Creativity is 110% sweat.

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On Sunday afternoon Ray and I had the opportunity to spend some time with a couple we met during the weekend. They came to our house for a short visit. As we got to know one another, we told them a little about our family and about what we do at Notgrass History. As Ray and I sat across from them in our living room, the man surprised us with a question: “You two are obviously creative. How did you get your children to be like that, too?” That was a new question. We had to think about it.

Ray and I agreed that we stand on our parents’ shoulders. Ray talked about the printer’s ink that is “in his blood,” as the son of Wesley Notgrass, who worked at the Columbia, Tennessee, Daily Herald newspaper for 53 years. He told of his dad’s interest in history and literature. He also told them that we learned to make our homeschooling a family lifestyle.

I talked about my mother. My mother did not thrive as a student. She struggled through school, but my mother was a great success in her own business. She took what she learned in high school home economics and the sewing course that came free with her Singer® Featherweight sewing machine and built a thriving seamstress business.

As I have written before, Mother always taught me: “Can’t never could do anything.” But Mother didn’t teach me that only with her words. I learned from her example.

Mother was good at many things, especially math, fixing whatever around the house was broken (the kind of things that daddies usually fix), and figuring things out. When one of her customers asked her to make a costume for an Elvis Presley impersonator to take to Europe, she couldn’t go to the Simplicity®, Butterick®, or McCall’s® pattern books at the fabric store and pick out a pattern to duplicate. She had to figure it out.

Mother didn’t stop at figuring things out. She “put her hand to the plow,” “the pedal to the metal,” and, in the vernacular, “got ‘er done!” When I think back on it now, I grew up watching my mother figure things out again and again.

Mr. Kolenkhov is the Russian dance teacher in one of our favorite Jimmy Stewart movies, You Can’t Take It With You. After helping to roll back the rug to give Essie ballet lessons in the family living room, Kolenkhov pulls his shirttail out of his pants and declares, “Art is 110% sweat.”

So is creativity.

Creativity is part of our nature as creations created in the image of God. Nurture it and nourish it in your homeschool. Give your children opportunities — and encouragement — to figure it out, put their hands to the plow, put the pedal to the metal, put their hearts and souls into it, and get ‘er done!

Whatever you do in word or deed,
do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks through Him
to God the Father. . . .
Whatever you do, do your work heartily,
as for the Lord rather than for men,
knowing that from the Lord
you will receive the reward of the inheritance.
It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.
Colossians 3:17, 23-24

 

 

 

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