The Alliance

Yes, it sounds like a movie title but in this case it’s not.  The Alliance is a group of age-old homeschooling families who have walked in their own moccasins for more than twenty-five years and have come together to support homeschool state leaders.  They put on a conference, to which my husband and I attended this week, sort of like a family reunion but we were just meeting the family for the first time. I haven’t mentioned here on MSJ that my husband and I are on our state’s homeschool board, partly because I don’t feel worthy to be there half of the time… and the other half of the time I can’t figure out why they let us on after hearing my husband’s stories.  (Yes, he did it again.)

We were invited to a “refresher weekend” in January so the current board could get to know us casually over a buffet lunch and some chat time on a Saturday.  All went well until my dear husband started telling a biking story as we were moving from tortellini to cheesecake.  Rick and I were sitting next to each other in the middle of a rectangular table.  He was speaking to one end and I was speaking to the other.  I kept one ear on his conversation the whole time in case I needed to run interference…. but as the forks went into the cheesecake, realization hit that I was too late to save the day. Mercy sakes alive.

The story went something like this…. we were attending a new church that had Saturday night services.  Rick and our son went on a bike ride Sunday morning in the direction of our old church.  Rick has been going to church on Sunday mornings for 44 years… if he is out bike riding on a weekend morning, in his brain it is Saturday, even if it is Sunday.  So Rick and our son agree to meet at our old church, as our son needed to pump out an extra 10 miles without killing off his father.  So my husband pulls into the packed parking lot of the church and sits in a patio chair out front… in his biker stretchy shorts.  He visits with a few friends and keeps asking what is going on that brought so many people on a “Saturday”.  Many people told him that it was for church.  He didn’t get it.  Finally our son pulled up right as the main service was getting out.  A dear friend finally explained that it was Sunday and approximately 300 people would be leaving the building soon.  Rick minorly freaked out and ran to fill his water bottles, jumped on his bike and they peddled out of there as fast as they could.  The story simply sounds funny at this point.  If only he had stopped there.  He continued telling the homeschooling board members that after he arrived home he discovered holes in the back of his stretchy shorts……(story still sounds mildly okay)…. here was the clincher… he finished by laughing and saying “and we go camou under those shorts.”  Yes, he meant COMMANDO, but I was not about to correct him at that point.  It was an out-of-the-body experience for me.  Why, oh why, did that story seem appropriate at that moment??  I have no idea!

They smiled and said goodbye nicely, like there was never a holey-bike short story ever told…. and they said THEY would call us. (Like ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you.’) I assumed that if God did not want us on the board, this was his way of working that out.  Lo and behold, no call came the first month.  No call came the second month.  THEN a call came!  Unbelievable!  Maybe they forgot the end of the story!  We were invited back for another round of questions and the rest is history. 

Back to the Alliance.  I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, especially being surrounded by like-minded people who are sold-out on homeschooling their kids and/or training the next generation to stand strong.  It also made me realize that there is a whole other level of politeness, respect and love that can cross generations and keep families tight.  It was like coming home… all over again.