Take Back Your Family 5-Day Plan ਨਮੂਨਾ

Our families are not safe. We have no time for each other. We are unhappy and unhealthy. That’s what the data shows.

And that whole multigenerational thing? I think the silent killer is what our families are doing to our elderly. We in the West invented an entire industry—called nursing homes—to do what most people in history did within their own family. 

We don’t like to say it, but to us elderly people are dispensable. We don’t actually need them like cultures did in the past. Before, they were the gatekeepers, the sources of winsome and sage advice that had been hard fought for and hard won over decades of life experience. Now you can just google the answer, so why would you need your grandparents?

And this mindset is devastating both on an emotional and on a practical level. . . .

I love how the psalmist reflects on this same truth, noting in Psalm 68:6 that YHWH “sets the lonely in families”—not nursing homes—not in front of a screen—not among their peers. What is the place God has for lonely and isolated people? It's a family, and that can be actual family, or if we’ve been failed there, it can be an adoptive family or the church family. But it is a place of multigenerational diversity committed to one another and a place to rest and be known.

Prayer

Father, please help me build and care for my family as you have instructed, and please help me to value the wisdom, insight, and experience of the older members of my family. Amen.