“The saving of many lives.”
After two and a half weeks at home as a family, not going anywhere, simply being together, I’m thinking that God is up to something special. It not that He’s unconcerned with the bell curve, but He’s ringing it like a bell, calling families back together. Distancing us from others so that no distance and no distractions remain to stop us from being intimately social together.
While I believe God is actively in the business of “saving many lives” these life-threatening days, He’s also in the business of “saving many families.” God is saving us from our busyness so that we might get to the business of loving Him and loving one another. He’s saving us from the damaging effects of being so ridiculously self-focus and activities-focused keeping us from focusing, truly focusing, on each other.
Of course, all this togetherness may feel like it’s tearing your family apart. I’m sorry if that’s the case. If you want to throw in the towel and throw all the people out, you’re not alone. This charge to parent for days on end with with no end in sight, and no school or sports to give reprieve is hard. And the hard is amplified if your togetherness is miserable. Hard parenting struggles may be another sort of bell, signifying that there is more hard parenting ahead. However, we can decide to see the issues in our homes as a gift today. We have the time (at long last) to finally face the issues we’ve been enduring (or avoiding) head on.
Our kids don’t need another baseball practice with us cheering from the stands. What they need is life practice, obedience practice. They need to practice clearing the table and making their beds and putting others first, with us cheering from the kitchen! This is the time, this is your opportunity to help them.
If you are struggling in your home with multiple little people melting down over their online schoolwork, throwing fits and acting disrespectful, let me encourage you to partner with the Lord in the days and weeks ahead. As some of the evil tendencies in our children’s nature and immaturity rise to the surface during this solitary sort of confinement, let’s choose to see the time at home with them not as a pain to endure but as an opportunity to take advantage of. We’re usually too busy to deal with their backtalk and disrespect, whining and complaining, but we have the time to tackle some of those issues now.
Choose a few recurring issues you see in your family, whether it’s their unwillingness to pick up after themselves of your family’s lack of time together in the Word, and make a plan to use this evil time for good. While Covid-19 has reached it’s sickly arms around the whole wide world, The One who made the world is reaching His arms around our homes, repurposing the evil for good, reweaving our families back together again.
Need help dealing with some of your children’s most common struggles, and your own struggle to stay calm and kind as you’re all cooped up together? Grab a copy of TRIGGERS: Exchanging Parents’ Angry Reactions for Gentle Biblical Responses. The chapters are short and applicable, and will leave you different than they found you — that’s right, they won’t just change your child’s behavior, they’ll help to change yours! When your kids do wrong… you can still do right.
Although we are social distancing, you can join us for a Book Study in our Facebook page, Gentle Parenting with Amber and Wendy. Use this unexpected time at home to pinpoint some your kid’s struggles — struggles you’ve been too busy to address for far too long. You’ve all the time in the world now, so let’s partner to carefully correct them together!
What the devil intended to kills us, God is repurposing to save us — as families. Don’t miss out on this momentous time in history by crying and complaining about your kids. With a little intentional parenting you may actually look back and say, “That was when our family finally learned to be loving, honoring, obedient, self-sacrificing, and kind.”
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This piece originally appeared at WendySpeake.com, published with permission.
