A Good Walk Ruined
I’ve just returned from my firstborn son’s first nine holes of golf. My dear wife gave this golf outing with Campbell to me for my birthday. There is any number of ways that a sly homeschooling dad could look at this as a part of my son’s education.
It was sort of like a physical education class. Though we enjoyed riding in a golf cart, one of the first assessments of the morning made by Campbell was, “Wow! That was a lot more tiring than I expected.”
I could have seen this adventure as a shared experience in the glory of God’s creation. We saw a deer running across the fairway. We saw a heron and a whole gaggle of geese. Despite all that, there were no birdie sightings.
Too often we not only turn something joyful like a father/son golf outing into a homeschooling technique, but we also turn something joyful like homeschooling into—at worst—a financial success technique, or—at best—a godly child-rearing technique.
I could have turned this into a class on physics, as I explained to him the nuances of force vectors and momentum.
Our little outing might have been considered part of his preparation for business. I may be a touch biased, but I think my son is rather charming, and I have little difficulty imagining him in some kind of sales role when he is grown—many a business deal is cut out on the links. Being able to play golf well may be as important to sales success as having a pianist for a wife is to pastoral success.
You could chalk the whole thing up to a learning exercise in learning. That is, I was teaching him to take instruction, a very valuable skill indeed for long-term success as a student.
You could even call it a history class, as the lessons I passed on were the lessons I learned, however badly, from my own father.
None of this, however, was on my mind out on the course, or now as I turn my attention back to my work. Transforming a game of golf into a technique, or a technology, for some other good, even if that other good is homeschooling, isn’t such a good thing to do. I played golf with Campbell for two simple reasons: because I love him, and I love to be with him. Or, to put it another way, I played golf with Campbell because I knew I would enjoy it, and because I knew he would enjoy it. There was no other grand goal.
Too often we not only turn something joyful like a father/son golf outing into a homeschooling technique, but we also turn something joyful like homeschooling into—at worst—a financial success technique, or—at best—a godly child-rearing technique. In the first instance, we reject government schools and private schools because we are convinced we can do a better job preparing our children for the finest colleges, so they can then attend the finest graduate schools, and then have their pick of the most prestigious jobs. In the second instance, we see homeschooling as an important part of the recipe we need to raise good children. We mix together homeschooling with a family-integrated church, modest clothes, courtship when the time comes, and a heavy dose of Elsie Dinsmore for the girls and G. A. Henty for the boys. Out of this soup, we think, will come the kind of children we can be proud of. While the first strategy may well succeed, and therefore fail, the second will probably just fail.
I trust we are more comfortable with the goal in the second instance than in the first, that we want our children to grow up godly rather than yuppie. I hope also that we see that many, if not all, the ingredients in the second version are quite fine things. In the Sproul house we homeschool, attend a family-integrated church, dress our children modestly, expect to be very much involved when the time comes for our children to marry, and have whole bookshelves groaning under the weight of Elsie and Henty. Not only that, but we are prayerful and hopeful that each of our children will grow ever more godly with each day.
Which is why we do not consider any of the choices we have made to be technologies. Instead we see them as expressions of our love for our children. We do not see our children as the product of our labors, but rather as the objects of our love. If our lifestyles are just factories designed to crank out children-widgets that will wow everyone down at the next homeschool convention, we have looked past the heart of the matter.
All the right choices in the world will not undo this wrong choice: seeing our children as means rather than as the end. We will not do well by them until we win their hearts. We will not win their hearts until they fill our own hearts. That is, our children will thrive as the godly seed we are called to raise when the hearts of the fathers are turned to their children. Loving our children may mean reading the right books to them. It may mean modest clothing. But it most assuredly means spending time with them, enjoying them, delighting in them.
Some Scottish wag got to the heart of the game of golf when he described it as “a good walk ruined.” I didn’t play well today. But because I was with Campbell my ruined walk turned out to be a tremendous blessing. Whether or not he ever learns to play the game, whether or not he learned any of the golfing techniques I tried to give him, I know he came home having learned something of the utmost import: his dad loves him. That made it a blessed walk indeed, for both of us.