“Nothing but fire kindles fire.” – Phillips Brooks

Read the beginning of the series HERE

We had lain down (temporarily at least) our wild ideas of turning the world upside down. I was working, we had an apartment, and all of our friends, in-laws, and other family were happy that we had “wised up” and were submitting to the status quo of the culture. However, there was still a subversive fire burning in our bones and so we devised a plan for our life. I would work hard at whatever work God sent me during the day and at night Lisa and I would get educated theologically so that we could educate our children to be warriors for Christ. I told Lisa that for every book she read on Christian womanhood, child rearing, women’s ministry, or prayer and wrote a report on the book, I would buy her a new dress. So about two days later I came home from my $5.00 per hour job and she had already read a weighty book and written a beautiful report. I couldn’t believe it! How was I going to buy her a dress? I began, like Laban in the Bible, to change her “wages” seven times but she smilingly assured me that she never intended to take me up on my dress deal. She was as committed to our vision of knowing God and preparing our little family to impact the kingdom as I was and she need no additional incentive but the joy of pursuing God as a family. Within that month she had read 5 books and written reports. I couldn’t keep up with her reading, but I tried hard.

One day when our oldest, Luke, was about to be school age I came home and told Lisa, “I am not sending my kids to these New Mexico schools. The only thing I learned there was self defense. We are going to keep our kids home and teach them ourselves.” We had never heard of homeschooling so you can imagine my wife’s response. I told her that everything man has ever learned is in a book somewhere and all we have to do is teach them to read. She was incredulous but agreed to start teaching them at home. We didn’t have a TV so we spent nearly every evening reading. Every morning she would gather the children around our little table and memorize scripture with them. I bought her a blackboard to put on the wall in our dining nook and when they had mastered a verse by memory she would write the verse on the board. Each day they would review the verses on the board and then begin the process of memorizing a new one. I was working very hard to keep the wolves away from the door and not paying too much attention to the blackboard until one day I stopped and noticed that there were over 40 verses written on that little blackboard. I couldn’t believe it! I asked Lisa, “Do you mean to tell me that you and the children have memorized over 40 verses of scripture?” “Yes”, she replied and quickly to prove her point had the children recite from memory all 43 verses. I was stunned and thrilled. They were 7, 6, 5, and 3-years-old and our 5th baby, Brooke, was an infant. It wasn’t long before they were reciting whole chapters of the Bible from memory.

I had preached at a youth rally in Indianapolis, Indiana and the daughter of an evangelist, Don Boys, was in the crowd and was impacted by the sermon. Somehow I was told that her father was working on a curriculum for something called Home Schooling. He was gathering Christian educators from all around the country to collaborate on it which intrigued me greatly. Later I learned that he had completed it and it was available for purchase. We checked with the laws of our state, New Mexico, learned that homeschooling was illegal, but ordered the curriculum and began home schooling our children nonetheless. We didn’t know another homeschooling family but believed it was God’s plan for our family. Later our kids would tell us that for years they thought we invented home schooling! Later we fought with other home schooling families to make it legal in all 50 states. It didn’t turn out to be the quid pro quo fool proof method of raising warriors for Christ that we had hoped but we are still glad that we educated them ourselves all the way through high school. We eventually built up a library in our home of over 7,000 volumes, many of which our children had read before they graduated from high school. History, theology, biography, Christian living, science, classics, of course some good old fiction kept us captivated day in and day out year upon year and God was deepening us individually and as a family and preparing us for adventures we couldn’t have imagined at the time. Even today though our children are in their 20’s and scattered all over the world, we read a book or two per month together and share our insights, comments, and delights from each book in a secret Facebook group we affectionately call Bullen Book Club.

Many were the months that we didn’t know where the rent would come from but God always provided. There was a large rock outcropping in the mountain foot hills near our apartment complex and I would often go there late at night and cry out to God to provide for my little family. I was working at everything that I could find. Some months the Lord saw fit to let us really be tested. I even spent a night in jail once because our tags were expired on our old ford van that I used for work. But even then I witnessed to the officer that arrested me and everyone in the jail that I was raising 5 warriors for Christ on one laborers income and sometimes buying milk came ahead of renewing my registration. I’m sure we made many mistakes but we were two kids in our mid 20’s with 5 children and a religious conviction against food stamps and welfare and we were doing our best to figure out how to make it all work. God always sent us what we needed when we needed it though and that included encouragement. We lived in a second story apartment and a couple and their 3 teenagers moved in down below us. We began to notice how mature and how sweet and respectful their children were and it wasn’t long before we met them and discovered that they were Christians and that they homeschooled! Wow! Our first encounter with another homeschooling family! They were much farther down the road than us and so John and Kim took us under their wings and mentored us for the rest of the time that we lived there. They were radical! They lived in an apartment so they could use their funds for missions! They were unbelievably wise and encouraging and we owe them an eternal debt of gratitude for letting us know that rather than being crazy, we were actually on the right track. John and Kim and their children are still dear friends today and staunch supporters of our ministry. God is good.

It wasn’t all work though. We had a motto that we worked hard and we played hard. I doubt any young dad ever enjoyed his children more than me. Many were the nights that the water ran down the walls of our apartment as we had water fights. You could always count on getting blasted with a rubber band or cold water dumped on you in the shower or something around our place. Many weekends the older 3 children worked with me on moonlighting construction jobs. I found out later that they would endure the hard hours of labor because I always bought them breakfast burritos on the way to work. We were strict and demanded a lot from our kids but we had tons of fun too and it is the greatest joy of my life that today we are very close and there is deep love and respect in our family and we have the incredible blessing of working together in ministry around the world. But that is later in the story. The other wonderful thing that happened during this time was though we were not in any organized type of ministry, God sent an unending stream of people to our door to be discipled and encouraged… Aflame For God 13 – A Path To Our Door