Lessons from my Father...

I have been contemplating adding a new "feature" to my blog but always seem to put it off for another day. So here in the quiet of an evening, itunes playing, I have decided to put my thoughts on virtual paper.

Education is an atmosphere

I don't think I truly understood how true that is. Nor did I appreciate how my parents raised me to be in constant pursuit of knowledge. I have so many memories of my father sitting in his chair with a book or with his Bible silently living out his beliefs right in front of me. This unit we are reading Alice in Wonderland and I can not help but think of one summer and his gentle guidance for me. Being a typical child, I wasn't too concerned with the how I spent my hours and so much of it was blindly wasted in front of the TV. One afternoon my father called me in to his office. At that time he had a built-in bookshelf filled with books behind his desk. There he sat behind his desk surrounded by literature. It is here that one of my life lessons began. In his calm way, he passed me a gold hardback copy of Alice in Wonderland and asked that I read it. He began to talk to me about the quality of what fills my time. Am I spending it doing something of value, something noble, something good? Or am I just allowing myself to be a passive participant in the gift of time God has given me?

Of course being young, I listened and even stored it away under "all the things my father tried to teach me but I'm not going to pay too much attention to right now." I am thirty-something years old and his words of wisdom still ring in my ears. There was no yelling. There was no "Shelley, you are wasting your life." Just a simple gesture to open my eyes to see that there is more to life than just being lazy. So how does all this tie in to the quote by Charlotte Mason, (Education is an atmosphere)? "The child breaths the atmosphere emanating from his parents that of the ideas which rule their own lives." volume 2