Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 248 | How to Arrange Care for Your Family When They're All Sick

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Ep. 248 | How to Arrange Care for Your Family When They're All Sick · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:04
  What's up, guys? Welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. So what do you do when your wife and all your kids get sick and you have to head out to work? James asks, he's part of our Facebook group, how to arrange care for your family and kids when they're all sick at the same time and you still have to go to work for a long day. What does that look like? And we're right now sitting in the middle of the coronavirus scare.
• 0:26
  What do you do when there's all this sickness? There's so much this time of year. So, James, first of all, the first thing that comes to mind is that this is a very strong modern problem. Yeah. And that we tend to be very under-resourced. So, it doesn't take...
• 0:42
  Yeah, we're very fragile, always on the edge of collapse. With extended family units living together with aunts and uncles and grandparents and multi-generational extended family everywhere supporting each other, this is actually almost a benefit because anytime a particular small immediate family starts to go down, it just fires up the extended family to come in and save the day, which is a beautiful experience. Now, a lot of us live apart from extended family, but I would say it's important to just call out.
• 1:08
  We're not supposed to be this fragile. It's supposed to be okay for you to take a long day of work and for others to come in. I would say that beyond extended family, this is when a Christian community is really critical. It's important that wherever you are,
• 1:23
  you are building deep relationships with other believers. And again, it's important to boast in your weakness, and that is to be able to send off an SOS to your Christian community and say, guys, this is the moment for our family. We need help. Come in and help us. I got to work. My wife's sick. All the kids are sick. So that's the next sort of, I think, safety net that we all need to be cultivating before a crisis like this occurs. Yeah.
• 1:46
  Cultivate extended family relationships. Cultivate extended family style relationship with your Christian community. Are there people in your life that will bring over a meal at the drop of a hat? And again, that is a beautiful experience. It is important for us to demonstrate weakness and to let our neighbors and our friends and our believing brothers and sisters come in and swoop in. And you just fire off that text, fire off that email, and just see what the Lord does. And it's a beautiful thing.
• 2:12
  I would say that there are, of course, situations where you haven't cultivated that community. You have no real strong extended family. Then I would say the next safety net is money. Yeah, totally. You got to leverage financial resources and basically buy some of those support structures and get people in there that could possibly help you. Use a babysitting service.
• 2:36
  Um, and obviously, you know, if you have to negotiate with a boss or figure out, you know, how to figure that out. Um, and sometimes there is just survival mode. I mean, you just, you, you want to avoid survival mode, but, but we've definitely had seasons where we just fall into survival mode for, uh, it's critical if you do fall into survival mode where you're just like, yeah, we're just going to take a huge hit.
• 2:55
  that you try to make that crisis last as short as possible. Survival mode is not healthy to be in for a long period of time, but it's okay. And then use that to motivate you to begin to create more safety nets and contingency plans for your family. That's your job as a father. But there are times where you've moved to a new city, you have no extended family, you haven't cultivated community, you're low on funds, and this stuff happens.
• 3:20
  No, I think you nailed it. I wouldn't add anything more to what is needed except for two things. One, let the, it's like what you said, it, it, when this happens, it kind of shows you where the relational equity is that you have. It's like, it just kind of shows you what you have. So I think let that speak to you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like an audit of like, and let that speak to you for the next time.
• 3:39
  And not just for sickness, but I think any time life happens, right, of like any hardship, anything happens, let the audit speak to you of like, oh, I don't want it. I don't want to feel this empty or lack of resource in my community a year from now. So then how can you start building that? And the one thing I would say is, yeah, I think the community one is so strong. We live in such a special, awesome community in Maui. And I remember there's even been times, not where I've been, Alyssa's been sick or anything, but like...
• 4:02
  you know, I'll be traveling because I was telling you even before we started recording, you know, I don't have to tend to have this circumstance because I can kind of just drop everything some days and help. But there has been some times where it's even worse than going off to work where I'll be like across the country. You know what I mean? So I'll be like, you know, miles away. I can't just or thousands of miles away. I can't just get home. So there's been a couple of times where I remember, I think like, I can't remember if it was a sickness or just a hardship or something, but I just started a group text between me and like five of like five other wives in the community, which is kind of weird when you say that.
• 4:29
  But I just literally said I think I didn't even tell us because I wanted her to feel like it was just them And I said hey, she's kind of like struggling or one of the kids is Aaron I don't remember what happened someone's sick something was happening And I just said I didn't even because we were so close. I didn't even give a bunch of examples I just said hey, can you all just like step in and help? Can you just check on her make some meals just like basically I got trusted all them? So I just said like you guys do your thing I know you guys can take care of it and our communities awesome and they did right and so when I was and then what's cool is that it does something for the guy to
• 4:54
  Because then I feel very like less stressed and anxious. I'm like, okay, I'm not feeling like I'm letting my family down. You know what I mean? And that actually it's allowing someone else to rise up and to show the power of community and the strength of community. And so that's what I would say is tap into community, but also make sure you're building that so you can tap into it.
• 5:09
  Awesome. And guys, as we talk about survival mode, one of the biggest tools that we use to try to absorb so much of the crazy stuff that you have to do with the young family is to live in a rhythm of seven days. And so Jeff and Alyssa and April and I created a course called The Seven Day Family. It just walks you through how to craft your ideal week.
• 5:27
  how to begin to really, over time, lean and live into that. And this has been one of the most life-giving tools for our family, especially to rise above survival mode and to live in a state of peace in our normal week. Survival mode still happens to all of us from time to time. But man, you want your normal week to be amazing, full of peace. You don't want to live in that state of survival for too long. And so if you want to figure out how to rise above that, go to FamilyTeams.com and check out that course, Seven Day Family.