Bringing Idaho Home

By Johanna Ireland

Join me in looking up from the headlines and guidelines!  Picture how bringing Idaho home reveals our resilience and returns our focus to our families.

Bringing Idaho home means families are spending days and evenings together.  They are going on walks, working on projects, or playing in their yards.  They are building puzzles together and playing games in rediscovered family rooms.

Bringing Idaho home means dining room tables are becoming a hub of engaging conversation and relished meals.  Meals have become an important event to cherish our loved ones and blessings instead of just another task to check off in the routine of the day.

Bringing Idaho home means working parents are given back their commute time as many are now working from home.  Dads and moms are sharing together parts of the day that have long been segregated.  Working lunches, coffee rooms, and the water cooler now merge with snack times and table-top science experiments!

Bringing Idaho home means we are learning to enjoy unstructured days together as the frenzy of organized activities is put on hold.  Experienced homeschoolers and newly homebound families alike have been given a gift of being home.

Bringing Idaho home means families and communities are finding creative ways to manage businesses and serve each other.  Lessons about how all aspects of society rely on others are engraved in our memories.  Bringing Idaho home unites us in careful planning for using supplies that are running short, creative menus to account for staples we might not be able to restock, and gratitude for service providers.

This is a tumultuous time, with far-reaching effects still to be seen.  We know parents will soon go back to traditional work settings.  Kids will return to their favorite sports, libraries, and parks.  Schools will reopen.  The gears of activity will be moving again before we know it.  But bringing Idaho home will leave us a legacy of families strengthened by faith and purpose!