I was driven to my knees this weekend. Well, actually, I mean that a couple ways. One in the not-so-pious sense. My mother, my wife, my daughter, and I all got the stomach virus.
The other in the traditional sense, and yet related to the former. Because I was not at work or church or play and spent virtually all my time sitting or lying down, I read R.C. Sproul, Jr.'s When You Rise Up.
Whatever your take on homeschooling, I would highly recommend this book. There are many excellent insights and challenging illustrations. I found myself convicted, not on homeschooling, but in my parenting approach to my children and even to my worldview in general.
You know, it's very easy to believe we have a biblical worldview. We can even take tests online to discover "how biblical" our worldview is. But how often are we only paying lip service to a worldview. How often are we really practicing it? How often do we really think and see and breathe and taste within that worldview?
The following is my own illustration and I may be about to prove I'm not smarter than a 5th grader by trying to remember my science here: But, IIRC, we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is absorbed by trees, which essentially filter it and then release it back into the atmosphere as oxygen. (Rather makes you want to plant more trees, doesn't it?) I don't remember if there is anything making new oxygen or if this oxygen is constantly recycling like this all around us since the beginning of time. But I was suddenly struck with the thought, I may have just inhaled oxygen into my own lungs that was once inhaled into the lungs of Joshua. Then I struck that the stories of the Bible can become contemptably familiar. This of no fault to the Bible, of course, but to our own frailty. Have these become just stories to me? Has my love of Bible study reduced it to dry academics? Or do I pick up my Bible this morning, read it, and with a sense that the same oxygen passing through the lungs of my Savior as he hung on the cross and said about his tormentors, "Father, forgive them," could be the same oxygen that rips from my own lungs when I snap at my child for snatching the remote.