4-19-20 The Rush Back

Quote: “In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to.” – Dave Holler

The big thing on everyone’s mind is definitely WHEN.  When will everything go back to normal? When will it be safe to leave our house?  When can we go back to work? When can we hug family members we haven’t seen in over a month?  When can we celebrate birthdays again?  The unknown of the “when” has been the hardest.  Many of us can’t help but wonder even if the economy does open back up, when will it truly be safe to take our kids out in public?

But this quote from Dave Holler really made me do some different kind of thinking.

I had to ask myself.  Are there things in my life that I really don’t want to go back to doing?

I know for our family, this is the most we have EVER stayed put at home!  We are hardly ever physically in our house for very long.  Because of our 9 month work schedules, we go from full on school and sports schedules to full on summer trips back to back every year, and have done that for many, many years.  We love living life out there…discovering new places, meeting new people, and making new memories.

While we wouldn’t trade our life for anything, the shelter in place order literally forced us to see up close and personal that we had developed some pretty bad habits at our house.  Our “normal” had been keeping parts of our house semi-clean and then shoving everything else in closets and cupboards to clean some other time.  We were ashamed and embarrassed of all the (for lack of a better word) crap we had collected over the years.

It was time for the Zieroffs to purge.

What a great lesson it’s been for our kids to see and learn.  Not putting things away properly and collecting junk we don’t need is not a healthy way to live. The kids have seen villages and orphanages in Guatemala.  They know they don’t need lots of stuff to be happy.  Our family needed to do some down-sizing, focusing on “needs” and things we “needed” to make a priority instead of “wants” and what we “wanted” to do.  As parents, Mark and I need to show the boys how to be good stewards of what God has given us.

We even found a verse in the Bible to back this up and help us all stick to the new plan for our home.  It says in Matthew 6:19-21, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy…but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  We were no longer going to let frivolous things overtake our house,  just to collect dust. Instead of adding to the chaos of our life, we needed to keep things simple.

Because when you have less “things”, it’s also easier to keep your house clean.  And that’s a win-win in my book.