While texting a friend, I had a crazy flashback this week that threw me back a decade or two… maybe I’d not like to admit how long ago it was… but it threw me back a good many years to when I was learning to drive. I remember being at a friend’s house one evening in our neighborhood and admitting to a kid a year or two younger than me (named Thomas, who, oddly enough, should not have known how to drive yet at this point) that I was struggling with keeping the car going straight down the road in Driver’s Ed. I felt like I was constantly making these tiny corrections, constantly turning the wheel, and it just didn’t feel right.

With all the wisdom of (I guess) a fourteen year old or so, Thomas said:

“If you want to drive straight, you can’t look at the road right in front of you. You have to look further down the road.”

The next time I got behind the wheel, I put wise young Thomas’s words into practice. I found that when I looked further down the road, I stopped making all those tiny jerking adjustments and corrections to try to make sure my tires were right between the lines, and found that as I kept my focus further down the road, I naturally steered the car exactly where I wanted it to go.

You might already know: I’m one of those crazy people who homeschool their kids. And I’m constantly inundated with ideas, methods and curriculum choices. When you’re just getting started, it can be so overwhelming you almost don’t want to homeschool at all. You can homeschool online, in a co-op, with the Classical method or the Charlotte Mason method, with Classical Conversations (my favorite), with methods that are student driven and based on the child’s interests… there’s even un-schooling. Yep, that’s totally a thing.

But the challenge in midst of the tendency to constantly want to jerk the wheel back and forth in response to this trend or that New York Times article is to focus “on down the road” and think about what the real goals are, what the non-negotiables are, and to plan from there.

I’ve fallen in love the Read-Aloud Revival site, and was listening to a class this week where I was encouraged by this G.K. Chesterton quote:

Just now there is a tendency to forget that the school is only a preparation for the home, and not the home a mere jumping off place for the school.

What in all that is good and fluffy does that mean? Well, we sometimes tend to forget that education is just a part of the process for preparing children to grow up and contribute to society and be responsible adults and (if we’re Christians) hopefully do with their lives what God created them to do. But what do we really want for children when they grow up? It often goes without saying (and therefore doesn’t get said) we most of all want our children to be happy, well-adjusted adults with a good family life.

Yes, we want them to be able to pay their bills and earn a living, but we know deep down that if we have raised selfish or greedy kids who expect things handed to them, they are not going to have a peaceful life at home, and one way or another, that’s going to catch up with them.

But how about if the goal is what the Westminster Catechism says? “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

When I have the glory of God in mind for my kids, I don’t skip over our morning devotional time at the beginning of our homeschool day — because I remember that these kids knowing Jesus is, in the light of eternity, more important than anything else on the to-do list. Yes, we will do school, but first? Jesus.

So, question:

Where do you want to go? What do you want to have accomplished in five or ten years? Because whatever your long-term goal, your short-term decisions will make or break you getting there.

If you want that book published, can you make it a habit to write a few hundred words every day to help get you there?

If you want a happy marriage, can you start asking your spouse what you can do to help make their day better? And doing it?

The problem is, the methods and tips and tricks at our fingertips aren’t just for homeschooling. We are all constantly inundated with options and ideas and the next way to get there fast. Wherever there is. If we are constantly trying to keep our metaphorical wheels between the lines by making those adjustments and corrections, because they say you should… and we’re blowing with every breeze pop culture tells us is the way to get there, we will find ourselves swerving all over the road.

And possibly hitting mailboxes.

Or parked cars.

So ask yourself a question about your life you should probably ask yourself when you get behind the wheel of the car: Where am I going and how am I going to get there? Like…

I’m on a journey to lose weight so I’m going to make sure thirty minutes of exercise are a part of my daily routine.

I’m on a journey to be more generous to those in need, so I’ll make coffee at home, and each of those $3 lattes will add up to enough to sponsor a child with Compassion or World Vision.

I’m on a journey declutter my home, so I’m going to spend ten minutes a day, going through the house section by section until I get there. (If that is actually a goal the step-by-step in this book is a really helpful tool.)

I’m on a journey to find a deeper and more intimate relationship with Jesus, so I’m going to read two chapters of the Bible every evening, and spend ten minutes in prayer every morning…

Once you know where you want to go, you can focus your eyes down the road on that goal, and give some thought to the plan for getting yourself there.

This is the way the writer to the Hebrews put it:

Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed—that exhilarating finish in and with God—he could put up with anything along the way: Cross, shame, whatever. And now he’s there, in the place of honor, right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls! {Hebrews 12:1-3, The Message}

As we consider in the week to come, that Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, which led to the Holy Week that led to the cross, remember that Jesus knew where He was going. And He endured the trials necessary to cross the finish line, to achieve the thing no one else could achieve, but everyone else could benefit from. He fixed His eyes on the finish line. And we should fix our eyes on Him.

Don’t let the short term, day to day decisions blow in the breeze of what the world thinks you should do with your one precious life. Because the sum total of those short term decisions? That will be your whole life. Lived one day at a time.

Fix your eyes on the God who never took His eyes off you. With His glory at the center of the dreams and the goals, anything is possible.

xCC

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