Men - It's time to be a safe haven from the storm
Right now, our entire world is experiencing an emotional hurricane of anxiety and fear. Many people are waking up each morning, checking the news to see how many have died in the last 24 hours from COVID19. There’s an ability to quickly find the answer thanks to the media’s laser focus on negativity.
As men, we’ve been taught to be afraid of our greatness. Now is not the time to be passive. Instead, it is time to embrace our strength and go to war against fear and anxiety.
Displaying our strength doesn’t look like beating our chest or sitting on the pedestal of pride. I’m referring to the ability to be stronger than your circumstances, to maintain peace when it feels like the world is in chaos, and unapologetically be steadfast in your resolve to be an anchor for those you love.
It is our job to step into the God-given instinct we have to protect those around us. The best way to protect them right now is by managing your inner world in a way that provides emotional safety and stability.
The problem is we often don’t realize how mismanaging our inner world negatively affects our environment and does the opposite of what we are hardwired to do.
Your internal reality is directly impacting the environment you create within your home. For boys who are looking up to you, their hero, what kind of masculinity are you modeling? Be the man that makes them want to brag to their friends about how great you are, not one who they feel the desire to escape from.
Here are some practical ways to cultivate peace during this storm:
Try your best to maintain routines in your home. It helps create stability for your children to know there is something consistent when everything else is up in the air.
Make sure you are processing your fears, doubts, and insecurities with other men when your children are not present. There’s immense value in letting your kids see your imperfections but now is not the time.
Get up earlier than you usually do and spend 30 minutes doing any of the following.
Journal
Meditate
Pray
Read your Bible
Talk to a friend
Breathing exercises
Yoga… or any workout
Remind your children of the challenges we as a nation/world have overcome in our past and how we will get through this too.
Smile. It seems simple enough but has a significant impact on those around you.
Do things that make your children laugh and be lighthearted. Dance, laugh, be goofy, or embarrass yourself.
Do creative things with them. Draw, paint, color, do crafts or build something.
Score some points with your wife... knock out your honey-do-list. You’ll get on her good side, stay busy, and model to your children practical ways you love their mother.
These are just a few simple things you can do. I’m sure you can come up with plenty more if you just put some thought into it.
I love what the Daily Dad shared and think it helps put things in perspective:
If you’re in your 30s, then your parents raised you through the global financial crisis, SARS, the bursting of the tech bubble, and 9/11. They saw two wars in Iraq, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Black Monday. If you’re in your 40s, they experienced that and the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, stagflation, Chernobyl, and the final saber-rattling of the Cold War. If you’re in your 50s, then your parents raised you through Vietnam and Watergate and the Berlin Wall. If you’re in your 60s, they raised you through the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture revolution, the draft, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations, MLK’s assassination, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you’re older than that… well, now we’re getting into even headier territory: the war in Korea, the Iron Curtain, the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, and god knows what else.
You think that was easy? You think there weren’t moments where they shut the door and wept out of anger or fear? You think they didn’t spend a lot of nights sitting up in bed, talking quietly to their partner about what was going to happen, about how (and if) they were going to make it? They were scared. They were overwhelmed. They wondered what kind of world this was to bring you up in.
And then you know what? They put on a smiling face and made you breakfast. They went to work. They saved their money. They prepared for your future. They loved you. They protected you. They soldiered on.
You come from that tradition. You come from parents who didn’t have it easy… and grandparents who had it harder, and great-great-great grandparents who definitely had it worse. What we face today is tough. These are real economic, political, and medical crises. But we’ll get through it. We’ll get through it as our parents did. We’ll keep smiling. We’ll keep protecting. We’ll keep doing our job.
When your kids tell the story of 2020 to your grandchildren, will they talk about your bravery, stability, and emotional safety? Or will the story focus on the state of reaction and inability to remain anchored when the storm rages on?
You are writing the script of your life story. Choose to act in a way that makes the story worth sharing and one you will look back on with pride. You are more than capable of being bigger than life’s circumstances.