Being the detail-oriented person that I am, one thing I have to be on guard against in homeschool is turning it into one massive To Do List. Yes, there are things that need to be completed for each subject, and I have a large spreadsheet listing the remaining weeks of the current school year and which lessons we need to have completed by each week in order to stay on track, for a total of twelve topics (yes, sometimes I think we may be overdoing it).

When I focus too much on this list, I get stressed and rushed, and school days lose some of the joy that comes with learning.

One of the best examples of this for me was last week – the Apologia Biology textbook said it was time for my oldest son Caleb to do an experiment. Sometimes my tendency is to skip these because of the time they take (not to mention the mess). It’s easy to think that just reading the textbook is sufficient.

But for this experiment, we decided to give it a try. It came in two parts. The first part involved putting four different materials in four small glass jars (rice, grass, soil, and an egg yolk), then adding a scoop of pond water into each, and leaving it in a warm dark place for a few days.

(Side note: Our warm dark place of choice, being winter, was the laundry room. We covered the jars with a towel, but I had to warn my family not to just scoop up that towel with any other towels and throw it into the washing machine – can you imagine the mess?)

Five days later (which is the last day that the book said the experiment would be successful), none of us really felt up to looking at everything under the microscope. We started with the prepared slides – dead and dyed organisms purchased as part of the Apologia curriculum.

Our microscope is not the highest quality – and with the light bulb out, we have to carefully arrange the flashlight of an iPhone so that it illuminates the right part of the slide while trying to figure out what parts of our view are just dirt on the inner eyepiece we can’t seem to remove compared to the actual image we are trying to view.

After four slides, none of which we were able to view well with our microscope issues, we were all pretty tired and frustrated. I almost called the whole experiment quits right there.

But then, when we opened the first jar of pond water and added a single drop to a slide, I literally gasped as everything came into focus.

There were living creatures swimming everywhere. We could look at the pictures in the textbook and figure out what several of the microscopic organisms were – a large amoeba, some algae, and several paramecium. Each of the four jars had different content on the slides based on the different “food” types that had helped the organisms grow. (For a quick 1-minute video that looks similar to what we saw, click here.)

When my husband came home for lunch, we were all talking over each other to explain what we were so excited about, as we put each slide back on the microscope to share our joy with him. Even after my sons were done with the experiment and starting to clean it all up, I found myself taking another look at each slide just to take the time to marvel at the tiny world teeming with life.

It just reminds me how creative God is – so much He has made is elaborate yet smaller than we can even see with our bare eyes. Why do I sometimes act as if I think God is too busy for me, forgets me, or fails to see me – when I can see the intricate details of His creation that is so much smaller than myself?

“Oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways! For who can know the LORD’s thoughts? Who knows enough to give him advice? And who has given him so much that he needs to pay it back? For everything comes from him and exists by his power and is intended for his glory. All glory to him forever! Amen.” Romans 11:33-36 NLT