hope deferred

Gone are the days when homeschooling was just a fringe option. Gone are the days when home education was done in isolation. Gone are the days when educators felt like failures. No! These are the broken parts of home education, and we are here to fix them. We want to see lives changed.

At Redwood, we know who we serve. We serve the home educator, and by doing so, we serve their children. And because of this, we are witnessing beautiful, transformative moments every day.

Students are going home and sparking dinner conversations about how God has given them imagination and calls them to use it for His Kingdom—insights drawn from Ourselves, a book we are reading together.

We see students delighting in the outdoors, eagerly picking up objects and exclaiming, “Wow! Look at this! What is it?” Their minds are coming alive with curiosity and wonder.

Inspired by a book about Blue Baby Syndrome and a hands-on heart dissection, one of our students is now dreaming of a career in medicine.

One student, after completing their landform project—where I intentionally stepped back to let creativity unfold—proudly said, “I like what I did. I am very proud of myself.”

And then there was the morning we prayed during Morning Adoration for God to reveal His creation to us on our nature walk. That very day, we watched baby hawks being fed by their mother and even spotted a snake! The students were in awe of how God answered our prayer.

We continually see older students caring for younger ones, not just noticing age or grade level but recognizing one another’s personhood.

Proverbs tells us that hope deferred makes the heart sick—and too often, I hear homeschoolers losing hope. This isn’t working. This is hard. We fight all the time. But what did we expect? This side of heaven, homeschooling—rubbing shoulders with fellow sinners every day—is bound to be a big, glaring mirror, revealing the dirt on our faces that we cannot wash off on our own.

Homeschooling will expose your own gaps. But will you let those gaps stop you from doing what God has called you to do? No. You. Will. Not. Because God is the filler of gaps. He is the One who makes your homeschool fruitful. You must keep going—but only if you have hope. If hope is deferred, your heart will grow sick.

Hope is not found in the perfect curriculum, the best teaching method, or even the healthiest lifestyle. While these things are good, they are not ultimate. Hope is found in Jesus Christ alone. We serve a God who takes our meager, botched-up, inconsistent, knock-down, drag-out mess and does something beautiful with it. We must believe this. We must put our hope in this, or we will be crushed under the weight of it all.

This is why Redwood exists. We want to be agents of hope in your home. We see you. We know you. And you must see the hope before you in order to fight for your child’s heart—because make no mistake, all of hell is against you. But take heart: the One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world (1 John 4:4).