The Normalcy Exodus

What are you waiting on? Ready for? Prepared for?

A fight

Happy Father’s Day to all the family men out there holding down the fort. Keep pursuing your wife and prioritizing your children. Keep standing guard and drawing boundaries. Keep laying down your devices and looking in the mirror. Wholeness and inheritance are worth the work.

Went to the Braves game tonight and was ashamed at the prima donnas jogging down the first base line and making an all around lackluster effort. I don’t care what level you play at or how long it took you to get here, you play each game with EVERYTHING YOU HAVE. Otherwise, you dishonor those that came before you and those that would give anything to be on that field. Get it together major-leaguers. Maybe y’all need a Michael Jordan-esque disrupter to join the league and elevate your standards?? Show me something.

“I’ve not seen my shadow
Or heard the birds a’chatter
I just need to go outside

I’ve not felt the wind blow
Or held the sun in its glow
I just need to go outside

Where the songs I hear are just for you
And the water glistens crystal blue
And the work that’s done is unified
Oh, I just need to go outside

Where the trees that sway are strong in root
And the season’s change welcomes brand new
And the harvest yields a great supply
Oh, I just need to go outside”

There are lovers of nature who overlook God, lovers of God who overlook nature, and lovers of both who ignore neither. I’d rather fall into the latter. Embracing the obvious connection between Creator and Creation.

Romans 1 teaches us that Creation should be enough for us to acknowledge Creator. That means if every Bible was confiscated and burned, and every oral tradition was forgotten, Creation was intended to be so marvelous and mystifying that we would naturally deduce that it had been custom-built by an intentional architect WITHOUT any documented proof.

This chapter also showcases the dangers of worshipping the thing that was created instead of the Creator. This is most commonly something in nature: the sun, moon, stars, wildlife, wonders of the world. But we can also worship culture by building our lives just like the world’s. Time is worship. Priority is worship. It is impossible to exhaust our bandwidth in normalcy while also maintaining our devotion to peculiarity.

So, when and if we feel ourselves drifting, sometimes a walk outside and a talk upward is all we need. Deep breaths, confession of our confusion, questions of how to change strides - these are all part of healthy communion with Heaven. And if we need a reminder of His ability to intricately create a way for us, we needn’t look further than His often-overlooked creation.

Adults are built in the hallways of our homes. Is our construction of them haphazard or well-planned? Often times, we find ourselves sucked into the vortex of busyness and our consistent attention goes out the window. This distraction deteriorates healthy development and erodes trust.

Never mind that we are already fighting the uphill battle of device addiction, the normalcy of sin, the celebration of confusion, and religious responses that condemn instead of correct. You would think these reasons would kickstart our intentionality and pursuit of family, but often times we simply remain obedient to the numb cycle: Prep for school & work > go to school & work > taxi kids to games > decompress from school & work & games > eat > sleep > repeat.

In between these events, parenting can become “Oh, whatever. Just hurry up!” or “I don’t care what you watch, just give me a minute to think!” or “What do you need NOW?!”

We begin yielding to tantrums and treating them with screens. We stop policing content. We stop looking in each other’s eyes. We stop slowing down long enough to create an opportunity for connection.

It only takes a little free time and focus for a moment of laughter to combust. But we have a million invisible things on our minds that keep us from getting to the visible. So we provide substitutes. Some we hand to them, others are found on a child’s secret journey.

If we don’t stop this insane trajectory, it will break us. Maybe not in some tragic moment, but perhaps in the cascading regret of what we didn’t do when we had the ability to do it. We are in charge, after all, aren’t we? Kids can’t choose it. They can only long for it. They can try to tell us in the their own little ways, but they cannot make the familial decision to reset the home. Only we can.

The redemption of intentional parenting is perhaps the highest calling in the land today. Whole families correct brokenness and confusion and can begin a domino effect that lasts for milennia.

We need a generational reversal and it starts with small tweaks to the culture in our homes. Let’s not allow our busyness and inconsistency to be the only consistent things we do.

If we, as adults, don’t have the self control to resist the lull of the limitless smartphone, how do we expect an adolescent to?

Article after article warns us about the danger of phones and screen time. About the deterioration of the family because of it. Yet we continue still. Why?

Because it was designed for us. And it’s evolution is based on us. It’s a we- move-they-move scenario. They are adapting to what we want. WE are their research focus.

How do we triumph against such a targeting pursuit?

1. Turn your phone back into a phone. Use a tablet or computer for social media, emails, and banking, etc. Convenience is not an excuse.

2. Get your kid a smart watch that allows calls and texting with preset contacts managed by you.

3. Watch TV on the TV. The show can wait. Watching on your phone will triple your screen time. (We’ve moved to DVDs to bypass the dangerous content on streaming platforms)

4. Get a land line. These can still be obtained and the VoIP options are simple and cheap.

5. Stop handing your kid your phone. It likely has no parental controls or safety mechanisms. Giving them your phone means throwing them to the wolves of the world, and these wolves will pounce on their vulnerability and devour their innocence while wearing a smile.

Not all innovation is good for humanity. We will never restore the value of the whole family if we aren’t willing to take a breath, think objectively, and simplify life down to its highest intended priorities: each other.

Part of the purpose of the Ekklesia is to inspire onlookers, both earthly and heavenly. (Ephesians 3:10)

Sometimes we are doing good just to survive a chaotic day, much less inspire Heaven and Earth!

Getting to that point will mean a shift in perspective for God’s people. This idea that we are too flawed and filthy to accomplish anything great because we are human is perplexing because so were all the heroes of our faith, including Jesus (for 33 years).

Jesus’ sinlessness was criteria for sacrifice, yes. But, it’s the completeness of His relationship with His Father that empowered His life to produce transformation on earth. Are we not now also complete? Do we not have relationship with the Father? I sure hope so since reconciliation is what Christ died for!

So, if we are reconciled to the Father because of Christ and we are complete because of that relationship, what exactly is it that Jesus had that we don’t?

If we wait for “flawlessness”, we will never act in full confidence. If we wait for completeness, well, we’ve already got that! Plus, we have the promised gift of the Holy Spirit to boot!

We have to stop settling for less because someone told us we will never escape sin. Peter says we CAN escape sin, but not suffering. Why? Because as our lives push the envelope to the edge for the Gospel and the Bride, things will likely get tough. Tough might actually be an understatement. But that fixated pursuit generates sharing in His suffering (biblical) and shedding sin (also biblical) simultaneously.

We miss the mark because we’re human, sure. We keep on sinning, though, because we have believed its our destiny. What if the only reason we continue to sin is because we think it’s normal?

I guess it depends on how we define sin. If it’s flipping over tables in disgust and rebuking religious people publicly, then Jesus was a sinner. If its a moment of impatience or a thought you had to take captive, then we are all in major trouble. The simplest definition of sin is “to know the right thing to do and not do it”. (James 4:17)

We may not be flawless, but we are complete. And I believe Jesus’ model of completeness shows us what we can do, not what we can’t.