Four lessons to learn from the pandemic about home life …

The pandemic has served up much, from death, illness, and an abundance of fear, to something that could actually benefit us — an abundance of lessons that can be learned that can improve our lives going forward.

I’ve written previously on what some of these lessons are, and even though I think any of us can easily identify some lessons we can learn from the pandemic, it’s my growing concern that I don’t see a lot of that happening, including in the church.

We need to learn now while we can, so that we can avoid what has been referred to as the “Old Boy’s Law.”

What is that?!?

The “Old Boy’s Law” is this: You don’t learn anything the second time you’re kicked by a mule.

If you get kicked a second time by a mule, it’s evidence you didn’t learn anything you could have learned from being kicked by a mule a first time.

And if you wander out of a global pandemic missing some prime opportunities to learn some valuable lessons, well I won’t be surprised if you “get kicked a second time”!

I’ll share a few of the lessons we can learn. This time I’ll give you four that stand out regarding our home lives:

The value of nurturing the quality of your home life. One thing having to “quarantine” at home for an extended period of time should have taught many people is they’ve been sloppy (at best) at consistently nurturing and maintaining the quality of their home lives. In fact, many people have discovered they had allowed their home lives to become just a support to everything that happens outside the home, rather than the home being the hub for living and then expanding out from there. One lesson for many is that they’ve made so much of living life being about the busyness outside the home that home isn’t the hub, it’s more like a gas-station/convenience store combo – a place to quickly fuel the body, change clothes, and otherwise prepare to go outside the home – for work, school, sports, activities, events, church, and the plethora of things we shoehorn into our calendars. Being forced to make the home the hub from which life is lived absolutely confused many, many people.

The need to nurture relationships. A lot of people have seen that relationships are far more like flowers, things of beauty that adorn our lives. But they can be delicate. All flowers need some level of nurturing. Relationships are not like weeds, something that grows anywhere and even if you abuse them they stay and thrive. We’ve seen two extremes from the pandemic – some couples and families have grown closer because of more time together and are thriving now more than ever, and some couples and families have experienced an increase in conflict and abuse because of having to spend more time together. The neglect of years of failing to nurture relationships has been harshly revealed from the pandemic. Most of us can at least learn from the experience we need to give not just consistent, but persistent love and care to the relationships in our lives.

The need to pastor your own children. Social media has experienced a tsunami of memes praising teachers for their work after parents have been forced to teach their own children at home the past year. But many parents have also learned just how much — in most cases, far too much — they have relied on the church for the spiritual nurture, education, and pastoring of their children. With churches unable to meet, parents had to face the reality that God’s plan has always been for parents to be the primary spiritual teachers and pastors to their children. With many churches now beginning to hold some level of in-person services, not all of them have yet restarted children’s and youth ministries, extending the time parents have to take the lead in pastoring their children. Parents need to learn NOT to attempt to pass this leadership back to the church.

The wisdom of being a good steward — of everything! The pandemic has placed many people in the position to learn they really have not been good stewards of much — not their use of time, not their use of money, not how they care for their physical bodies, not how they care for their mental health, not how they tend to their spiritual lives, not how they value their “things,” or much of their lives in general. Moving out of the pandemic is an opportunity for all of us to learn this lesson and finally become good stewards of all of life that God has blessed us with. Wouldn’t that make for a wonderful “new normal”?

Scotty