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Joyce Swann has been a Christian since childhood and a prayer warrior for over forty years. She became nationally-known in the 1990’s because of her work homeschooling her ten children from the first grade through masters’ degrees before their seventeenth birthdays. She has been featured on Paul Harvey’s weekly radio program, CBN, and the 1990’s CBS series, “How’d They Do That?” She has been interviewed by “Woman’s World”, “The National Enquirer”, and numerous regional newspapers. The story of the Swann family has also been featured in the “National Review” and several books about homeschooling success stories. Joyce is the author or co-author of five novels, including “The Fourth Kingdom”, which was selected as a finalist in the Christianity Today 2011 fiction of the year awards and “The Warrior” which, since its release in 2012, has had over 50,000 Kindle downloads and hundreds of glowing reviews. She was a popular columnist for “Practical Homeschooling” for nearly decade and she has retold her own story of homeschooling her ten children in “Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother”. “The Warrior” is her first solo novel.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

He Knows our Needs

There is an old song that says, “He knows our needs before we pray, and we can rest assured the answer’s on the way.” One could not find a more appropriate explanation of what happened to Petra Anderson on the night of July 20 of this year.
The young woman was attending the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, when an armed gunman burst through the exit door of the theater and opened fire on the theater goers. Five days later we are all too familiar with the events that followed James Holmes’ shooting rampage and with the carnage that followed. We have heard about acts of heroism in which several young men died shielding their girlfriends’ bodies from the bullets; we have heard from theater goers who escaped injury altogether, and we have been told about those who escaped death but remain in critical condition. No one knows why some people lived and others died in this senseless slaughter that shattered so many lives.
Today, however, I want to share Petra’s story about God’s provision for her that He set in motion at her birth twenty-two years earlier.  Petra was born with a small “defect” in her brain that remained undiagnosed until she was shot in that Colorado theatre. Three shotgun pellets hit her arm, but the fourth went through her nose and traveled up the back of her cranium before hitting the back of her skull.
When Petra arrived at the hospital, she was in critical condition. Before she went into surgery the doctors were concerned because such a large portion of Petra’s brain had been traversed by the bullet, and they worried that her speech, motor skills, and cognitive abilities would be permanently impaired. During the five-hour surgery, however, the surgeons discovered that Petra’s brain had sustained almost no damage, and they were able to remove the bullet cleanly.
It seems that God had looked ahead and seen that awful day when Petra would be the victim of a madman bent on ending the lives of complete strangers, and He had prepared a path for that bullet to follow so that Petra’s life would be spared.
The surgeons discovered a tiny channel of fluid running through her brain that could have been detected only through a CAT scan and would have forever remained undetected if Petra had not been shot. According to the surgeon, the bullet entered her brain at the exact point of this small channel and traveled through it like a marble through a tube. The defect guided the bullet from Petra’s nose through her brain, turning slightly several times and stopping at the rear of her brain. As the bullet traveled, it missed every vital area of her brain.
At the time of this writing Petra is still in the hospital, but she is talking and walking, and the doctors expect her to make a full recovery.
Petra’s story is another reminder that God loves us so much that he looks ahead and makes provision for us years in advance. No one would ever imagine that a birth defect in one’s brain could be a blessing, but this particular abnormality was the means that God used to save a young woman’s life in such a way that she would be able to return to full health.
God works in wonderful and mysterious ways to intercede for his children. The next time you find yourself in desperate circumstances I hope that you will remember Petra Anderson and be reminded that even when we are called upon to go through difficult and frightening situations, God is always with us. He is the God who is there, and He has already made provision for us.


Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother Her newest novel, The Warrior, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/ or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

The Freedom Prayer


The following prayer appears in The Planner, a Christian novel by Alexandra Swann. The Planner is set a couple of years in the future when the United States is living under an oppressive government that has stripped American citizens of virtually all of their rights and reduced the populace to poverty and dependence on the government dole.

One evening Kris, the central character, finds herself sitting in on an illegal prayer meeting held in her parents’ tiny apartment, and when she hears Todd, the retired pastor who leads the group, pray this prayer, she begins to re-evaluate her own life.

In these trying times, I think that we would all do well to take this prayer to heart and incorporate these sentiments into our own prayers.

Todd’s Prayer

“Lord we come to You tonight to ask for Your forgiveness. The Bible promises that when we seek You, we will find You, if we search with all our hearts.

“Lord, we confess that we have not followed Your commands. We have not loved You with our whole hearts—we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not stood for the truth of Your Gospel. We have sat by and said nothing when Your name was blasphemed and mocked. We did not take a stand when we saw Your laws despised.

“We know that many times we ourselves have been among the worst offenders. We have lived sinful lives that are contrary to the word of God. Like Esau, we have traded away our birthright for a little convenience; we have despised this incredible gift of freedom that You provided for us and allowed all of the liberty that our country offered to be trampled down. We have forgotten the words of King David who said that it is better to fall into the hands of God than to be at the mercy of men, and so we now find ourselves living under the rule of a cruel and despotic government who has stolen everything from us and shows us no mercy.

“We know that everything that is happening to us is a result of our bad choices, both individually and as a nation. You gave us the gift of being born into a free nation—the greatest nation the world has ever seen. You gave us a form of government unlike any other that had ever been known by any other people, and we did not value it enough to defend it.

“For all of these things, Lord, we ask Your forgiveness.  We pray tonight that You will change our hearts so that each of us will begin to love what You love, to hate what You hate and to want what You want. We ask You to save our nation, for we know that the Bible teaches that salvation belongs to our God—no political party, no ideology, no government can save us.  If we don’t find salvation in You, we won’t find it at all. 

“Please turn Your face to us again, and give us back our freedom, and restore our country so that we can truly be one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We ask all these things in the name of Your son, Jesus.  Amen.”

                          The Planner


Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother. Her newest novel, The Warrior, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/ or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The Freedom to Homeschool

July is the month when Americans celebrate freedom. We observe the anniversary of our independence as a nation, and we talk about the freedoms we hold most dear: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, etc. I wonder, however, how many people count the freedom to homeschool among our most precious freedoms.
In 1975 when I began homeschooling, my husband and I were able to locate only two states where homeschooling was legal. Fortunately, New Mexico was one of them, and since we lived only a few miles from the New Mexico state line, we sold our house in Texas, bought another one in New Mexico, and made the move that gave us the freedom to homeschool.
The word homeschooling had not yet been coined, and when I tried to explain to people what we were doing, they just shook their heads. In fact, homeschooling was so rare that I homeschooled for eight years before I met another homeschooler.
Since the homeschooling movement was God inspired, however, the number of homeschoolers literally exploded, and it soon became apparent that two states where homeschooling was legal were not enough. Parents began to realize that the right to educate their own children is God given, and they began to demand the freedom to homeschool in every state in the Union.
When I began homeschooling, my plan was to quietly educate my children with as few people as possible knowing what we were doing. Since each of the children was enrolled in Calvert School’s  extension program for the elementary grades, I told them that when anyone asked them about their school, to tell them that they went to a private school. This was true since Calvert School is a private school in Baltimore, Maryland, with an extension program that has existed for more than one hundred years. Each child was assigned an “advisory teacher” at Calvert School, and their tests were sent to the school for grading and record keeping.
Even though we had written permission from the state of New Mexico to homeschool, I feared that we might somehow become targets of the state department of education.  I wanted to keep a low profile and did everything I could to make sure that we were off the radar. Nevertheless, word began to get out that we were homeschooling. It seemed that the more I tried to remain anonymous the more people found out about our homeschool.
As a result, I was asked to testify in Leeper vs. Arlington, the case that legalized homeschooling in Texas. I also spoke twice to the legislators in North Dakota when they were debating whether to legalize homeschooling in their state; soon after North Dakota did legalize homeschooling. Ironically, more than fifteen years after I had begun my homeschooling journey, I was asked to speak to legislators in New Mexico as they reconsidered their homeschooling law; they kept homeschooling legal in my state.
That I was repeatedly asked to speak on behalf of homeschoolers in an effort to legalize homeschooling, is a testament to how few homeschoolers existed in the years between 1975 and 1995. That our numbers have grown to the point that homeschooling is no longer an oddity, is a testament to God’s special provision for His children. We now have homeschool sports teams, homeschool proms, homeschool support groups, and all sorts of homeschool curricula. Literally everyone has heard of homeschooling, and almost everyone knows at least one homeschooling family. What began as a longing in the hearts of a few parents across this land to educate their children in a way that would provide a solid, traditional education while protecting them from the negative forces that were moving into the public school system, has grown into a huge movement that has resulted in laws that allow homeschooling in every state of our United States.
This month as we talk to our children about the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, we should not fail to tell them that their freedom to be homeschooled is among the most precious that we enjoy. Let them know that many Americans worked hard to pass the laws that allow homeschooling, and that homeschoolers in every state were willing to go the distance to make certain that their state made homeschooling a legal option for all parents.  
Freedom is never simply bestowed without effort on the recipients. The freedom to homeschool was won through the efforts of many homeschooling pioneers. It will be up to future generations to hold onto that freedom. So when we count our blessings and thank God for the freedoms we enjoy, let’s not forget to include the freedom to homeschool.

Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees before their seventeenth birthdays is retold in her book,Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother.   Her newest novel, The Warrior, is available on Kindle and in paperback.  For more information visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/ or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup