When Preparation Fails Us
Homeschooling and the miracle at Cana
In recent days, my excessively informative post about how I plan for the school year has received a significant amount of traffic and led to several new subscribers. To everyone who found their way to my work through that post, I bid you welcome. Much of what I write here is intended for my children, but today’s piece is for those of you who are also homeschooling parents.
Across much of the USA this is the time of year for school planning, and as my own household has been engaged in this labor I find myself once again pondering the miracle at Cana. Not because of the wine, delicious as it sounds. Rather, because I find that this moment, His first miracle, is a vocational parable of sorts for how Christ meets with me at the feast of my vocational labors. It reminds me of who He is and who I am, and sheds light on how I ought to approach the work I have been given to do.
I am come that you might have life, says our Savior, and that you might have it more abundantly. During my strivings to follow Jesus I have found myself responsible for a feast, a time of abundant life: clearly called to be a wife and mother, to parent and homeschool. This feast, this vocation, has much in common with a marriage feast. Indeed, it began as one. This is more than a spontaneous gathering of delight and celebration. This home I keep, along with the education provided here, is an intentional appointment, the long culmination of abundance and tradition and responsibility. It is a beginning and it is a continuance. It is a feast filled with life, overflowing with good labor to do, a feast to which Jesus has been called. It is a good place to be.
John 2: 1, 2 - And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there: And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.
The feast begins, and for a while it proceeds smoothly. I have chosen books to use, I have found a support group of sorts, and I welcome our children with joy each day. I have trained for this, I am prepared. The strange, sleep-deprived days of babies and pregnancies and breastfeeding flow by. Night terrors and potty training and remembering to keep them hydrated once they’ve been weaned is joined to reading lessons and picnics in the woods and nature hikes. Our home library grows alongside the children. Charlotte Mason style, I spread the feast that all may grow.
But in each of my vocations, and perhaps in all vocations, the good and right preparations are finite, and they are being used up as the feast goes on. At some point, in spite of all the care with which the feast was prepared, or the vocation was trained for, I begin to run out of something important, something essential to the feast. Something like wine. Or patience, or energy, or health, or stability.
John 2: 3-5 - And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.
I look around at the missing pieces, and I find no way out. I am out of wine, but the feast has not ended. It is not yet time to cease from my celebrations and labors. Panic sets in at the realization of my own incompetency. To meet the needs of this specific feast with the specific resources available to me seems impossible. I know that it is entirely too late to prepare differently. There is doubt, too, about my work and my calling. Should I have allowed this party to even get started? Should this work have been begun if I could not see it through properly? Yet another useless question. We are feasting, and I have poured out all the wine I have, and it did not last.
I am not alone at this feast, there is a community around me. A community that also knows and loves Jesus. There are experienced homeschool mothers whom I can go to for advice, including my own. They don’t rush to smooth over the situation. They ask thoughtful, insightful questions to make sure they understand, and they see what I see. “You have no wine.” They do their best to help me find solutions, but it doesn’t seem to work. Nothing seems to solve for this missing essential ingredient. My friends show back up with seemingly no reason for confidence. and yet they are confident. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” they say, humbly but firmly. It doesn’t look like help, or feel like help. More often it feels like the keen blade of criticism. There will be no more trouble-shooting advice, no more “how to” solutions. Whatever the next step is, not even the familiar or the experienced can help me to predict it. They won’t tell me to enroll the kids in school, or keep them home. They won’t try to sell me a curriculum or get me to join a co-op or a book club or go to marriage counseling or use a planner. We’ve had those conversations before this moment, and the time for them is past. There are no preconceived expectations about what my next step is going to look like. My advisors know only that it will require obedience.
John 2: 6, 7 - And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim.
He tells me to bring water and so I do. Because the wine is gone. I know it isn’t correct, I know that what I am bringing is not what the occasion calls for. I know that I can’t cut the booklist anymore and I can’t squench the grocery budget any further and there is no more sleep or brain cells or support available to help me function at some higher, more adequate level. I keep showing up, knowing that what I am bringing is only water, so much less than what I was offering previously and yet all that I have. Whatsoever He says to me, I do it. Unusual and strange and unacceptable as it may seem to offer. As the circumstances of my life change around me, or perhaps stay unbearably the same, I do my best to obey. I bring water to my people.
John 2: 8-10 - And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: [but] thou hast kept the good wine until now.
And somehow, (when I look back on these periods in my life I can see it so clearly, though it was not at all clear back then), what results is better than anything that my own training and preparation could have brought about. It was God. That better wine wasn’t me. I had less than nothing.
Because God. We bring our obedience to Him - not obedience to the demands of homeschooling or marriage, or obedience to what we think those demands are, or obedience to what others think our feast should look like, but obedience to HIM - and He works his transformation, an unseen interference unknown to those around us, and this is when the drink we pour out in service to the needs of the others becomes truly high quality, remarkable for its goodness.
John 2:11 - This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.
I’d like to conclude with an applicable quote from Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, a book that lives rent-free in my head.
“Saint Joseph was a great saint but she is the saint of saints, and when she did speak, what words.” Bella’s eyes were brimming. “Think! “They have no wine,’ she told him. It wasn’t a matter of life or death - it was just a party - but she knew the shame you feel if the food or drink runs out, and she dared to ask him, who could stop a storm, make waves still, raise people from the dead, to do that little thing. That’s what she does for all of us when we don’t dare, are too frightened, bewildered, to ask for ourselves. Even when he seemed to put her down, she knew he didn’t mean it. ‘Do whatever he tells you',’ she told the servants - and that’s what she has taught me,” said Bella. “‘Do whatever he tells you.’ I say that to myself twenty times a day.”