Have you ever been thankful for what God didn't tell you? It seems I'm always asking God to show me the big picture, so that I can understand what He's asking of me today. But I am learning to look back with much thanks that sometimes He fed me my instructions one little step at a time. This would be most true in the case of our decision to home school. Had God shown me all the work that lay ahead in my decision to school our incredibly distractible child at home, I would have simply folded up like a card table. Instead, it all happened in digestible bits and pieces. Our first born child, Glenn, entered the world as a constantly moving ball of energy and he hasn't slowed down since. When he was in a private kindergarten things did not go well. He couldn't finish any task assigned. He was over reactive to the slightest perceived offense. He would stir up the other children and pull them off task as well. The doctor, the psychologist and every first grade teacher he might have in the next year agreed that he should be medicated. He had come through such medical difficulties (13 surgeries before he was 3 1/2) that the idea of pouring yet another drug into his body gave my husband and I pause. Our decision to home school was simply a finger-in-the-dike effort. We hoped to keep him from falling too far behind while we figured out a better plan of attack by the next school year. What we didn't know was that God had something else planned for us, something much bigger. I began home schooling this delightful and extremely active little boy in 1995, when he was diagnosed with ADHD. While there was a lot of help available on how to recognize ADHD, manage it, medicate it, discipline it...there was precious little on how to TEACH it. I had to discover Glenn's gifting. Assuming that Glenn should be taught with the same traditional methods used in most schools, the first six months of home schooling did not go well. Finally setting aside the standard practices of teaching and learning I put my own ideas to work and began to experiment. Happily, our son began to thrive. Home schooling was clearly the perfect environment in which to teach this high energy child. Glenn not only began to catch up in the home schooling environment, he began to thrive. We didn't know then how often these highly distractible kids become labeled as trouble makers and then proceed to live up to the name. But God did. He had planned for us an environment that minimized most of the most negative repercussions of his distractibility and gave us the best opportunity to grow the gifts in our son. Together we discovered the learning styles and methods that worked for this child. While we didn't know the great deal of work involved in home schooling a interactive-intensive child such as ours, God knew that there were ways that He wanted US to grow, ways in which He wanted to improve OUR focus. Home schooling has not been simply an educational alternative for us. It has been a God-centering leap for our entire household. While God has blessed us in being able to see His hand at work in much of the past, the greatest blessing He gave us was a sense of what our son, challenges and all, will look like in the future when he is filled with Christ. This sharpening of our focus to see our son as God sees him motivated us to ride more easily through the tougher days and hang on to this vision of our son fulfilling God's best for him. What a motivator! For us and for him! Our family has since made home schooling our lifestyle choice, teaching all our own children and several other children as well with this fun, inviting approach to learning.

Carol Barnier is the author of "How To Get Your Child Off the Refrigerator and On To Learning" published by Emerald Books, YWAM. She is now a speaker at support groups and at state home schooling conferences. She is a popular guest on radio programs, such as Moody Radio (311 affiliates), American Family Radio (200 stations), Life Talk Radio (15 markets) and many other individual stations. Her web site is www.opengifts.org.

This article reprinted with permission.