Sarah Mackenzie > Quotes

“If you want a child to know the truth, tell him the truth. If you want a child to love the truth, tell him a story.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“It is so exhausting- sometimes even demoralizing- to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“It doesn't really matter if we have the most beautiful, carefully thought-out plan if there aren't enough hours in the day to get to it. Look, if God expected you to get 36 hours worth of work done in a day, he would have given you 36 hours to do it. If you have more to do than time to do it in, the simple fact is this: some of what you are doing isn't on His agenda for you.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“A book can’t change the world on its own. But a book can change readers. And readers? They can change the world.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“Listen carefully: you do not need to have a "productive" homeschool day to please the Savior. You do not need to have a clean house to please the Savior. You do not even need to have well-behaved kids to please Him. It doesn't matter if you hit every math problem, get through an entire spelling lesson, or whether your child loves learning the way you want him to. It doesn't matter! What matters is that we seek to imitate Christ. That we order our loves so that our hearts better reflect His.  Many days, checklists will go untouched, books will go unread, ducks will not line up in a row, no matter how much we strive. So cease striving. "It is our part to offer what we can, His to finish what we cannot." —— St. Jerome”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“The God who turned water into wine can take our smallest efforts and weave them into a glorious tapestry for His delight.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“You are made in the image and likeness of God, and you have exactly what you need to be the mother that He wants you to be. Figure out what drives you and then let your kids shine within the atmosphere you create. Trying to be something you're not, trying hard to provide your kids with the education that the blogger-next-door is giving hers will burn you out make you want to quit the whole project entirely.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“No one will ever say, no matter how good a parent he or she was, “I think I spent too much time with my children when they were young.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“We need our kids to fall in love with stories before they are even taught their first letters, if possible, because everything else—phonics, comprehension, analysis, even writing—comes so much more easily when a child loves books.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“Rest, then, is not the absence of work or toil. It is the absence of anxiety or frenzy.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“When we read aloud, we give our kids practice living as heroes. Practice dealing with life-and-death situations, practice living with virtue, practice failing at virtue. As the characters in our favorite books struggle through hardship, we struggle with them. We consider whether we would be as brave, as bold, as fully human as our favorite heroes. And then we grasp—on a deeper, more meaningful level—the story we are living ourselves as well as the kind of character we will become as that story unfolds.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“It’s easy to forget that teaching is holy work. We forget that building up the intellect- teaching our children to really think- does not happen by the might of human reason, but rather by the grace of God. On an ordinary day, you and I likely have a set of tasks we've scheduled for our kids. But it's more than math. It's more than history. It's the building up of our children's minds and hearts, and we can only do that if we realize that this is how we thank Him for the graces He so lavishly pours out on us.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“When my head hits the pillow each night, I want to know that I have done the one most important thing: I have fostered warm, happy memories and created lifelong bonds with my kids—even when the rest of life feels hard.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“The daily mundane is holy ground because the ordinary tasks of a monotonous Monday are where we meet our Maker.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“It isn't about how long we pray or how many times we have to bring our minds back when it wanders off. It's about showing up, sitting at the foot of the cross, and putting aside our own will in order to give ourselves completely to His.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“What if, instead of trying to make the most of our time, we worked harder at savoring it?”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender. There will always be more you can do. You will never complete your tasks entirely, because just on the horizon is tomorrow, and tomorrow the to-do list starts anew. It is so exhausting—sometimes even demoralizing—to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“Can we live and teach from a state of rest? My prayer is that we will. But we must approach the Holy Spirit every single day, asking Him to lead us and to quiet our anxious souls so that we can really bless our children- not with shiny curriculum or perfect lesson plans, but rather with purposeful, restful spirits.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“We are weary because we forget about grace. We act as though God’s showing up is the miracle. But guess what? God’s showing up is the given. Grace is a fact.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“The great educator Charlotte Mason says that when we put children in direct contact with great ideas and get out of the way, "Teachers shall teach less and scholars shall learn more." Any homeschooling parent who has observed her own children for any length of time will know this to be true. Real learning happens when our children wrestle directly with great ideas- not as a result of our repackaging those great ideas, but when they interact with the ideas themselves.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“Some people call it multi-tasking, as though it’s a skill to be desired and honed, but I know it’s really a lack of focus-a refusal to seek out the important things.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“Our curriculum is the course that we travel.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“Raising our children isn’t just about getting them ready for adulthood. It isn’t just about preparation for a career. It’s about transforming and shaping their hearts and minds. It’s about nourishing their souls, building relationships, and forging connections. It’s about nurturing within them care and compassion for whomever they encounter.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“Tell me this- if you could have a guarantee that your child would be a National Merit Scholar and get into a prestigious college, have good work habits and a successful career, but that your relationship with him would be destroyed in the process, would you do it? Why not? Because you are made to love, that's why. We care about our relationships more than about our accomplishments. That's the way God made us. Then why don't we live that way? Why, come a damp and gloomy day in March, do we yell over a  math lesson or lose our temper over a writing assignment? Why do we see the lessons left to finish and get lost in an anxiety-ridden haze? We forget that we are dealing with a soul, a precious child bearing the Image of God, and all we can see is that there are only a few months left to the school year and we are still only halfway through the math book. When you are performing mommy triage- that is, when you have a crisis moment and have to figure out which fire to put out first- always choose your child. It's just a math lesson. It's only a writing assignment. It's a Latin declension. Nothing more. But your child? He is God's. And the Almighty put him in your charge for relationship. Don't damage that relationship over something so trivial as an algebra problem. And when you do (because you will, and so will I), repent. We like to feed our egos. When our children perform well, we can puff up with satisfaction and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. But as important as it is to give our children a solid education (and it is important, don't misunderstand me), it is far more important that we love them well.  Our children need to know that the most important thing about them is not whether they finished their science curriculum or score well on the SAT. Their worth is not bound up in a booklist or a test score. Take a moment. Take ten. Look deep into your child's eyes. Listen, even when you're bored. Break out a board game or an old picture book you haven't read in ages. Resting in Him means relaxing into the knowledge that He has put these children in our care to nurture. And nurturing looks different than charging through the checklist all angst-like. Your children are not ordinary kids or ordinary people, because there are no ordinary kids or ordinary people. They are little reflections of the”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“that the more children are read to, the higher their test scores are—sometimes by as much as a half a year’s schooling. This was true regardless of a family’s income. He goes on to say that reading aloud has proven to be so powerful in increasing a child’s academic success that it is more effective than expensive tutoring or even private education.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“Whatever is getting in the way of your plan for the day- the toddler's tantrum, the messy bedroom, the sticky juice leaking all over the fridge and into the cracks of the drawers, the frustrated child, the irritable husband, the car that won't start, the vomiting dog, the pie spilled on the oven door...whatever that intrusion into your grand plan for the day is, it's also an opportunity to enter into rest.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“At the end of our lives, He is going to look into hearts. What is it He will find there, I wonder? Will he find that we used the geography lesson, the dreaded math test, the teetering laundry pile and the boiling-over pot of soup to draw closer to Him? Did we use these gifts to teach our children to lift their eyes heavenward? Were the tedious details of a homeschooling day offered up as a way for us to love Him, or were they merely gotten through, checked off and accomplished? Did we even realize that every Monday, every Thursday, we were standing on holy ground? No task is too trivial, no assignment too small. Educating our children is an offering of love we make to the God Who was so gracious to bestow them upon us in the first place. Every moment of the daily grind in raising and teaching and loving on them is hallowed, because we do it for Him and because there would be no point of doing it without Him.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“Home is the only place in which our children have a fighting chance of falling in love with books.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

“When read-aloud time doesn’t look like we originally hoped, we begin to doubt that it’s giving us any of those wonderful benefits we discussed in part 1. But here’s the thing: it still works. Even when it’s noisy, messy, and more chaotic than you’d like it to be, it works. Even when kids are grumbling, complaining, and don’t seem to be listening, it works.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids