Parents, did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in? Anita and I used to enjoy watching the sitcom “The Middle.” Many of the middle class, middle America situations that the producers built their comedy around were situations that we were living through in our own home with our own kids, so much so that we sometimes felt there must have been secret cameras capturing the everyday drama of real life and rewriting it in sitcom form. One particular episode that lives on in our home is when Patricia Heaton’s character, Frankie Heck, had a computer problem. Everything she tried to make the technology work correctly and recover the files of pictures she reluctantly saved to the computer never yielded a good outcome. So, after an emotional meltdown she dramatically unplugged the computer, counted the exact amount of seconds and plugged the computer back in. Miraculously the computer worked again and the photos were found. This still happens with the technology around our house now. When the cable box is being wanky, we ask, “did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in, Frankie?” And most times the cable comes back up. We do this with smart TV’s, laptops, smart phones, and anything else that we feel technically unfit to fix. (Interestingly, this was my instruction to the DBC Connect Group leaders as all of our Zoom meetings were having problems this morning…just reboot! haha!)
When life is going nuts and things just don’t seem to be right, sometimes we need to unplug a moment and then plug back in. When I do pre-marriage counseling, I tell couples when they become angry or frustrated to the point of engaging the fight, flight or freeze response in their brain, it takes the body 30 minutes to calm down and allow function back into the part of the brain that reminds us who we really are, how we really act, and Who we belong to. If we don’t recover, we continue to act in fear instead of joy. And that means I have to win and everyone else has to lose… so then we all lose. God reminds us through Paul that if we let anger control us, we quit acting like Jesus and we start acting like the Evil One. Paul says, “‘In your anger do not sin’: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” Ephesians 4:26-27 (NIV) So, when something triggers us, we need to unplug, take some time to return to joy by plugging back in to Jesus, and then plug ourselves back in to the relationships with those around us. We can start acting like our “Jesus self” again. There will be some things in this pandemic and its consequences that will trigger our anger, we’re gonna’ hafta’ remember to unplug sometimes and plug back in.
Hang in there people! God is with us! I’m praying for you all!
