When we come home after a day or week or longer of being gone, we need to create a space and some time to prepare ourselves before we walk through the door at the end of the day. We need to prepare ourselves for children who’ve been bad, a late dinner, and a frazzled wife. We can handle pretty much anything if we are just prepared.
All of us come home.
Whether we’re accountants or programmers or teachers or farmers or soldiers, and whether it’s daily or weekly or longer, all of us have to step out of the fight and come home.
There’s a completely different set of skills we use when we provide for our families. We have to be decisive, abrupt, aggressive, firm, and for most of us, we have to go, go, go. There’s little rest and less calm, and to survive and perform well, we have to embrace the chaos, and by the end of the day, we’re physically and mentally spent. And if things aren’t going well in our professions, that stress drains our emotional energy as well.
And when we finally come home, at the end of the day or week or trip or tour, we just want some peace and calm and refreshment and consolation…
But if you don’t take some time and transition between your job slaying dragons for your family and your job as head of the castle, not only will you NOT get that peace, but your decisive, firm, tough ‘get this crap done, and get it done NOW’ approach will slam into your wife and children and leave everyone hurt, including you.
We need an AIRLOCK!!!
When I first started this blog back in 2017, I had this little idea that I would just put down some of the thoughts I had regarding marriage. Maybe just some of the ideas or considerations I had about being married and directed to both husbands and wives.
A really long time ago I when I had all the kids at home someone told me that a really great idea to be way more productive was to wait until all the children and my wife had gone to bed and then spend the extra 10 to 12 hours reading or writing or working – giving up a night’s sleep to get more done.
And so I tried it for a few weeks – what a lousy idea – it’s so disordered and messes you up – like God got it wrong with only 24 hours in a day – I had to go ahead and try to put in a 32 hour day.