These days, with our youngest child approaching her high school graduation, the inevitable question comes more and more frequently. “So, you’re about to become an empty nester?”
My typical reaction: a rueful smile. An inward cringe.
Maybe it’s because the term evokes a negative visual image. Empty heart, empty mind, empty tank … empty wallet. It seems few things in life that are empty are also positive.
Am I alone in thinking my emerging new identity as an “empty nester” sounds a bit half-empty?
It’s time to consider a more positive replacement for this expression.
My wife, Dana, and I have been blessed to raise our two children, Connor and Madi, here in San Antonio. Connor, now 20, is about to become an upperclassman at Oklahoma State. Madi, 18, will graduate from San Antonio Christian School in May and move to the University of Arkansas later this summer.
Things may indeed look and feel a bit emptier with just me and my wife, but we will still be a tight-knit family. Just in three different states.
What is the right terminology for our home of the future?
Here’s an idea: let’s become “base campers.”
I grew up in Durango, a small town nestled near the high and rugged San Juan mountain range of southwestern Colorado. For those who trek into the mountains, the concept of a base camp is familiar. It is essential to successful exploration.
A base camp has purpose. It provides supplies, shelter and communications for people climbing a mountain. It is a place for rest, for nourishment, for advice and counsel. A place to make repairs and recover.
But mountaineers — and young adults — don’t live at the base camp. Instead, that’s where the support team resides. The role of base campers is to be there to empower others to climb their own mountains in life. You don’t have to have been raised in the Rocky Mountains to get the concept.
In the Bible, the book of Exodus shares the story of how Moses brought the people he had shepherded out of his base camp to meet with God at the foot of Mount Sanai. It was in these mountains where Moses received the tablets of stone with the law and commandments from the Lord.
This knowledge equipped Moses to instruct people how to live their own purpose-filled lives, to empower them to stay on the right path as they navigate life in the wilderness and climb their own mountains.
To everything there is a season. And for those of us with our youngest child on the brink of leaving the nest, remember this: you are not being left to become “empty.” Rather, you are entering a new phase of life: one with renewed purpose, infused with years of experience and wisdom.
You will continue your own adventures, with expanded capacity to serve others, including those very children you’ve nurtured and raised. And you, like me, will be doing so from a high place of strength and love. Which going forward shall be referred to as the base camp.
