Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 266 | The Silver Lining of This Current Season

Transcript

Ep. 266 | The Silver Lining of This Current Season · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Instead of actually thinking about important things, we think about really small things and we blow them out of proportion.
• 0:11
  What's up, guys? Welcome to 5-Minute Fatherhood. So I want to talk about this current moment we're in, and I think there is a silver lining that it's really important for us to, as believers especially, to think about. And sociologists I've heard talk about that throughout all of human history, we live in a really unusual time where there is this thing that they are calling the assumption of stability.
• 0:34
  And that means that people are, for the first time in human history, growing up in an environment in which they never think that they're going to be in a situation where they could be hungry or they could be in danger. And that assumption of stability creates a certain kind of culture. And we've never seen what kind of culture it creates. And that assumption of stability is being...
• 0:57
  eroded because of this current crisis. In other words, people that have lived through both what we're going through with the virus and then probably the economic downturns and recessions that are going to come as a result, that they're going to look back, they're going to just look at life differently.
• 1:14
  And they're never going to be able to have the same level of assumption of stability that they would have had had this crisis not happened. And I think that as believers, it's really important that we live in a world without that assumption. I don't think that assumption of stability is good. I don't think that it's a part of...
• 1:30
  what life is supposed to feel like and be like after the fall. I don't think it's real. I think there's something illusory about it. We aren't really living in a stable world, and it requires trust. And there's really kind of, you think about it from two different poles.
• 1:45
  There's like, you could live in a world in which there's all chaos, right? 100% chaos, and you're always in survival mode. And that's not a good world to live in either, because in that world, it's really difficult to pursue God or anything meaningful because you're always worried about, am I going to survive? Then there's a world of 100% stability.
• 2:04
  This is also not really healthy because it's through adversity that we really grow. It's through adversity that we learn to really trust God. We need to be tested and tried, and we need to go through hard times and having an assumption of stability that makes us not even think about those things at a deep level. It actually creates a really weird psychological problem. And as I was hearing some sociologists talk about this, they said that the problem that it created culture-wide for the West
• 2:32
  is that the assumption of stability causes us to obsess over smaller and smaller things. We want to separate and get obsessed about every little tiny detail because we assume that life's going to be stable, we're going to be well-fed. Instead of actually thinking about important things, we think about really small things and we blow them out of proportion.
• 2:53
  That's not great. It's not been great for the gospel. The gospel is really—it really causes us to want to think about the ultimate problem in our lives, the problem with sin, the problem with separation from God, the problem that the story of the Bible really is describing about us being separated from God, and how do we come back into relationship and back into His family. Those are ultimate questions, and having the assumption of stability causes people to really
• 3:22
  I just want to encourage you guys, this is a really great moment for the gospel, both for those who don't believe the gospel, but also for those of us who do believe the gospel, go deeper into it. And I don't think that we were well served by that assumption of stability. And so I'm not lamenting that sort of transition because of this crisis. I think it's a positive transition.
• 3:42
  element of this crisis a lot of negative things about a lot of a lot of really sad and tragic and traumatic things happening to people right now and so we're not making light of those things those are very real and those are individually um can be really really bad but overall as a society there is a really good thing that's happening right now and i think it's important for us to be aware of that but yeah jeff what are your thoughts about that
• 4:06
  Yeah, no, I think you nailed it. And I totally agree. I think the only last thing I would say to adding on to that is that, you know, living through these things, adapting, and then knowing that it's a possibility in the past, or has happened usually creates you to be more resilient and successful in the future, right? Even like you can take the metaphor or the actual real world example of like the stock market, right? And kind of people that are in that world. But I mean, you can use it as a metaphor of real life. It tends to be
• 4:31
  People have lived through the crazy booms and busts and crises tend to be the people who also then are long term successful because they you know everyone sells when they buy because they've done it seen it three times, you know, that type of thing, you know. So I think it's very similar that it is challenging. It is hard. There's no way around that. We're not sugarcoating it. But there is something to also learn. There is something to lean into.
• 4:51
  and we're playing the long game. There will be, like, it's absurd to think that I'm 30. It's absurd to think this is like the first thing I can ever think of that's ever even been remotely like this in my whole life, right? Most people in most of human history, in most countries, it's literally something like this every two years, right? Something, a war, a famine, a pandemic.
• 5:11
  um, some type of, you know, coup, like you can go on, like there's governmental change. It's, it's, it's, it's very drastic, you know? And so I would say understanding that, that it is happened. It does happen. It will happen again. Um, and to be prepared for it in a wise way, not a scared way is two different things as well. So that's one thing I would encourage you with.
• 5:30
  You guys, if you like to kind of interact with some of these more deep thoughts that we like to share, one of the places we actually like to get deep is Instagram. We like to share different posts on there that kind of summarize a lot of the things we're talking about in these conversations. And so if you guys want to check that out, you can check out family teams on Instagram.