At Family Teams we talk a lot about the desirability of building a household.
Now, thanks to this virus, we are all getting a crash course on the necessity of building a household.
Until very recently most of us in the West have been living in an age of abundance.
We lived without the fear of starvation.
Without the fear of dying from a plague.
Without the fear of our cities being overrun by an enemy army.
We lived, for the first time in human history, with what sociologists called “the assumption of stability.”
Things around us appeared so stable that we went beyond enjoying a season of stability to assuming we, and our children, and our grandchildren were also destined to live in stable times.
This assumption gave rise to a culture of hyper-individualism.
If everything is stable then we don’t need to be a part of a household, we don’t need family, maybe we don’t need anyone?
When things are stable we are tempted to make gods out of ourselves.
If we don’t need to be a part of a team, maybe what ultimately matters is only what I want.
“Family can’t give me anything I really need, so family needs to get out of my way.”
But stability is an illusion.
Stability is a temporary gift not a new reality.
And sometimes when a gift is received as a right it becomes necessary to have it taken away.
Now this may sound callous to all the real suffering going on right now in our world.
There are real victims in this crisis to whom there is no compelling silver lining.
We must mourn with those who mourn.
But we also need to look at the big picture.
We must also mourn the millions of victims created by hyper-individualism.
The children abandoned by a father who makes clear their little lives are not worth the sacrifice of his impulsive pleasures.
The parents abandoned by their children as they languish for decades in crushing loneliness waiting for a phone call.
But the greatest tragedy is the way individualism robs from all of us, and from a watching world, the experience of a Kingdom rooted in familial love.
This love is forged as families sacrifice their individual desire to build a household strong enough to overcome the waves of catastrophes that are a natural part of life.
When stability is threatened we need a refuge.
When stability is threatened we need a team.
We were all designed to live our lives rooted in a strong, loyal, loving household.
Building our families in multigenerational teams is not merely desirable.
Today, we are learning that it is a necessity.
Jeremy
P.S. We want to help others make this transition in the midst of this crisis to building a family team. Invite your friends to go through our 5 Day Challenge by signing up at 5DayFamily.com.
This entry is a part of Jeremy’s Journal, a newsletter Jeremy sends out every Wednesday morning to encourage you on your parenting journey. You can sign up to get them every Wednesday here.
