Dear Warrior Mom: Run Into the Roar
Dear Warrior Mom,
Are you facing a situation that seems impossible? Something that you’re just not sure you can handle? Something that makes you feel like running away or hiding? All of us go through hard times, and sometimes we feel certain we just can’t do it any longer. We can’t keep homeschooling. We can’t keep working at restoring a difficult marriage. We can’t get out of financial distress. I’m hoping to encourage you to see, though, that you can do it!
Have you ever heard of Training for Warriors? It’s a fitness program that I started doing 2 1/2 years ago. The founder of TFW, Martin Rooney, is a wonderful motivational speaker, athlete, and coach. He tells a story about running “into the roar.” He tells about how the female lions, the main hunters, hunt gazelles. When the female lions are hunting gazelles, they run after the gazelles and cause them to run in the direction of the male lions. The male lions have one job and only one job–to roar loudly! When the male lions roar, the gazelles are afraid, so they turn around and run back toward the female lions. But the gazelles that choose to run “into the roar,” those that choose to be brave and run toward the roaring male lions, are the ones who survive.
For many of us, it’s the beginning of a new school year. It’s the time of year when most of us are excited to get back to homeschooling! But it can also be a time of stress and worry for some. Maybe you’ve had a stressful summer and don’t feel rested and ready to get back to school. Maybe your family is going through a hard time financially. Maybe you’re one of the thousands of families displaced by the recent hurricanes and floods. Maybe you’re going through something else that your friends and family don’t even know about–some kind of private struggle.
Maybe this year you’ll have to choose to run into the roar too! Sure it’s easier to give up on homeschooling or a struggling marriage or a seemingly impossible financial situation. It’s almost certainly more comfortable to run away from the things that are hard for us. But if we choose to run into the roar, we can overcome so many obstacles in our lives and become stronger because of them!
What are your goals for this school year? What are your goals for your personal life or your finances or your marriage? I encourage you to write them down. Face them. Pray about them. And make a plan to reach them! You may have goals to get in better shape, eat healthier foods, better teach and train your children, improve your relationship with your children or your husband, or help your children learn to do their school work more independently or more cheerfully. No matter what your goals are for the school year, you have to run toward them in order to reach them!
I’ll share a few of my own goals for this school year. I want to…
- …help my 9th grader make a plan for her high school years so she’ll be prepared for college if she chooses to go.
- …feed my family healthy foods instead of resorting to last-minute unhealthy choices.
- …reach my fitness goals (one of which is doing my first chin-up).
- …get better organized and be more efficient with my work.
- …keep the house better organized so laundry and dishes are easier to keep up with.
Most of these are things I’ve wanted to do in the past, but I made excuses instead. But I’ve decided that this is the year I’ll run into the roar and work toward reaching these goals! Instead of coming up with reasons I can’t reach my goals this year, I’m coming up with reasons why I can!
Will it be easy? Nope! Or I would have already reached my goals. Will it be worth it? Yes!
I’m sure there will be times this year when I feel discouraged and don’t think I’ll ever reach these goals. I’m sure there will be times I wish I hadn’t committed to reaching these goals. (Especially in public!) But once I’ve reached them, I can’t imagine how happy I’ll be that I didn’t give up. That I ran into the roar and worked toward my goals. That I didn’t let fear stop me.
What about you? Do you have goals you’d like to reach this school year? Do you have personal or financial goals? Goals for your marriage or your children? Maybe you have a goal to lose weight or get in better shape.
No matter what you’d like to accomplish this school year, we want to support you!
- Right here on our website, we share articles related to homeschooling, family life, deals/saving money, recipes, and more! We want to support you as you homeschool, but we also want to support the other areas of your life! After all, we homeschooling moms have many jobs and responsibilities–not just homeschooling.
- We have a several private Facebook Groups full of moms who love to ask and answer questions and support each other with information and ideas! If you’re not already a member of our primary group, be sure to apply to join!
- On Instagram, we share lots of fun and inspiration, sales, links to some of our latest articles or to some of our best previously published articles, and glimpses into the lives of our own homeschooling families.
- You can find us on Pinterest pinning our own content as well as that of some other homeschool sites we think you’ll love!
Don’t forget to leave a comment below letting us know about your goals for this school year! We love hearing from you!
Great read! I truly needed this inspiration! I’m getting ready to run into the roar!
Yay!! You can do it!!
I needed to read this right now! Thank you!
You are very welcome! I’m so glad it was a blessing to you.
My goals are to lose weight and to finally get my writing career off the ground (which is happening soon with the release of my first children’s book in November!) As far as schooling goes, my goal is to get my reluctant learner fourth grader to conquer multiplication and my lazy (yes, lazy!) second grader to love reading! I am woman; hear me roar! I’m running into those lions!
2 of my goals for this year are to lose some weight and be more healthy and to organize the house, slowly but surely one room at a time.
I loved this article!! Being a first time homeschooler I have lots of stress and anxiety this school year. Thank you so much for the encouragement ??
Our year started off smooth and strong, but we’ve hit turbulence over the past month due to circumstances beyond our control. So I’ve very thankful that one of our goals this year is for our oldest to be much more independent with her work. This has been a huge blessing to our family and is enabling me “run into the roar!”
Very encouraging! Run into the roar!
I would love it if my big kids became independent with their chores. Managing the house with 5 kids has gotten out of control.
Thanks for a great reminder! After the first week and Hurricane Irma, I was ready to throw in the towel. This really helps! Y’all are such a blessing to us!
This is our 6th year homeschooling, and I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it. I’ve been blogging since 2008 and I’ve never been able to really find a balance between homeschooling and blogging. That’s my goal this year.
This is my first year formally homeschooling my 5 kids, and our 6th is due this winter. It’s been a huge change for us and it’s more difficult than I imagined! But I’m GOING to make it work. I’m also trying to minimize our home so that it won’t be so hard to keep clean. Dishes and laundry are my worst areas as well.
We are getting started a little late this year for school. This is our first day. All day at work yesterday I just kept feeling like I was not ready and our short break was not enough. Thank you for the inspiration. We are going into the roar today. That horribly loud roar called math with my daughter. We can do this.
This was so encouraging! We have had a rough start to our HS journey.
According to the world, my life is too messy to be able to Homeschool, but provision has been provided, and obstacles removed by our Lion of Judah! I will keep running to HIS roar! Thank you for your encouraging words.
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“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it” (1 Corinthians 9:24, ESV).
Thank you!
So encouraging, thank you! I love this and will be adding “run into the roar” to my life. <3