The last time I posted here I subjected you to a couple of my home movies. Now I’m the first to know I don’t have one ounce of video expertise. I never even owned a video camera until three weeks ago! I like to think I’m getting better, but only time (and someone really objective—that is, my husband) will tell.

As I’ve carried my little camera around capturing footage everywhere I go, I’ve caught a lot of life on film—the good, the bad, the ugly, the frustrating, the hilarious, and the mundane. All the raw footage resides in iMovie on my iMac right now, but most of it will eventually make its way to the trash can, never to see the light of day.

Ah, the edit function. It isn’t that I don’t want to portray an accurate picture of life as we know it, it’s just that I don’t particularly want to showcase my own sin (or the sin of my children) for the world to see. It is a really great thing to draw the edit box around the 30 seconds of someone’s squabble and just hit delete. Presto! Sin gone!

Oh, if only life were that way. As it is, I have no edit function for the multitude of math struggles and the rest of life’s daily irritations. I can’t drag a yellow box around the things I wish were different and hit delete (even though I really wish I could).

But even if I could edit out my bad behavior, Scripture teaches that I still need a Savior. I wouldn’t see my need for a savior if I could deal with my sin myself. I wouldn’t view my kids as less needy of grace if I could edit out their sinful struggles. I wouldn’t pray and depend on God if I could just move my garbage to the trash can on my own.

Rest assured, I don’t see sin as God’s “gift” to me to learn to depend upon him more—James tells us that God does not tempt (though he does test). But I do see my lack of real-life editing skills as further proof for my desperate need for an editor—the Editor—with His skilled eye focused on editing my story into His, which is the greatest story ever told.

The name of His editing program? Sanctification.

For the past week and the next three, I’m participating in a promotion Chevrolet is doing in the St. Louis area. The company asked six local “mommy bloggers” to test-drive either the new Traverse or Equinox and blog (and video log) our experiences for them here. It’s called the “Mommy Madness” campaign.

It’s been fun so far. I’m definitely enjoying the new ride (our own van has 198,000 miles on it, and let’s just say that new car smell is gone), and I’m even getting handy with the Flip video camera Chevy gave me to record everything I do with it.

Oh, and I’ve also discovered that talking into a handheld camera is semi-therapeutic—a perk, if you will (and cheaper than an actual psychiatrist).

I’m doing my best to present my experiences in as good a light as possible for Chevy, but I confess there are some things I’ve thought twice about before blogging about them. Granted, they’re not big things (as you can see in the videos below, I had trouble figuring out how to open the gas cap and have had continual problems with the OnStar service), but I recognize there’s a part of me that wants to be careful so no one comes and hauls my (temporary) ride away too soon.

This got me thinking: If someone goes on and on and on about how they have it all together—how their homes are perfectly kept 100 percent of the time, how their children embody the essence of the fruits of the Spirit, how they never get to week three of a four-week budget and stress about how they are doing to make it that last week—that really doesn’t help me. Sure, I try to be happy for others when good things happen to them or when things are going well, but I know there’s more to life than just the good stuff.

I find I am most encouraged by others who are honest about the same road I’m riding on—for instance, the homeschooling mama who has seriously wondered if her children wouldn’t be better off learning in school after all because then they wouldn’t argue as much, another mama who understands how debilitating stacks of laundry and dishes can be, and yet another mommy who, just yesterday, experienced the same internal meltdown I experienced today.

These conversations—all actual ones I’ve had in the past week—are the things that build me up as a struggling homeschooler, mother, and wife. I don’t want to see perfection; I need to see imperfections redeemed. In other words, I need to know other mommies’ OnStar buttons sometimes work as little as the one in my new test-drive Chevy Traverse.

I need to see grace worked out in real lives, not test-drives. I’ve got plenty of “mommy madness” to go around; sometimes I need to know there are other mommies on the road.

Two completely unrelated incidents collided this week as to briefly take my breath away and reconsider life as I know it and wish it to be.

The first event came in the form of a trailer for the soon-to-be released film Motherhood. In the movie, Eliza Welch (played by Uma Thurman) is a “mommy blogger” struggling to find her voice in the midst of her life as a stay-at-home mother. In the trailer, her husband, Avery (played by Anthony Edwards), looks at his wife and says, “I want to know what makes you want to live a life with passion.”

When I watched the trailer (see below), tears welled up in my eyes. It could have been that particular day or just this particular season of life (the stay-at-home/homeschool mom season), but while deep inside I know what the answer should be (Jesus, right?), there are days I dread thinking about the question.

The second breath-taker: I recently decided to go through World Harvest Mission’s Sonship program. My book arrived this week and I began listening to the first lecture. I didn’t get very far before I had to pause again. In lecture one Jack Miller, the late 1970s pastor/evangelist, reads several verses from Galatians and then says, “The key question that the book of Galatians brings to us is this one: What happened to all your joy?”

Again, tears. What happened to all my joy? What makes me want to live a life with passion? If I can’t sincerely answer those questions with Jesus, then I’ve seriously lost touch of who I really am and was made to be. I can get so wrapped up in my identity—as a mom, as a homeschooler, as a writer—that I forget the very essence of the “why?” behind the “what?” of the “where?” and the “when” of the “how?” I do what I do.

And for Whom? That’s what I really need to ask, isn’t it? That’s the question: for Whom?

What makes me want to live a life with passion? What happened to all my joy?

How would you answer the questions? I’d love to hear from you.

Last week I went downstairs to pull some meat out of our deep freeze and noticed the seal on the door was no longer working. Our deep freeze has been on its last legs for a while, so I knew this moment was coming; I just didn’t expect it to arrive at 9:45 on a Tuesday morning. The last thing I wanted to do that morning was haul a quarter of a frozen cow upstairs to my sink, simultaneously announcing my plight on Facebook in hopes that somebody would come to my rescue by offering some freezer space.

The freezer needed to be defrosted. I just kept putting it off. But when the emergency hit, I sprang into action.

Just last night I took a closer look at my kitchen counter and saw a clear sticky substance gluing down everything from the food processor to the stack of small white boards I had left on the counter. I couldn’t quite figure it out, until I opened the cabinet above and realized that the last time my daughters experimented in the kitchen, they didn’t tightly close the lid on the corn syrup. Of course, the bottle got knocked over in the cabinet and now I have a(nother) mess to deal with.

The cabinet needed to be reorganized. I kept meaning to get to it. But now that there was an emergency, I sprang into action.

I’m sensing a theme here that I really don’t want to extrapolate into my relationships with my kids; yet just yesterday, one particular daughter and I had some relational struggles. At the urging of my husband, I decided to take her out for a little one-on-one time after picking her up from choir practice. It’s in these times that we’re both removed from the triggers of everyday life that tend to set us off—we see each other’s hearts and are able to catch a better glimpse of one another’s perspective.

Living this way isn’t easy; it’s much, much easier to close the freezer door and think, “I’ll just deal with that later,” or to look at the disorganized kitchen shelf and again, close the door for another time. But if I do that with my kids, I may find one of these days that not only is the mess still there, but the meat has spoiled and there are ants in the cabinet.

I don’t want to parent out of emergency. I pray God will attune my heart to the proper daily maintenance and initiative my family requires. Oh, and if anybody knows of a good deal on a deep freeze, let me know.

So did everyone survive this week? Obama’s school speech debate over now? OK, moving on . . . kind of.

One thing that really struck me in this week’s hubbub over the President’s speech to schoolchildren was how many parents were so volatile about their kids hearing it. It seemed many did not trust their schools (public or private) to adequately handle the speech and any potential discussion.

Here’s what I don’t understand: If you don’t trust an institution to do a good job of handling discussion in response to a 15-minute speech, what makes you trust them with the whole of your kids’ education the rest of the day/week/year? Especially if those teacher-led discussions are on the origin of the species or the great classics of literature?

My husband, Craig (yes, he of this previous WorldMagBlog post and this Terry Mattingly syndicated column), and I have always said we aren’t opposed to putting our homeschooled kids in public school. We believe that, with parental involvement, they could get a decent education at the ones in our area. But what will motivate me to put our kids in a Christian school if or when the time (and money) comes can be summed up in one word: trust—in the teachers, in the curriculum, and in the leadership.

If my kids are going to spend entire days with other adults in these formative years, I want them to be with teachers who have freedom to interact openly in spiritual discourse . . . with curriculum that doesn’t avoid hard questions and the accompanying hairy answers . . . with leaders who will challenge and mold my kids into leaders as well.

If trust isn’t firmly in place at the institution you’ve given authority and responsibility to teach your children, I’m genuinely curious: Why are your children there? Is it for financial reasons? Convenience reasons? Other reasons for a season? What is it?

Sharp new pencils, crisp clean notebooks, unsullied glue sticks, markers still inked up and ready to go. Fall has definitely descended upon Target.

This wonder is lost neither on me nor on my kids. When I see the preprinted lists of back to school supplies on the cardboard racks, I feel a slight twinge because I’m not required to follow a list to get what my kids need for school, and they miss out on the cultural rite of passage of selecting a new backpack and lunch box each year.

Still, there is something about joining these kids and parents digging through the bins of 25-cent crayons that brings us together, regardless of our schooling choice: We are thinking about and preparing for another season of educational intention with our kids.

Having a husband who is a schoolteacher is of great benefit to this homeschooling family. When he returned to the classroom two weeks ago (which seemed insanely early, but not unusual), it spurred a natural response in my own kids to resume their studies. When I announced to them that we would begin our own studies within four days, they were neither surprised nor disappointed; it was the natural course of things.

Similarly, I have become Facebook friends with a lot of people from my past who are now living out their lives in the field of public education. The homeschooling me of three years ago would have really been intimidated by this, but the homeschooling me of now knows that we’re not enemies; we’re both doing what we believe is the best thing for our kids. Their shared enthusiasm inspires me to be a better teacher in my own home, and I’d like to hope my zeal does the same for them in their classrooms.

When I see my friends with children in the local public school gather together weekly to pray for their children and their teachers, it strikes something very deep inside me. I’m proud of them for doing that; I need to do the same within my own school at home.

Proverbs 27:17 says, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” In the sometimes-fierce educational philosophy debates, the tendency is to be sharpened so much that we have a dangerous edge. I think if we allow ourselves to drop our defenses, we would see we actually have much to learn from one another . . . and much to teach our children by doing so.

I have a dirty little homeschooling secret: My kids take standardized tests every year.

I can hear the gasps among all the homeschoolers—some because we participate in that educational evil, the standardized test; others because we do it every year. Either way, I find myself defending our decision more than I ever thought I would.

I understand many homeschoolers, for reasons legitimate and otherwise, don’t want to be accountable to the state when it comes to educating their children. I also get that standardized tests don’t account for the differences in how many families study core subjects. Finally, I believe that being my kids’ teacher and discussing what we learn gives me an intuitive understanding of what they know (I don’t need a test to tell me).

But there are benefits to objective analysis. My oldest daughter learned to read at the expected age of kindergarten and first grade; she finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe all on her own when she was 6. But she hated math to the point of daily tears. Not wanting to stress her out, I let math slide that year and focused on her strengths. Not surprisingly (though I wouldn’t have known it without the Stanford test she took that May), by the time she finished third grade, her reading level was in the high school range, but her math level was stuck in first grade.

I didn’t need a test to tell me that. I knew she excelled at the one and struggled with the other. But having it objectively stated on the test results sheet was very productive for all of us. Having that mark of first grade level on my otherwise intelligent, entering-fourth grade daughter spurred me to action. It spurred her to action as well. We helped her set some goals for herself for the school year, among which was to raise her math score on the standardized test the following year.

Fast-forward 365 days and a whole lot of hard work: My daughter’s math scores were four grades higher than they were the year before. This was cause for much rejoicing.

Again, I didn’t need the test to tell me she had made improvement, but honestly, I didn’t know exactly how much of an improvement she’d made until I saw an objective analysis of her ability. Whereas the test from the year before surprised me by how much she didn’t know, the current year’s test surprised me by how much she had learned since. And it was encouraging.

Some would say that experience is the best teacher, but what we’ve found out is that it isn’t experience that is the best teacher; evaluated experience is. For our family, that’s what standardized testing—three days, once a year—helps provide.

After years of bad vacation experiences, our family broke its losing streak last week: We drove to Florida, seeing friends and spending five relaxing and enjoyable days at the ocean. It was a great trip for many reasons, not the least of which was the break from the tyranny of the urgent. We rested, we relaxed, we renewed. Most importantly, we reset.

I’m all about the family reset button. Certain seasons of the year just spiral way out of control and we need someone to push the reset button to get things back to the way they should be. Though technically still summer, I feel like we’re better prepared for the fall than we otherwise would have been had we just kept barreling headfirst toward August with our heads down and our collective breath sucked in. We needed the break.

I do have a problem with my reset button, though. It is usually eight parts mental and two parts practical. This time I asked Craig to help me with the reset. Craig is a systems guy. He not only makes plans, he sticks to them. He is the very picture of functionality. I am more the picture of flippancy.

I’m very systems-challenged, but it isn’t for lack of trying. I’ve tried organizers; I’ve got a whole shelf of time-management books; I’ve bookmarked similar websites; I’ve got a stack of planners I’ve both bought and printed myself. You name it, I’ve probably tried it. I just can’t keep going with anything (hence the need for the more than occasional reset).

In lieu of fancy planners or software programs this year (I’ve tried those, too), I’m going old school in keeping a hand-written to-do list on a homemade “white board” (actually an old window frame with cute fabric placed behind the glass panels). The white board (or “window board,” as I’m calling it) is hanging on the wall in my kitchen above my computer—ever present and (hopefully) ever motivating. I have eight squares in which to narrow down the categories of my life: home, office, school, personal, writing, seminary, and crafts. (Yes, for those counting, I have one square unclaimed, which Craig suggests I leave open so I always have one open. It’s a margin thing, he says.)

So the reset is on, but I’m nervous. I know my tendency to start strong but soon fizzle. So I’ll rest in Lamentations 3:22-23, which says, “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” That should be about all the reset I really need.

In the region where I live, there is a hot-topic homeschooling case going on in the courts and in the news. The case involves a homeschooling couple going through a divorce after 21 years of marriage. Though at its heart is divorce, homeschooling unfortunately has become the issue. It is a really sad scenario.

The mother asserts that the father was supportive of the educational status of his children . . . that is, until he filed for divorce and realized he would have to support two households if his soon-to-be ex-wife didn’t give up homeschooling and go back to work. The father asserts the mother is only homeschooling to meet her own emotional needs and he wants to put the children in a private school.

Clearly the two have issues. Sadly, however, their issues are taking a backseat to the very real fact that their two teenaged children have become the reason they’ve made their issues so very public. It appears right now that the court is going to side with the father.

I’m a member of two homeschooling email groups, and both of them are readying their respective troops to show up to protest what’s happening. As much as I love homeschooling my children and am prepared to do what it takes to protect my right to do so, I’m not sure this hill is one I’m ready to die on. What this case needs is mediation . . . prayer . . . reasoning together . . . understanding . . . cooperation . . . repentance. What it doesn’t need is a bunch of scared homeschoolers picketing on the courthouse lawn.

If you read the comments on this St. Louis Post Dispatch article, you’ll see just how polarized these discussions have become. Some would make this story their case in point for why homeschooling should be outlawed, drawing fierce response from the homeschool-at-all-costs-because-public-schools-produce-blithering-idiots crowd. Neither group will listen to the other’s perspective, and as a result, neither is helpful to the discussion.

There are two sides to every story (though in this case, there are probably four). Without having lived with that family for 21 years, we will not ever really know those sides. We do know they are in need not only of a fair judge in St. Charles County, Mo., but also the only One capable of healing all things broken.

This case shouldn’t be a homeschooling litmus test, regardless of which side of the issue one is on; it’s worst case for both sides, and worst cases aren’t what we should be comparing—best cases should be. For the parents, for the kids, for all of us, this is not it.

What does the story of a philandering governor in South Carolina have to do with a simple homeschooling mom in Missouri? Not much unless you consider that this homeschooling mom is also a married woman and takes to heart stories of vows gone awry. My heart goes out to Jenny Sanford and their four boys. My heart goes out to families everywhere experiencing grief such as this.

It was in this recent recounting of the Sanford affair I read the following: “During an emotional interview at his Statehouse office with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Sanford said Chapur is his soul mate, but he’s trying to fall back in love with his wife.”

I think that was the saddest thing I’ve read of this whole story. If the mistress is the true soul mate, what was the wife?

As I was driving to the store the other day, the Sanfords’ story came to mind again and I thought to myself, “Boy, am I glad Craig isn’t a politician.” And then I remembered the 2006 Ted Haggard scandal. This thought was immediately followed by, “Oh yes, and I’m also glad he isn’t a pastor.”

As if being a politician or a pastor are the only two professions in which otherwise happily married men are brought to public shame . . . as if men are the only ones to fall.

This isn’t a newsflash for any of you, but not a single one of us is immune from sexual sin—not the politician, not the pastor, not the Christian schoolteacher, not the conservative magazine writer, not the homeschooling mom—not a single one.

I can be smug in my almost 13 years of marriage feeling safe and immune, but this is foolish, as areas given the least attention tend to be the areas most prone to cracks. I’m reminded once again that I need to be the one praying for my husband, and together, we need to be praying for our marriage. Few others are going to do this for us (and isn’t it better to protect than to repair?).