have done some grammar, that was not a priority during those years when I was scrambling. (15:11): So okay, but she's not my only child, of course. This is Allison. She is a twenty-year-old, she just finished her sophomore year at Savannah College of Art and Design. But how different of a need does she have? When we're homeschooling our kids, we think, we want to make sure our kids are prepared for whatever they need when they grow older, but what Audrey needed and needs for her life, now as a twenty-two-year-old who's going off to Scotland for graduate school who has a huge heart for missions, is different than what this child needs who is pursuing art and is gifted in the arts, is very different than our oldest son who is now graduated from his freshman year at Franciscan University. So he's also in college, this is another braggy moment, but when he went off to Franciscan, he broke two school records, all-time school records his freshman year, which is kind of fun. (16:05): During his junior and senior year of homeschool high school, we would be listening to Screwtape Letters, or Animal Farm, or all the different books we were listening to together, and I would be sitting there doing a puzzle and he'd be over there doing like push-ups and sit-ups and I probably should have been doing them too, but I was doing a puzzle drinking my latte while he was exercising. Super athletic, he's pursuing a degree in economics and philosophy, and is entrepreneurial-minded and wants to own his own business. Comparing these three kids, what I realized is that if I had thought, "Oh, I have to give them education that prepares them for the future." Everything that each of them has needed has been very different from each other, and that's part of the problem. I think we sort of feel like our job is to walk the path for our kids. (16:51): So we want to figure out, we've got all of our ducks in the row, we want to make sure we have everything ready, but our job actually isn't to walk the path for our kids. Our job is to walk alongside them. We need to think about doing less, consistently as we're able, putting relationships first, because when we do that, we give our kids an education that regardless of what they need later on, for missions, or art, or owning their own business, or something completely different, maybe being a mother of many children, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or a janitor, or any million of other things, a truck driver, there's a gazillion different things that our kids will be doing. And then also all the different trials and tribulations that they're going to encounter in their lives. We absolutely can't make an education that equips them for all the different nuances, but that's what I think we're kind of trying to do. (17:50): Hopefully, this idea that doing fewer things can actually create more opportunities for learning and more opportunities for deepening our relationships has convinced you to give doing less a try. But how do you actually turn doing fewer things into a practical strategy for your homeschool? I like to think of it like packing a backpack. Okay, stay with me. Imagine you're going for a hike and if you're not the hiking type, maybe you're packing a diaper bag or a big purse, you know the one, for a long day away from home. It's tempting to put everything you could possibly need for the day into that backpack, or diaper bag, or purse, maybe even more than could fit and definitely more than you need. But you never know what you're going to need, right? But then what happens is you're lugging around this needlessly heavy bag and it ruins your ability to enjoy the day, to enjoy whatever journey you're on. At this point, you've probably learned to pack lighter, or at least lighter than you used to. (18:56): Most of us in homeschooling, we want to be prepared and thoughtful about what our kids are going to need, but we also want to avoid a backpack, or a purse, or a diaper bag that is crammed so full that it's ruining our time. And homeschooling can be just like that, it can be the same. In fact, I encourage homeschooling moms to follow the rule of six. Put your focus on six foundational goals and then go from there. In this next clip from the same Circle with Sarah Retreat, I share some of the things I make sure to pack in my backpack, and then I offer a relationships-first metric for knowing if you're doing enough. (19:43): I had this tendency to feel like I have to fit it all in now, like I'm going to launch my nine-year-old out into the world next year. The nine-year-old needs geography, and history, and science, and math, all the things. And it's so funny because if you can get a little perspective and back up a little bit over, let's say, three years, we'll probably do some history, some science, some geography, some nature study, some field trips. Over three or five years, we're going to get to a lot of those things, but we don't have to get to them every year, and we don't have to get to them every month, and we definitely don't have to get to them every week. And when we're trying to cram our backpacks full of everything, what ends up happening is we're just exhausted, so the most important part of homeschooling, which is our relationships, that's the part that suffers. (20:29): Because if we're exhausted and we're behind and we're tired, then we're snapping at our kids, then we're sending them the message that, "You are not enough. You're not doing enough. We're not doing enough. What's wrong with you? What's wrong with me?" That's what we send to our kids and that's what they take with them. But if we can go, "Okay, let's get some of this stuff out of our backpack and just make sure it's lightweight, so we can enjoy the journey, so we know we can get to our destination." And remembering that what we're doing is not trying to give our kids very specific skills for their very specific lives that God is going to call them to, but so that we're giving them skills that he can use in an abundance of ways. And that's because if our job is to walk alongside our kids, we can sort of give them skills that they need without feeling like we have to meet every single need of our children. And so I want to talk about a rule of six and what it means and how to make one. (21:27): Now, a rule of six is something that I actually learned from a fellow homeschooling mom, Melissa Wiley, years ago, on a old forum that she and I were on. She posted about having a rule of six things, which is like, six plus one is seven, which is our happy Christian number. So six plus prayer, so that's seven things, that are like if she could get to these every week with her kids, if she could make sure she hit all of these things, she would know she was giving her kids the kind of education that she envisioned. And I loved this so much. I went to one of those paint your own pottery places, this was like 20 years ago, I went to one of these pottery places and I painted my rule of six onto this teapot thing. They're very similar to what I would say would be my rule of six today. (22:13): They're things like go outside, pray, read aloud. These are the things that are basically, if you could do these six things every week, or every month, you can scale it out for however long you need to, you would know that this is good education. So even though we might not get to everything, because you won't get to everything, you will not get to all of the books you want to read with your kids, all of the experiments or activities or adventures you want to go on. It's not so much about, "Did we get to all the things we wanted to get to." Because you just simply won't. I know, I can say that and we're all still like, "Yeah, but I'm going to try anyways." That what I feel like. Yeah, but I'm still going to try to get all the things done. But it's really helpful if we can identify, what are the six things that we actually really want to make sure don't fall by the wayside because they really do matter so much to us. (23:02): And again, the basic idea is, these are the things that absolutely go in the backpack. The other thing, too, is this rule of six should encourage you. The idea behind it is you would want to be able to post this somewhere you'll see it, like your kitchen sink. You spent a lot of time at your kitchen sink, I'm betting. Posting it, for example, on your kitchen sink, even with a post-it or something, will help you every day look at it and be like, "That's right. These are the things that matter most." This is how we actually help ourselves do fewer things as consistently as we're able putting relationships first, because we made these with a clear mind when we were remembering that relationships matter most and connections are really the heart of homeschooling and thinking like, "Okay, what do I want my kids to remember about their homeschool?" (23:48): So this can end up being a guiding compass as the year progresses, and when we feel very stressed or overwhelmed in the middle of a week or our homeschool year, we can look back and go, "When I was thinking about what was going to fit in my backpack, what were the things that I thought at the beginning of this year were most important?" One of the questions that might come up for you as you're thinking through this is, "How do I know if I've got this right?" And one of the things that I suggest is starting your homeschool year slow and just adding in one more thing. So, for example, we'll start our homeschool year with just co-op, that is it. We'll just go to co-op. And then a week later, I will add in our morning time, and then a week later we'll add in something else, a lot of math. (24:48): And you're just adding things in slowly. It doesn't necessarily have to be a week later either, it could be a day later, but you're sort of slowly adding, because what you're doing is you're just slowly filling your backpack, and then as soon as it gets too heavy that you can't smile at your kids at the end of the day anymore, or that you're starting to feel like you're going to roll over and die, that's when like, "Oh, my backpack got too heavy. That last thing I put in, I got to take it out for now." And again, it doesn't mean you're taking it out forever, it means you're taking it out for now. For now, we're not going to do science. We'll revisit that in six or eight weeks, or 12 weeks, or after Christmas. (25:28): Maybe it's history, for now we're just going to table history for a minute and we'll come back to it, because it's more important that I can smile at my kids and enjoy them and that they remember our homeschool with these things that you wrote down, whatever those were that you want your kids to remember about their homeschooling years, that they had time, that they were connected, that they had time with you, that maybe the read-alouds, maybe the conversations, maybe the places you went, that's your enough. That's how you know you're doing enough, is that you can still smile at your kids at the end of the day. (26:02): Man, I have been homeschooling for nearly 20 years and I still need this reminder. I still find myself doing too many things pretty much every year, especially at the beginning of a new school year. Now sometimes we associate worry and anxiety with freezing up, sort of being paralyzed by fear, frozen by indecision. It's like a kind of freezing up that happens when we just cannot make one more decision. But for me and for a lot of the homeschooling moms that I talk to, worry and anxiety doesn't look like freezing, it looks busy. Specifically, it looks busy with researching the best homeschooling methods or researching the best new strategies, or scrolling Instagram to find new ideas, fussing over curriculum. Here's a question for you. (26:57): What if your worries about whether or not you're using the right curriculum have nothing to do with curriculum, and are about something else entirely? What if our anxiety about whether we should take this approach or that approach to math or history, isn't actually about math or history at all, but it's about something deeper? I think the Holy Spirit can help us ease those anxieties, but we've got to make space for that deeper healing to happen, and honestly, putting your concerns about curriculum in the rear view mirror is one of the very practical things we can do. RAR community manager, Kelsey Murphy, and I, discussed this in a Circle with Sarah Live from earlier this year, take a listen. (27:48): I think even if we know intellectually that homeschooling is all about connection, we still get to Monday morning, Wednesday morning, Thursday morning, and we crack open the history lesson plans, or the math book, or the spelling curriculum, or whatever, and we think, we just need to get through this actually, right? And just like that, on a dime, our curriculum becomes our master and we're not actually educating for love or connection anymore. We're letting the resources we're using dictate our kids' education and it shows up in these ways. "I'm tempted to switch my curriculum." Why? "Because this one isn't working. The kids are complaining, somebody's crying, may be me." Or I added too much and I feel overwhelmed, because I know I can't get through all of this today. Or I don't want to do any of it, and the stuff I want to do we don't have time for and I don't know how to make time for the stuff I really want to do. (28:44): Most of us are worried that we're not doing enough a lot of the time, and I think a lot of us would say we're just generally frustrated. Here's the thing, if you focus on the three areas of connection that we talked about, connection with Christ, connection with each other, connection with ideas, then the truth is that the particular choices you make for your curriculum, for your actual lessons, don't actually matter that much. And I heard experienced moms say, "The curriculum you choose doesn't matter that much." So many times when I was going through homeschooling with my oldest kids and I didn't believe them, I didn't think it was true. Speaker 4 (29:21): Yeah. Sarah Mackenzie (29:22): I think I thought, "It has to matter. We have to use the best history curriculum. We have to use the best math." So what that did though is it put me on a constant hunt for like, "Well, this might be working, but there might be something better." Speaker 4 (29:36): Yeah. Sarah Mackenzie (29:36): And so we couldn't actually even enjoy what we were using, I couldn't relax and enjoy my kids, because it was like, well, if I had a day that went smoothly, which didn't happen all that often, frankly, but when it did, I would think, "What did I forget? What should I add? I'm sure I'm missing something very important." One of the things that I just think is so fascinating is that I have met homeschooling moms who have done homeschooling with their kids in all different stripes, like classical, and unschooling, and Charlotte Mason, or using a box or sunlight, or stuff that they've got from their mom who homeschooled them, right? A whole bunch of different ways, and actually the philosophy or method that they use doesn't make it that big of a difference. Speaker 4 (30:23): Mm-hmm. Sarah Mackenzie (30:23): The particular curriculum choices don't actually matter as much as we think they do, but what matters a lot more than we think are those connections. Connections with Christ, connections with each other, and connections with ideas. And one of the things that I think is hardest as homeschooling moms is for us to step into the world of understanding that God is giving... He made you the mom of your children, and he's giving you all the grace to be able to homeschool them well and you actually know them better than anyone else. Even better than, believe it or not, well-meaning family members who like to comment on how you're doing, and what you're doing in your homeschool. Our job is basically to offer this invitation to connection, an invitation for our kids to connect with Christ, an invitation for them to connect with us and their siblings, and an invitation for them to connect with ideas that we read about and we learn about in our homeschool lessons, and God takes care of the outcome. (31:18): So we can do our due diligence to go, "Okay, I think this particular curriculum or method will work well for me in this season because..." Fill in the blank. "Because I have a brand new baby who's not sleeping through the night, and so my kids need to do as much independently as possible because my hands are full." Or, we have an ill family member, so I'm like, "I'm not able to give my other kids as much one-on-one teaching time." Or I have this child who really needs me to sit next to him for the hardest subject of the day for him, so I'm going to use this particular curriculum even though I've heard really good things about that one. It's all about teaching the child who's in front of you instead of seeking after this mythical ideal homeschool that everybody seems to be on the hunt for. (32:05): It helps me when I remember that worry is actually a sign, it's a red flag for me. It's a reminder that God is ready for me to put as much attention on him as I am putting onto this thing I'm obsessively worrying about. All right, before we get back on our metaphorical plane and leave our little vacation here, I want to swing back around to Joy Clarkson, and two more of her critical ideas that are about supporting yourself. I think they're very important in this summertime as we're thinking about a new school year. In Aggressively Happy, Joy reminds us, and I know this can be hard to believe, that we have bodies and those bodies need care, and sleep, and water, and nutrition, so that they will do the things we want them to do. And as homeschooling moms, we need our bodies to do a lot, because we're keeping up with a lot of humans and a lot of schedules and a lot of demands and responsibilities. (33:06): Joy also encourages us to tell ourselves a good story, instead of narrating ourselves through the lens of anxiety or fear, we can narrate it as people who are confident of God's love. Confident in the love of our families. I'm going to let Joy explain. Joy Clarkson (33:29): So I think that on a daily basis, the Remember you have a Body is probably the one that comes back to me most. I have found that in most of the problems in my daily life when I am running up against not feeling aggressively happy, a physical solution almost always helps. Whether it's eating, or taking a walk, or getting into the sunshine, or having a cup of tea, or not having another cup of caffeine. Looking back on my twenties, I'm like, "No wonder I was so anxious all the time. I was drinking an obscene and scary amount of caffeine." So I think that one has probably the most persistent effect on how I live and has been the most helpful in that sense, that if you are experiencing a trial of some kind, a difficulty, an emotional heaviness, doing something to care for your physical body will never hurt and will almost always help. (34:24): It has been my experience. But then I think that the chapter, Tell Yourself a Good Story, it's actually something I've been returning to again and again, and something that's kind of deepened itself in me, I think, even since I wrote the book. The reason I read Remains of the Day by Ishiguro, is that I'm working on this article, by which I mean a 10,000 word one, on autobiography and Ishiguro, and about how his books are always about people trying to understand themselves by telling the story of their life. And one of the things that he shows over and over again is that none of us are reliable narrators of our own life. (35:02): It's not just that we're all bad at narrating our lives, it's just that it is impossible to be a totally reliable narrator of your life. You have to pick some facts, not other facts, just like you can't ever see yourself other than in a mirror or a picture. There is this sense that we can't ever totally understand ourselves and we can't ever totally understand our own story. And so I think that idea and sitting with that, which is kind of scary, right? Because it's like, "Well then can I ever totally know myself?" And the answer is no, you can't. There is this sense that to know yourself, you must continually leave yourself open to God, and leave yourself open to other people, who can see and understand and tell yourself your story for you. And is that a little bit scary and insecure sometimes? (35:49): Yes, but it also means that when you have told yourself the worst story about yourself, when you've gotten to a place where you think you can't see a better ending, you don't have to trust that story about yourself that you're telling is true. And so that's something that has impacted me and I keep on kind of chewing and mulling over and thinking about it in different contexts, and something I also think about in society. I think about how convinced we become of the story that we tell about ourselves, that we tell about the world that we live in, the beliefs that we hold, the politics we hold, and that there's a real value and an importance to gathering this sense of openness to the fact that we are never totally reliable narrators, but that that's actually comforting because we can bring our stories to God and they're never finished. Sarah Mackenzie (36:39): Well, that was a whirlwind little podcast vacation. I'm so glad you came along with me. What do you want to most remember from this trip we took together today? I encourage you to jot it down. Just grab your phone or a random piece of paper, a journal if you want, if have it handy, but you can even just open the notes up on your phone, and jot down two or three things that you want to remember from our time together on this podcast. That way you're not just listening, you're jotting it down, and by writing it down, you'll have a much higher chance of letting it make a positive change in your life and give you that rest, help you let go of that anxiety as you're thinking about this upcoming school year. I hope this episode inspires you to give yourself a break and remember that you are so very loved. (37:37): Now, let's hear what Read Aloud Revival kids are reading and loving lately. Hazel (37:44): My name is Hazel. I'm eight years old. I live in Idaho. My favorite book is Red Fern Grows, because when the hounds saved Billy from The mountain lion. Zoe (38:00): Hello, my name is Zoe. I'm 11 years old, and I live in Louisiana. My favorite book is The Black Flower by F.L. Lily. I love this book because it has a funny romance and I love the adventure and how fast-paced it is. Evelyn (38:18): Hi, my name is Evelyn. I'm eight years old, and the book I recommend is Green Ember by S.D. Smith. My favorite character is Helmer. I love this book because its action packed. Holly (38:33): Hi, my name is Holly. I'm six years old. I like Green Ember because it's full of fighting and stuff. My favorite character is Helmer. Marcus (38:51): My name is Marcus, and I'm eight years old, and I'm from Michigan, and I recommend the I Survived series. My favorite book in this series is the Japanese Tsunami, 2011, by Lauren Tarshis, and I like it because I'm interested in tsunamis Sam (39:12): I'm Sam, and I'm four, I live in Virginia. Speaker 11 (39:18): And what's your favorite book? Sam (39:20): Dear Doc, please Doc, [inaudible 00:39:26]. Shay (39:27): Hi, my name is Shay and I live in Pennsylvania. I'm nine years old and I recommend Tomfoolery because the illustrations are beautiful. Bye. Speaker 11 (39:37): What's your name? Finch (39:39): Finch. Speaker 11 (39:40): How old are you? Finch (39:40): Four. Speaker 11 (39:42): And where do you live? Finch (39:43): Idaho. Speaker 11 (39:43): In Idaho? What's your favorite book? Finch (39:48): Frog and Toad. Speaker 11 (39:49): Frog and Toad? Sarah Mackenzie (39:52): Thank you so much, kids. Listen, if you could use this kind of support throughout the school year, I encourage you to come join us in RAR Premium. Our next Circle with Sarah Retreat is right around the corner, and the Circle with Sarah Podcast offers tiny nuggets of encouragement, just like this episode, every single Monday all through your school year. You can get all the details by going to rarpremium.com. I bet if this episode resonated with you, that it will also resonate with a homeschooling mom that you love and are inspired by and want to inspire, so I would encourage you to send this episode her way. You can send her readalouderevival.com/269, or you can just share it straight from YouTube or your podcast app, and give that homeschooling mama you love a little burst of encouragement, and look forward to the new school year with Hope. Now, I'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But in the meantime, you know what to do. Go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.