May 2025 – bekahcubed

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I’ve been typing up the lyric sheets for next year’s hymn study (we learn a new hymn every seven week interval) and one of my children (who shall remain nameless) started complaining about how we never learn TRULY new ones that they’ve never heard before.

Now, Daniel and I have already chosen next year’s hymns – selected from songs that are personally meaningful, theologically rich, and a part of our church’s corporate worship – so I’m not planning on changing anything.

But I was a bit curious as to what said child thought we should be learning. So I started singing one after another, trying to find something that I knew that was unfamiliar to her. Strike after strike until I got to an old song I learned in Sunday school from a then elderly retired missionary couple who likely sang it in Sunday school in the 20s or 30s.

Everybody ought to go to Sunday school,
Sunday School, Sunday School
The mommies and the daddies and the girls and the boy
Everybody ought to go to Sunday school

So let’s get up on Sunday morning and get out to Sunday school
Though the weather be so cloudy or so gray
So today and every Sunday this will always be our prayer
When the roll is called on Sunday I’ll be there

And then into the chorus, sung just like “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder”

When the roll is called on Sunday
When the roll is called on Sunday
When the roll is called on Sunday
When the roll is called on Sunday I’ll be there

I finally found one that was unfamiliar! Curious, I started looking around to see if I could find any recordings of said “hymn”. Alas, none could be found on Spotify – and even Google struck out.

What about you? Have you heard this one before?

My mother raised and homeschooled my six siblings and I in an 1100 square foot house (with a basement) on half an acre. So I knew from the get-go that it could be done.

But I also knew that my mother spent a lot of time dreaming of adding on to the house because raising and homeschooling seven children in an 1100 square foot house can be… cramped.

We had file crates to hold our school books, and we generally ate dinner with our crates under our dining room chairs – there wasn’t room for a dedicated space for them so they ended up wherever they could fit.

So when Daniel and I designed our house and had it built in 2015/16, knowing we wanted a whole passel of kids and to homeschool them, we built a 1200 square foot house (with a basement) but had a large space built into the rafters that could be turned into a school room when the time came.

We finished the basement after 3 years in 2019, when we were up to four children and pregnant with another one (the first baby we lost.)

Another 4 years and we were adding our third student to the homeschool (we were up to five kids now, having reintegrated our foster daughter with her family and had a couple more bio kids.) We decided it was time to finish the upper room.

But then God saw fit to give and take away and give and give again. We lost a second baby and God added two more children to the family – one through adoption, one biologically. The process of all that was consuming enough that we put a pause on the school room finishing project.

But now, with a fourth student slated to join our homeschool in July and three preschoolers in the wings (one chomping at the bit to be taught to read), we are at last finishing up our school room – another 500 feet entirely dedicated to school.

Construction began today – to say I’m excited is a bit of an understatement :-P

When the Roll is Called on Sunday…

Room for Schooling