43. Shaping a New Path

© 2021 Daniel Yordy
March 2009 – June 2010

This chapter includes a number of things taking place through the last year we were at Family Christian, things unrelated to any difficulties of mine. Besides covering the next year of my life, this chapter is also an attempt to share my reasons for writing and the first year and a half of sending out the Christ Our Life letters, thus I go back and forth on differing topics.

Family Life
So much of this account is about me, but when I look through my wife’s calendars and pictures, what she recorded is about the children, our visits with family and friends, and our many pets.

As I look through these years thus far, I see that I have left out many things we did together, things that were part of the children’s lives. Yet a home and yard filled with happy and adventurous children watched over by a loving wife was very much my environment. I want to share some of this briefly with you, though I will not try to place what happened when.

All four of our children are musically inclined. We had continued the girls in piano lessons through these years. Katrina also expressed an interest in the violin, so we bought her one. It did not take her long with a violin teacher, however, to discover that maybe she did not want to play a violin after all. Johanna continued advancing in her piano studies. We took her up from one level of teacher to another, until she was learning under a master pianist who lived in the Kingwood area.

Johanna was so brilliant on the piano. I could listen to her for hours and never tire; her music was to me like the sound of water running over rocks, the most beautiful sound I have known. She played the piano formally in the graduation ceremony for Kyle and his classmates. People coming in were stunned to see that the classical music they were hearing was coming from a ninth-grade girl. It was one proud dad sitting there beaming.

Kyle loved the guitar. He participated in the praise leadership in the chapel services and had begun to lead the praise at times. James took to tooting on a trumpet and soon switched over to the French Horn, which he played for several years in school bands and orchestras.

We went to various parks as often as we could, including overnight camping trips to state parks on a regular basis. We went to the Renaissance Fair a second time, but this second time, Maureen and I rented “medieval” costumes as well. It’s just so much fun to be part of the presentation rather than just a gawking onlooker.

Our house was often filled with girls, Johanna and Katrina’s friends from school. I look through all the pictures and see joy and kindness and sharing, and my heart is glad in the goodness of God.

Kyle went out for track during his four years of high school. Johanna also joined track, but only in her eighth grade year. We went to their track meet near Angleton, Texas that year, but Kyle then participated in a major state-wide track meet in Waco in the fall of 2008, the first semester of his senior year. His grandpa, Claude Mack, had been a sprinter in high school as well. Kyle placed fourth in the state meet, and his record is still on the walls at Family Christian.

In March, James was injured at school. Another boy had jumped on him in gym class and broken his collar bone. Maureen and I took him to the emergency room at the children’s hospital in the Houston medical center. We waited all night, that is, Maureen did with James. I went home for a few hours of sleep through the early morning. I returned, then, and James finally had his appointment later in the morning, having suffered without help the whole night. After taking x-rays, the doctor told us that there was nothing they could do. When we mentioned seeing a chiropractor, they laughed as if such a thing is ridiculous. They gave James an expensive sling, charged us $1500, and sent us home.

We then took James to our chiropractor, now that we had clear x-rays. Two visits and maybe $100 later and he was all better again with the pain gone and the slight fracture able to heal. The difference between the scam and the real was pretty stark to us.

YGuide
Besides working on “Micro-Business for HighSchoolers,” I also started a website in the fall of 2008 which I called “YGuide” at yguide.org, which no longer exists. I had come up with the idea since my time at Lubbock Christian University as an expression of my desire to create my own approach to self-directed education, the Yordy Guide to Learning History, etc., becoming “Y”-Guide. Except the YGuide website was my attempt to give form to a community of Christ in the expression of every part of “village” life.

Following is a portion of the front page of the website, similar to how it was in its beginning. I signed onto Clickbank affiliate program and filled many pages with ads for e-books on the various crafts found in each of the categories. I did make some money from people who bought a blacksmith program and a grape growing program. I also wrote a number of articles on these topics which I posted at ezinearticles.com, some of which are still there.

YGuide - A Homesteading Community And Journal

The delights of strong and healthy children, warm and inviting homes, the aroma of herbs, the cackle of chickens, the richness of the soil, shaping wood into beauty, tinkering with machinery, the comfort of a full and well-stocked pantry, the beauty of growing things.

Dream of a simple life, of the increase of the fruits of the earth and of your labor.

Share with others from your abundance.
 

The Homestead	The Herbarium	The Wood Shop	The Healthy Home	The Home School
The Farmstead	The Garden	The Metal Shop	The Home Office	The Home Studio

I developed this website through 2008 and 2009, adding other things to it. I did not continue with it aggressively, however, partly because most of what was on offer was not worth the money asked, though a few were. My main drive turned elsewhere, then, by the late summer of 2009.

A Sad Outcome
I must conclude the outcome of “Micro-Business for HighSchoolers.” In order for my course to be complete, I advertised for a business-minded writer on a free-lance website. I needed someone who could look at the entire package with a business eye and think through all of its parts to tell me if there was anything missing, or if any part might be made better. A lady from Dallas assured me that she could meet my requirements, and by her resume and reviews I believed her.

After signing a contract with this lady, I sent her my stuff, including the outline for the entire course. I instructed her that I did not want her to do any editing of small mistakes, as I was not paying her for that. (It was a rough draft, full of all the little mistakes that you fix only AFTER you know it’s what you want.) I asked her to look across the whole course to give me her thoughts.

What I received back was small edit corrections as well as personal ridicule for having those small mistakes in my writing. When I asked her for what she had agreed to do, an overview with a business mind, she replied that she could not possibly do that. I paid her and said that I had no more work for her to do. (All three of these individuals who did not produce for me together cost me hundreds of dollars.)

Then, as I continued working with Karen Corey in completing and polishing the first three months of the course, I went onto the AWAI website and asked for a copywriter to write the sales landing page for an ad I planned to place on LewRockwell.com, a site read by the kind of people who might want this learning experience for their children. I wanted a fresh and different mind to come up with the argument that would convince people to buy. I hired a lady from the Midwest who had graduated from the AWAI program and paid her six hundred dollars to write my landing page. It was okay, not quite what I had hoped, but good enough.

We launched the course, offering it to parents who wanted to purchase it for their teenagers, when we were one-third complete. I believed that we could stay ahead of any students in the completion of the rest of the course before they finished what was ready for them. I then purchased a month-long ad on LewRockwell.com for another $600. This might have been June of 2009. During that month thousands and thousands of people clicked on my ad and went to the landing page that offered to them “Micro-Business for HighSchoolers.” Thousands looked, and not one expressed any interest at all. Not one.

Then Karen Corey in California, who was the one truly useful participant in this project and who enjoyed being part of it, sent me an email that she was not able to work for a time because she was in the hospital with pneumonia. She seemed to get better, and wrote a lesson or two more for me. And then I never heard from her again; no one responded to my emails. I do not believe that she “quit.” My only conclusion was that she had passed away.

If you were to look at all my course, and all the work I did on it you would see that it is beautiful, that it is brilliant, and that, in the right context, it would benefit teenagers tremendously and be a far superior way to focus the final years of high school – business driven learning. But what I did not know how to do was make it able to support my family.

Christian Connections
In March of this year I came across a website blog by a brother in England named Chris Welch. To my astonishment, I read in his latest blog of his desire to see the word taught by Norman Grubb on union with Christ merged together with the word taught by Sam Fife and the move on the revelation of Jesus Christ, the very thing I had begun to do.

I was very timid, and it would be several more years before I could see my letter writing as anything more than my own desire to know the Lord expressed through very rough drafts that I shared with a small number of people. I certainly did not view myself as anyone of consequence in the larger picture of the Church. Nonetheless, I sent Chris Welch an email inviting him to look through the slowly accumulating articles on my website at dyordy.com. He replied cheerily, appreciating greatly what he found there. It turns out he had been in the move there in London for a short while in the early years and had known John Clarke and others.

This was a milestone for me, in connecting with Chris Welch, for he soon started posting  things I had written on his blog and sending more readers my way. I was filled with excitement, for this connection brought good fellowship and interaction with others inside the word I was writing at that time. I gained new subscribers to my Christ Our Life letters.

Not long after I began communicating with Chris Welch, he convinced me to sign onto Facebook and join the fellowship there. I finally did that, and was quickly “friended” by many of my Yordy cousins with whom I had not had much connection before. This was a wonderful benefit. Facebook, however, puts me out into a very “unsafe” place, and so I had to take occasional breaks from that flow of conversation.

Then, through an article posted on LewRockwell.com, I connected with a pastor in Oregon who promoted Christian community. On his website, he enabled connections with people of like minds to get together. Through these connections, Maureen and I contacted a couple living in The Woodlands, just north of Houston. Their names were Sandy and Richard Roberts. I think this would have been in the fall of 2009.

We visited with Sandy and Richard in their home a number of times over the next year and found much in common concerning the vision of Christian community. Sandy, especially, loved all that we had to share about our experiences in community. Although they expressed an eagerness towards being a part of a small gathering of people on a rural property, in the end, it seems, as is so often the way, that actual commitment with all of its costs in every direction was maybe not quite in their consideration.

It was Sandy who said to me, “I don’t believe in ‘leadership.’” Yet as I pondered that statement, I realized that, in gathering together in community, saying such a thing would be an act of taking control.

Meanwhile, I wrote an article on the topic of community and the need we have to gather together in rural places. I then received an email from Fred Pruitt explaining to me why such things as Christian community and homeschooling have nothing to do with Christ as us. I replied with the question – if Christ lives as me, than how would the things that I valued not be of Him. I also said that I am not following him or Norman Grubb. I received a second email, a bit sharper, rebuking me for instructing him on union with Christ. Although this exchange was overwhelming for me, Fred’s words were not personally hostile or controlling.

In the fall of 2009, I invited Fred again to our home, as he was coming through Houston accompanied by two other men who had been with him the first time. I also invited John and Crystal Mancha to that meeting with them. We received them gladly and any difficulty there might have been was put into the goodness of Christ. The sharing felt a little rushed to me, however, again, not the kind of impartation I expected from those who purported to know the living God. John Mancha did say that he enjoyed it, however.

Nonetheless, I was struck by one of the other brothers saying that “Christ as me” means we have no need of any gifts or anointings of the Holy Spirit. This ignorance of the nature of God and the construction of the human was astonishing to me. Although I continued email communication with Fred from time to time, and continued to gain much understanding reading his articles, I knew that I would not know God as I wanted from those connections.

Also, a couple of those from the Norman Grubb connection who were on my  mailing list posted letters of mine on their blogs. One sister posted “Practicing the Presence of God,” which sent many readers my way. Another brother asked to post an article, but told me that he had removed every occurrence of “Jesus” and replaced it with “Christ.” At the time, I thought only – “Well, Christ as you.” Once I understood what it really meant, several years later, I would have graciously refused.

Then, Bonnie Morris of Arizona communicated with me more often than any other reader. She replied to most of my letters with warm encouragement and blessing. I had connected with her through her website, A Bridge Builder, but she closed that down. Because I believe in corporate ministry, I asked her if she wanted to post her articles on my website, and so I made a section just for her articles, with a link so that readers could communicate directly with her.

My Writing
Why did I write and continue writing the Christ Our Life letters, almost all of which found their place into one or another of my books? What was my drive and purpose? What did I hope to gain from this endeavor?

My first reason was that I was fed up with a “Christian theology” that denied the biggest verses of the gospel and gave them no place. I was fed up with the discovery, over and over through the years, that the definitions of “what the Bible says” that are considered “orthodox” were simply not supported by what the Bible actually says, in particular the non-Biblical concept that salvation is all about “going to heaven.” I was fed up with the practice of twisting verses to “prove” doctrinal points, even when those verses are pointing to something else, something more glorious than anyone considers.

Nonetheless, I approached the Bible by the practice of NOT forcing my own definitions upon it or of attempting to “figure it out.” Rather, I hid the words of the Bible in my heart over decades, that those words might be what they are inside of me.

And so, through these first few years of writing, the great issue of “how do I know that I am right” hit me regularly, not so much from others, but inside of me.

Yet here’s the thing. I find so many BIG things in the gospel that no one knows, no one teaches or fits into their way of seeing anything. What is that? Why are verses central to Paul’s gospel thrown out as “heresy?” Why are verses twisted so badly to say even the opposite of the words? How could Buddy Cobb preach over and over on the jeopardy of the gospel from Hebrews 3 and NEVER look beyond the “IF” to see what God actually requires?

My heart ached to know the Word, what God actually says, and what He means by what He says. This is the first reason why I could not stop writing. Yet I never imagined that I would know the Word by any intellectual “prowess.” God had so forged in me His meaning of “the Words that I speak to you are Spirit and they are life,” that, since my twenties, I have never considered attempting to know the Bible intellectually. The fact that I remember things does not signify an intellectual approach to Scripture.

The second reason I wrote was that, in and of myself, I am utterly lost. I cannot find my way; I cannot save myself. When I write, I hear Jesus singing in my heart, and I am determined to know Him inside of me as real to me as Don Howat or Abel Ramirez ever were. The only way God has given me to know Jesus Sent into me is to write. And so if I write endlessly, it’s because I love to be with Jesus.

The third reason I wrote was that I was becoming aware, not so much mentally, but in my heart, of the extensive accusations against God found in Christian and human thinking, that he knows evil, that He “punished Jesus” instead of “punishing us,” that He is responsible for terrible things happening in people’s lives. I had found those who demonstrate that God’s judgment is for a season and not forever, and that it carries great purpose coming out from love. But then many of those same people wanted to claim that Satan did not “fall,” but that God created him evil in the first place. They use a couple of lines from Scripture to make this savage accusation against God, not realizing that they mean, then, that all evil must come through Jesus.

As I said, this agony in my heart was not so much known to me mentally, but I became deeply disturbed. And so I found myself with a great need inside to know how everything in the Bible can be true in an entirely different way than by the definition of a “God” who “knows evil” and who brings forth hurt out from His own being.

The fourth reason that I wrote, which was the reason that I dared to send out my letters to other people, not an easy thing for me, was that I had to do something to call forth the community of my heart, to gather together those precious holy ones who would be part of the second part of the covenant by which I bound God to myself, that I would walk with a people who know God.

Often, as I sent out my letters, I was hit with the autistic fear of stepping “out of my place.” I endured much pain, simply over the thought of “exposing” myself to ridicule. But I sent my letters anyway, out from my determined faith in God, regardless. And in sending every letter out, I believed what God says, that as I “cast my bread upon the waters, so it will come back to me.”

During my final months at Family Christian, I read through the Annie visions, I Looked and Saw Visions of God, for a third time. This time, they became brand-new to me. The first two times, although they had presented to me a glorious vision of knowing God, yet they had also seemed to place that vision far away from me. As I read them this time, I saw union with Christ throughout, and the vision of knowing God seemed right at hand.

Yet, in reading them again, I was struck, as I had always been, with the awfulness of being given an opportunity by God and then failing to enter into that opportunity such that God removes it and never offers it again. In my desperation, I looked across the years of my life, and I said, “NOT SO.” And thus I wrote this line, “All of His ways concerning me are perfect. He has never led me wrong; He has never not led me.” You see, I cannot have anything God offers me of Himself to be lost to me. I cannot have such a thing at all.

And so, I did not write for others, and I did not even write “for God,” as if human endeavor could benefit Him in some fleshy way. I write always for myself, that I might know God, and that somehow, by His grace, I might walk with a people who know God.

The Progression of Christ Our Life
Several years ago, I created a list of every Christ Our Life letter I sent out in order, with the dates. Then, when my last computer cratered and the hard drive froze up, that list was one of the few things I lost. I no longer know the exact order in which I wrote the progression of letters from January of 2009 to August of 2011. I will do the best I can, then, to piece it together.

I did not assemble any of my letters into books until after I self-published Kingdom Rising in late 2012. For that reason, I did not write through this time with any final “book” in mind.  

For the first several months, my writing bounced around without following any specific series. I would often write in response to questions or comments coming from different readers. Rita Robinson in Wisconsin often asked me questions concerning things that I said that countered things she had heard in ultimate reconciliation circles. Bill Wilkerson of Virginia was deeply drawn to what I taught and asked a number of deep questions. One of Bill’s questions, probably in the late summer of 2009, sparked my first series of letters on a single topic, and that was “The Life of the Age to Come.”

At the same time, I received a number of antagonistic responses. Such responses always bothered me immensely, like a grain of sand under an oyster’s shell. I cannot leave such responses alone, but I must coat them with truth and coat them with truth until I have written a gentle response of Christ and thus resolved my understanding of the issue that was raised.

The single most important such antagonistic response came through my Facebook correspondence with Chris Welch. Someone had seen on my website the statement, “God sent Jesus to make us just like Himself.” They challenged Chris that, “the Bible says no such thing,” and that we ought to go only by the Bible “like the Bereans.”

I can tell you that this REALLY bothered me, especially since few people are more “Berean” than I and since most who say, “The Bible says,” really don’t know what it says. Yet it was this agony that birthed in me the concept of “the most important verses of the Bible.” And so I wrote my response and sent it to this brother. Rather than responding to “what the Bible actually says,” he replied with a list of doctrinal talking points, wanting my response. I did not reply.

In the fall of 2009, I began the series of letters that would form part of The Great Story of God. Readers who had connected with me through Chris Welch really enjoyed this series on the meaning of story. Then in the spring of 2010, I wrote the series titled “The Unveiling.” My purpose in writing this was to bring my understanding of what God says concerning the revelation of Christ in the closing out of this age into my present knowledge of union with Christ.

YGuide Academy
Upon leaving my teaching position at Family Christian Academy at the end of May, 2009, I was no longer emotionally or physically able to meet the requirements that any full-time employer would have for a forty-hour work week. I was then 52 years of age. From that time until now I have not had a full-time job.

I left Family Christian intending to devote myself to creating an online business that would bring in money passively 24/7. Thousands of people all over the world were doing just that and I was certain that I could do the same.

Yet it seemed that “Micro-business for HighSchoolers” would not be that business, at least for the moment, and so I set it aside. Don’t imagine, however, that any discouragement ever remains with me long. Give me a few weeks and I’m back at it again, “knocking on new doors,” expecting something to open. As Alexander Pope said, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”

And so, sometime in the middle of the summer of 2009, I must have been driving long distance somewhere while drinking coffee, because that’s where all my best ideas come. This time an idea came to me, an idea that is so beautiful to me and into which I poured my heart and soul and countless hundreds of hours of work.

You see, I love teaching middle school kids the best, even though they take more emotional energy than any other group. At the same time, the schooling needs of my children, who were now back to homeschooling, were pressing on me. But I had long since come to the conviction, as you can see since my time in Lubbock, that chaining middle school children to desks all day and to rote busy-work, filling out meaningless worksheets, is a crime. It is child abuse.

Children of that age, especially, need to be DOING something they love with their hands.
To make a long story short, I decided to create “Project Guides” for project-led learning that I would offer to homeschooling families as well as use for my own children. The first one I wrote, as a trial guide, I wrote with Katrina in mind, and that was “A Project Guide for Raising Rabbits.”

Here is part of a brochure I wrote before the end of July, 2009.

Project-Led learning weaves the learning objectives of schooling into a range of projects that are interesting and valuable to the life of a middle school child. With all of their hearts, middle-school-age children want to explore the world in which they live. They want to make things, to work with their hands, to experience things. A child wants to fix a car, build a go-cart, cut mommy’s hair, make a dress, build a dog house, grow some funny looking gourds, plant some flowers, ride a horse, spend a day deep-sea fishing, work a sail-boat, build a canoe, go fishing with Grandpa, show a steer at the fair. Discover what project-led learning can do for your eleven to fourteen-year-old child.

Project-led learning bridges between the structured elementary years and the character- driven high school years. It turns the junior high years from a time of boredom and frustration into a time of wonder and excitement. Raise rabbits, make candles, create a movie, read great literature, build robots, play a cello, go out for little league baseball, repair a car engine. And all the while, learn reading and writing, math and science, history and art!

~~~

I proposed a series of Project Guides written specifically for individual homeschoolers. My hope was that once these were written with individual children in mind, they would be useful to many. And so I started with a boy in New York who wanted to grow a garden, build a greenhouse, and enter his pumpkins in a fair. In actuality, his mother paid me to write ten project guides for him, one in each category of learning.

Then a girl in Florida wanted a project guide for studio dance and another for growing herbs for fragrance. A boy in Illinois wanted to study nature at his local park. A boy in Washington state wanted to train his dog and to go camping in the woods. A mother in Florida asked for a project guide to teach her son how to “submit to the elders in the church.” I compromised by writing one called “Visiting the Elderly,” which is a superb project. I also wrote “Raising Chickens” for this young man.

I wrote “Martial Arts Karate” and “Playing Football.” I wrote “A Microscope in the Garden” for the boy in New York. Then I wrote “A Microscope & the World of Bugs” for the boy in Illinois. Another boy wanted to build a computer, and a boy in Australia wanted to fix small engines. I wrote several versions of “Design and Build Backyard Structures” for different boys. I made this a “math” guide, that is, designing and measuring.

I wrote “A Sewing Business,” “A Woodworking Business,” and “A Metal Smithing Business.” The list continues. In all, I wrote for maybe eight or ten different homeschooled kids, several different guides for each, boys and girls, in the differing categories.

I put a lot of work into these guides. I spent time at Border’s Book Store, flipping through books on various subjects in order to choose the best for that age of learner. I searched the Internet for the right articles and videos. If you would like to see three updated versions of these project guides, you can find them at the following link. – www.thelearningconservatory.com

Just click on “Project Led Learning” on the right. Then, “Natural, Physical, and Scientific Projects.” You will find the link to a guide on each of those pages. 

At that time I called my school “YGuide Academy” and put all the articles about this way of homeschooling on a website of that name. I advertised in various homeschool outlets, and, in fact, I wrote articles for a homeschool website for a year. I also got some of my clients through homeschool articles that I posted on ezinearticles.com.

A Peculiar Love
Again, I am bringing our regular weekly service at Lakewood Church one piece at a time through these several chapters. When the account is finished, one could take each of these descriptions of Lakewood services, put them together as one service, and multiply that by the around 350 times we attended there.

Here, I want to show you the paths we walked to and from church, that is, about 700 times over seven years. You will find mention of the second path many times in my writing; I now realize just how much this path holds a place in my heart.

The red line to the right was our walk for the first couple of years. Then, the red line to the left was our walk for the last four years. The right yellow line shows the path of thousands of people underground. The left yellow line shows the flow of hundreds of people down the street. The mauve line on the far left is the route by which I drove in, dropped off the family, and then parked the car at the X.

And so, we would sit down right after the service ended and wait until the rows behind us were cleared. Then we went up the steps inside the auditorium to the second level. There we crossed the flow of hundreds of people heading towards the main doors and the yellow lines out. We left the church building through doors on the north side and crossed a covered parking area that was not part of Lakewood parking. We crossed a little-used street and then entered the grassy area with fountains of water as you see in this picture. We then crossed a slightly busier two streets and on to our car. When we left, we took two right turns and encountered no Lakewood traffic.

I placed a star on the map at the top of the large glass building which is on the left in this picture. If you had stood on top of that building at the Star most every Sunday afternoon for four years, you would have observed hundreds of people streaming down the sidewalk on one side, and each Sunday, the same one family walking alone through the green grass and bright sun and fountains of water. I loved that path, for Maureen and I would walk together arm in arm, with Kyle and Johanna ahead of us, also walking arm in arm and chatting merrily together, and ahead of them Katrina and James would run and alternate between scrapping and walking together visiting.  And coming out from Joel’s exhortation each Sunday, we walked this path filled with the hope and expectation of God.

You see, we loved all those other people and blessed them with all our hearts. We were just going a different way.

Our Children’s Schooling
Kyle turned 18 this August; he was now an adult. The first time after his eighteenth birthday that he asked me, “Dad, can I go out to –?,” I replied with, “Why are you asking me? You’re an adult, do what you want, just let me know on your way out the door.” The shocked look on his face was one of the best enjoyments of my life, something I got to experience twice more with Johanna and Katrina. (James was another matter, but that’s several years ahead.)

From his enjoyment of playing guitar at Family Christian, Kyle also had an interest in recording music, and thus, audio engineering. The best audio engineering college program in Texas just happened to be South Plains College several miles west of Lubbock. And so Kyle applied and was accepted into South Plains College. We arranged with Lois that Kyle would rent a room in her home. Before the end of August, Kyle packed his stuff and ventured back to Lubbock and to college.

Because I was not working full time, we lived primarily on the good salary Maureen was bringing home caring for Miss Ruth in Pasadena. We could not afford any payments for our remaining three children to continue at Family Christian, and so we planned to home school them for the 2009-2010 school year. Johanna was in tenth grade this year, Katrina in seventh, and James in fourth.

I had created reading lists of books in differing categories that I thought should be read by a young person at each grade level. Johanna was a reader, and so I put her into a schedule of working through reading those listed books she had not yet read. I also bought her a large college textbook on world history. What I did not know, however, mostly because I was oblivious, was that this school year became a sad time for Johanna. She had been close to so many friends at Family Christian, and now she was alone in her room every day.

I ask forgiveness of Johanna for my thoughtlessness. Nonetheless, in looking at the path of her life, I realize just how necessary this year was for her, for the Lord Jesus was switching her heart towards the path He had for her, which was very different than for our other children. You see, Johanna was born in the praises of Christian Community in the wilderness.

Katrina had expressed an interest in raising rabbits, and thus I wrote my “Raising Rabbits Project Guide” with her in mind. We were not able to get rabbits until the summer of 2010, however. Katrina also liked nature as well as sketching and drawing. I wrote the “Drawing Sketches Project Guide” for her and directed her through its exercise. I had her study and draw the things of nature in our back yard. Katrina also went through the literature reading I had listed out, even though it started at the eighth grade level. She tells me now that she did not read Oliver Twist because she did not understand it.

Katrina had found math frustrating and difficult, and so we skipped math for this year and the next. My theories were proven right when she returned to a formal classroom in ninth grade and suddenly understood and did well in math. When you try to force things on children when their brains are not ready, you succeed only in making them hate to learn.

James soon excelled at looking like he was doing something while doing nothing at all. Of truth, I had read some of the arguments for “unschooling” and agreed with them, at least for a year or two scattered throughout the school years. The result of doing nothing academic for a whole year would come when James went back into the formal classroom in the fall of 2010.

In actuality, I am very glad that all of my children experienced different kinds of schooling back and forth through all their school years, public school, Christian school, and homeschool. It gave them a full sense of distinction and difference, that there are many things in life. In complete contrast, those who grow up in only one setting imagine that is all there is, an untrue fiction. Our children experienced as much of the variation of life as we could give them, and I see the fruit and wisdom of that path in their present persons.

More Family Things, Spring and Summer 2010
In May of 2010, I won the lottery! Somewhere around $3500, if I remember rightly. To celebrate we went down to Academy Sports & Outdoor Supplies and purchased a large family tent, a campsite kitchen and propane stove, cots, and other camping supplies. Then we headed into the hill country towards Pedernales Falls State Park. We passed through Brenham on the way and toured the Blue Bell ice cream factory as part of the children’s homeschooling. We splurged in their ice cream store afterwards.

We arrived at our campsite after dark and tried to set up our new tent, not knowing what we were doing. At that moment the clouds dumped heavy rain upon us. We gave up and drove down the road to the first motel. After a great night in a cozy motel, we returned to our campsite to a sunny morning and finished setting up our tent correctly. We might have spent two nights there. But we hiked the Pedernales river, clambering over the rocks around the falls. I even spent time myself swimming in the warm water.

After our time at the park, we drove north to Longhorn Cavern State Park. We spent several hours there, touring the caverns and the large historical rock fort and eating our lunch in the park restaurant. This was a very worthwhile place to visit.

Then, on the way back home, we angled southwest to the Bastrop area. We had found a lady in that area who had rabbits for sale, the specific breed we wanted to get for Katrina. We spent a couple of hours at their beautiful rustic place in the countryside, in their country home and touring their little “farm” in the woods. We purchased two rabbits for Katrina, a male and a female, and drove on home to Houston.

I had seen a notice of summer courses on learning nature being offered at Jesse Jones Park to school-age children. We had visited this park several times and loved the heritage environment there. So I went early in the morning and got in line in my car – I was not the first – and I signed up Katrina and James to participate.

They both went to their respective classes that June and loved it completely, especially the canoeing down Spring Creek. Our connection, then, to Jesse Jones Park and all its activities was cemented into place and continues until now. The park has been Katrina’s place of employment for several years.

Sometime in May or June, Maureen and I took our YGuide Academy brochures and project guides to a home school fair in Conroe, Texas. We stood behind our table, giving out brochures to those few who came by and discussing the concept of “project-led-learning.” There were no takers.

More than that, even though I advertised on homeschool websites, and even though many visited my page of completed project guides at $14.95 each, few bought. Eventually I came to the conclusion that trying to make a living off of homeschooling families was a narrow field indeed.

Nonetheless, my problem was never my ideas or the market, but always my inability to make people feel comfortable and thus willing to buy.

Yet I place all that I am into the Lord Jesus. My long hours of work over months did not result in an income for us, nor did it seem to fit the needs of very many homeschooling families. I know that my ideas are worthwhile and that my project guides are of great value. Yet I have carried all this inside as a great loss. It was when I began to write this chapter of my life that the sorrow returned to me, and then the Lord showed me that all my work was of great value to Him and would become valuable to many in the future.

“Thank You, Lord Jesus, that I belong utterly to You in all that I am and that You belong utterly to me in all that You are. Thank You, that those things that seem to be loss to us in the present time, are only gain forever inside of You.

“Thank You, Lord Jesus, for the goodness of Your gentle hand always upon my life.”