In one week, I will finish my first day of homeschooling.

Last week,  in my excitement over leading two precocious children through the rich history of the ancient world, I bought a globe.

It’s not a fancy globe, but my children were suitably happy with it, tracing trans-Atlantic flights with their soft fingers and circumnavigating the equator with a few deft spins.  I remembered my childhood fascination with maps, atlases, and globes, and smiled inwardly at our shared interest.

But as I moved the globe aside this evening, I made a discovery: after approximately four days of living in our house, the globe has a dent.

Yep, a big gouge right across Mexico.

Humph.

I liked our globe.  I liked its round perfection, its little ridges marking the topography of the world, and here we are, one week in, and bam.  A big dent.  Like someone just went and bashed his car door right into Monterrey, taking out part of Baja and Mazatlan and even Corpus Christi with it.

And then suddenly the globe felt a little like my whole homeschooling career, not even yet begun.

Here I am, with one mere shelf cleared off for curriculum, with a host of ideas and questions and way more going on than any homeschooling mom in her right mind should have going on, and I feel a lot like a dented globe.  Not one of those antique globes at the far end of a spacious library with mahogany panels and leather-bound volumes, not an expensive globe glowing golden in a shaft of light with little flecks sifting silently before it.  Not picture-perfect. Not worthy of Pinterest.

It’s still colorful.  Useful.  You can still see how far it is to China, and you can marvel at how remote Antarctica is, and you can learn the things you want to know.  But imperfect. Scars from being handled.  Shortcomings.

Then I think back to why I decided to undertake this journey anyway.

I have two gifts, one age five, one age six.  They can read. They both like math and art and science.  They are insatiable learners.  And I want to take all that budding interest and feed it and nurture it and see what it turns into.  I want to get my hands dirty and help them to uncover what makes them flourish.  I want to sit beside them and coach them through the challenges of pushing yourself when something comes easy and trying even if you can’t do it perfectly the first time, or the second.  Or the third.

I want them to come away from first grade more excited about learning than they are right now.

And when I’m honest with myself, I must say that they couldn’t care less that the globe is dented, or that I don’t have our whole homeschool year planned, or that I’m not even totally sure what we’re going to do on Monday.  They’re going to learn from this dented globe.

Then, on a more profound level, I remind myself that when the God of the universe formed them, he already knew everything about the woman he was giving them as their mother and teacher, dents and all.  And he knew we’d be at this crossroads right now.  He knew the other things he’d called me to do.  And he has it all well in hand. Indeed, he has even orchestrated a set of circumstances which remind me that I’M THE DENTED GLOBE.  Even before our homeschool of awesomeness has begun, it’s already imperfect.

Because I am.  And so are my kids.

Now, I feel just about ready to begin.