It was our first house, and it needed some work. One of our first projects was tearing out the old stained carpet in the master bedroom. At a carpet store, we browsed the rolls of discounted carpet pieces, and the salesman convinced us to purchase a lonely roll that was supposedly of much higher plush quality than the other colors. The only problem—the color was white. At the time, we didn’t think having white carpet was a big deal, but we didn’t realize it would spotlight every speck of black sock fuzz and every minor stain.
We have all made major or minor decisions that we now regret. We might have avoided them had we taken the time to ask those with more experience for advice. Proverbs is full of instructions about seeking counsel from others, as in Proverbs 15:22 (NKJV): “Without counsel, plans go awry, but in the multitude of counselors they are established.”
As I begin homeschooling, I want to intentionally seek out advice from wise mothers. Whether they’ve homeschooled their children or guided them through traditional school, they can lead me down a time-tested route and warn me about detours or potholes.
When I have a question about homeschooling, my first inclination, as a child of the digital age, is to Google it. While I’m thankful for the convenience and wealth of information online, I want to guard against the dangers of wasting time and having information overload. Before I realize it’s dinnertime, I have forty-six tabs open on my browser with opinions of people I don’t know from Adam.
If I lived fifty years ago and had a question on teaching or raising my children, the obvious course would have been to pray about it, talk with my husband, and call a trusted friend or relative. While the Internet brings the world together, it threatens to isolate us from true relationships. I know many wise, godly mothers that I can go to for counsel, and many of them happen to be homeschool moms as well. By approaching them, I’m going to sources I trust, and I’m building relationships with women who can encourage me and pray for me.
Seeking personal counsel is worth the extra effort, and integrating our lives with other believers’ lives is the biblical pattern. In Titus 2, the apostle Paul encourages the older women to mentor the younger women so that their lives might honor God’s Word. He told Titus to teach
the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things—that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. (Titus 2:3–5 NKJV)
So what about you? How have you found ways to balance the convenience of online information with the value of a trusted advisor? How do you balance social media with face-to-face relationships ?
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