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You’re tired.
Not just physically; though yeah, that too.
You’re tired in your bones. In your soul.
Trying to be a steady husband, an intentional dad, a man of God… but deep down, you feel like you’re falling short. Like you’re carrying more than you know how to hold.
Dad Tired is a podcast for men who are ready to stop pretending and start healing.
Not with self-help tips or religious platitudes, but by anchoring their lives in something (and Someone) stronger.
Hosted by Jerrad Lopes, a husband, dad of four, and fellow struggler, this show is a weekly invitation to find rest for your soul, clarity for your calling, and the courage to lead your family well.
Through honest stories, biblical truth, and deep conversations you’ll be reminded:
You’re not alone. You’re not too far gone. And the man you want to be is only found in Jesus.
This isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about coming home.
Hey guys. Welcome back to The Dad Tired podcast. And first of all, just please forgive my terrible sounding voice here. Uh, I caught some kind of bug this week, plus I was teaching this weekend, so I was just like shouting at everybody and screaming. And in addition to being sick, I just completely lost my voice.
So, thankfully for you, uh, Chris is gonna be hosting today's podcast and it's so, so helpful. And you won't have to listen to my terrible voice for the next 20 minutes. Anyway, super excited for us to jump into today's episode. I do want to give you a couple things before we do that. First of all, if you are not signed up for our dad Tired annual retreat, I would love for you guys to be part of that.
It is going to be an incredible time. This is our third year in a row doing it. The first year we had a hundred guys. Last year we had 200. We're anticipating three to 400 guys this year. So if you haven't signed up for that, make sure you do that before our early bird pricing ends. We'll have to increase the price as we get closer to the date.
If you go to dad tire.com, you can click the annual retreat tab and get information on that and also sign up for that. We're also looking for guys or businesses to sponsor that retreat. We just wanna make this. We know that dads very rarely get a chance to break away and to just spend some time getting poured into, and so we just wanna make it the most valuable time for them.
We really wanna bless the guys that come here and, um, the more means that we have to be able to bless them to gift. Them things to make sure that their experience is kind of over the top. We just really wanna love on the guys, make it the most comfortable and engaging time where it just really blesses them.
And so we're looking for businesses to help us do that. If you can sponsor or you wanna sponsor, it's all tax write off for you as a business. Or if you want to do this individually, you can do that as well. You can just reach out to us hello@dadtire.com and we can talk to you about what a sponsorship would look like and we'd love to get your business in front of our guys if that's something you're interested in as well.
Before we jump into today's episode, I do wanna thank my friends over at True Play for sponsoring it. Uh, if you're like me, you want your kids to stay safe online while having a blast with the games that they play. That's why I'm really excited to tell you guys about True Play Games. True Play is a brand new faith-based app that's designed specifically for kids.
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So what do you do when you're at the park and a kid pushes your kid down? Or what do you do when your kid's in high school and they get an unfair sentence of detention? What do you do when your kid is in. Elementary school football and a ref makes a horrible call. Or not just a, uh, some kind of capricious call that didn't go your way, but maybe even you could make a really good case that they were trying to make your team lose.
I, I think this is one of the few areas where as parents, people can get more divided. I just found this out, um, working with my life group. I, I work at a church in San Diego, California as a pastor and. We just put up a new, like a play scape in front of the sanctuary so kids can come and crawl and play and do that.
There's like a hill in the middle, like a little hill slide. So I mean, in the middle of service it looks like an ant hill, just kids climbing up everywhere. And so without fail, you start getting kids who are sliding down and bumping into other kids and. And so it's just so funny to watch the semicircle of parents watching all this take place and all the different kind of categories of parent.
You've got like your hyper involved, right? The, and some of us are those kind of parents. They, you, you kind of bubble wrap your kid. You don't want them to experience any sort of pain or any kind of anguish, and so you just kind of bubble wrap 'em in it. Then you've got like the, uh, you might not be physically concerned with what they're doing, but you wanna make sure they're not offending anyone or that they themselves aren't being offensive or that anyone's calling them a, a name.
So you, you stay with an earshot to hear even what the kids are saying. And, you know, some of them are, they just find themselves like one of the kids, you know, I found myself just sitting on top of the hill slide with all these. Kids everywhere. And I just think the world of kids is just so interesting to me, like what they talk about and their instant ability to make friendships and their lack of social filter.
And you know, they've got no problem telling you like you've got an old face and you're like, well that was super rude. And, but then the great thing, but Hillside is you can just, you know, push 'em off and all is fair and love and war and hill slides. So anyway, but it's a, it's a social experiment, right?
It's, it's, I think it's like why adults watch The Bachelor is you just watch what happens when someone is convinced that they're in love with three different people and then. 40 women all think they're in love with the same guy. It's, it's a social experiment, so, such as is with any playground. It's, it's a social experiment in the realm of parenting and.
One of the things that I've asked myself lately and, and that I've been navigating a lot is what do you do in the instances in life when your kid experiences injustice? I, I think there's probably a few different categories. I named some of them, but maybe some of the key ones that I've already experienced with my kids.
I've got five, five kids. The oldest is. Nine, the youngest is two. And so you already kinda walked through some of these things. I'm thinking about specifically either authority figures in their life or friends, neighbors, where they experience what you would consider to be like just some kind of gross injustice where you can't really make an argument that you can see it the other person's way or that it makes sense, but you just kinda sit with your jaw dropped.
Like how was that fair? How did that happen? I, I remember. In my house growing up. One time I was, I went to school and I was walking into school and there was like a crosswalk and there was a guy on the other side of the crosswalk. He was like the crossing guard. They had just started having a guy be like a cross guard at my high school.
And for three years, this was my senior year for three years, I walked to school every day and I crossed, and I did it like an adult would. You know, you look both ways. There's a little, uh, signal, so everyone's supposed to stop and you wait until they stop and you cross and you're, everything's kosher.
You're good to go. Everything. I had gone home from after school. I didn't have a seventh period, and then I came back for a theater practice or whatever. I was coming back for, I should have said basketball rather than theater, but it's too late coming back for basketball practice and I. The crossing guard, I was halfway across and forgot that we had a crossing guard.
So I'm in the middle of the street and he's like, I did not give you the signal to cross. And I'm some, and now I'm standing in the middle of traffic and cars are like honking and getting mad. And I'm like doing the, do you want me to come across? Do you want me to go back? Remember those guys from the song like, what is love baby?
Don't hurt like me, you, you, me. That's how it felt in the middle of the street. Like, do I come there? Do I go back? Do I do whatever? And so. He's like, what are you doing? Why in the middle of the street? And I was like, well, you, you haven't signaled me across. And he is like, oh, oh, wise guy. So he finally, I go across to him and he's like, you come with me.
And so he takes me to like this, the some dean of students. I ended up getting Saturday work for it. And I. I just remember having this conversation with my dad about why I was getting Saturday work and you know, my dad, he was angry. He like went across to the school and kind of told him what was what and I ended up getting Saturday work anyway.
But you know, it felt good to have my dad kind of fight my battles for me and to go in through that And I. I remember, I, I showed up with a breakfast burrito and bribed the security guard on Saturday to let me out early. So I spent like 20 minutes in detention for Saturday work where you're supposed to be cleaning up trash.
So I didn't learn a great lesson, but it was still one of those things where I never got to see that from my dad's perspective until recently. Having kids and experiencing moments where they experienced injustice as maybe the question I wanna propose to you is what do you do when, let's just start with a, a simple situation.
You're at the park, your kid gets pushed over. Your kid didn't get pushed over because Billy Blue Jeans there was really trying to get up the slide and didn't recognize, you know, he just got overly ambitious. It wasn't that kind of a scenario. Billy Blue Jeans, when your Sweet Darling Petya, whatever your daughter's name is, or whatever your son's name is, fill in the blank here.
I. He's standing there and, um, just drinking their water bottle. But some other kid who's not getting enough hugs, whatever, it's just comes over and just checks your kid into the ground. No remorse, no, sorry, no. Anything else like that. And they kinda look around. They might even make eye contact with you.
And there's a part of you that just feels like. You're ready to go to prison for your kid and you just wanna drop kick 'em, or if they're gonna go down the slide, you wanna put some malicious thing at the bottom of it that they're gonna sit on when they get at the bottom. I, I'm a Christian, but there are moments where I feel like I'm not above, I.
Being really mean, but you don't, because you recognize that prison's a bad place. You get that there's a better way of doing things, but you still have a decision to make. And so I think some of us, we naturally wanna hunt for the parent, like, where is your parent? Because we have to have this conversation.
And others of us, we might be the, you know, direct to the other kid kind of parent where you chase that kid down, down and go, excuse me, what was your name? Billy. Billy, you're the worst. And explain to them how their actions make someone else feel. And. It can be uncomfortable because you're kind of parenting someone else's kid.
But those of you who fall in this category where, uh, you're more of the, the advocate, like the peer advocate category, so we'll call that like the peer advocate. You advocate to the other peer, you advocate to the person who hurt them, and you, you basically are thinking to yourself right now, well, someone's gotta parent them and it might as well be me because clearly Bernadette over there on her cell phone isn't paying attention to what her son's doing.
So someone's gotta do something and. Others of us might sit there and go, okay, I gotta go talk to Bernadette. And you go and slap her phone out of her hand and you go, excuse me, what was your name? She says, Bernadette, you chuckle to yourself softly because it's just your first little jab that you're gonna get in.
And before you go on your long lecture in high soapbox about how, if you're gonna bring your kid to a park, you have a social responsibility to watch them. And so. This is more of like adult advocate, where the injustice that your kid experienced is best solved by going directly to the person who can solve things moving forward.
And you don't just want behavior change. You want policy change. You know what I'm talking about. You want this to come from the top. You want the powers that be to make an adjustment in their thinking. So it's not enough for Billy Blue Jeans to make a change. You need Burnette to change the way that she parents and so.
You're going for systemic change. You want change at the highest level. And it's funny, you know, sitting at church and watching this play, skate, play out and watching these different interactions happen and then mom step in and dad step in and have these different conversations or just bubble wrap their kids or you know, that would be another thing is maybe someone goes in and explains to your child who was hurt, your beautiful little Petya that.
Billy Blue jeans wasn't paying attention. Or you try to, you're almost telling a story. You're like kind of the narrator personality where you've gotta tell your kid a story to make their world different. You know, well what Petya you got knocked over, but you see that kid over there, he wasn't looking where he was going and, and so there's a sense in which you're trying to kind of spray cologne on the dead corpse that is Babylon of just recognizing that this world's kind of messed up.
But you want Patia to maintain her innocence as long as possible. And I think there's a good. Argument to be made in this category to say, you know what? One day Platoon's gotta realize that there's real just bags out there. But today's not the day that platoon needs to realize that people are out there that like the joker, they just want to watch the world burn.
So you gotta make a decision in this moment, and I think something that I've been doing lately, and I guess at the end of the day, what do I know about anything? But what I found is I asked myself this question because I was watching this play out and. My son, uh, Leo got knocked off the slide and then got back up and kids were just kind of cutting in front of him doing their thing.
And I feel like, I feel all those different emotions coming out. Like, where are your parents? You kid need to get a little talking to or just to tell Leo, like, okay, well that, that kid only had one chance left. And, and trying to recreate the world like. Renar the world so that it's not such an affront to his sensibilities that people are just straight up cutting in front of him.
And this has been one of the most pervading questions since I started having kids nine year, almost a decade ago at this point, which is why didn't Jesus have kids? You know, like, why didn't Jesus get married at, I recognize like. It says in his baptism in John chapter two that he, or John chapter one that he, he, he does a lot of the things that he does to fulfill all righteousness.
And so there seems to be, in some sense of the word, what would we do with Jesus's wife? Right? Would we not venerate her immediately? Would she not be like, and what kinda a life would she lead where she's married to Jesus, he's so loving and caring and everything, but she never gets to look over and be like, well, my husband, he's been a real pill today.
It's like, well, your husband's the Messiah, so uh, whatcha gonna do about that? And. What would we do with his kids? You know, we would probably start, honestly, we'd probably start a papacy and be like, well, these kids rule the world and their descendants and their genes and their offspring, and so if Jesus had offspring, would we not worship them?
Would we not have a problem with, like, what do we do with them? They're like demigods and whatever. So I think there's really good reason Jesus didn't have kids. If you start to think about it and. Like, you know, we put Peter's handkerchief in a museum because it's so neat. What would we do with Jesus's offspring?
Who knows? But I am interested in the idea of if Jesus sat alongside the play scape at College Avenue Church here in San Diego and watched kids crawling over this, like what would he say? What would he do? What would he encourage? And if I was standing next to him, you know, like parents do, watching other people parent and just sarcastically comment, like those two muppets in the, you know, the, the Muppet.
Movies, the guys in the, like that little press box like, Hey, that guy's an idiot ho, whatever. I feel like if Jesus were willing to indulge me and stand next to me while we watched other parents parent, I just wonder what his encouragement would be. And I think probably after reading the scriptures, um, I might have come to a conclusion that I think I can make the best case for.
And I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know if it's right or not, but I think I can find enough. Validation and enough biblical backing that I think, I think Jesus's approach would be one that I've been trying to do a little bit more lately, and I might find out that it was really traumatizing to my kids, which isn't fun.
Like I, it's not a funny thing to think about, but I, I would want them to, I know that I don't wanna raise kids, I wanna raise well adjusted adults, and they are kids, but I'm really, I always have the end game in mind that I, I want my kids, I've always said this, like, I want my kids to act. To have fun like kids, I want them to have permission to act like kids, but I, I want them to act like I want them to behave like adults in a kid's mindset, which means they're not allowed to disrespect people.
They're not allowed to disobey what I'm telling them. They're not allowed to be dishonest with what they're saying. And so I recognize that kids want to run and play and be wild and all those things, but I do also have boundaries on the fact that I, I wanna raise well adjusted adults and it can't be okay that my kid pushes other kids down the slide.
It's, that's not, while it might be behavior that is common to kids, it is not. Permissible for any kid to be pushing other kids down. Anything that's that won't fly is essentially where I wanna find myself. That's not okay, even though I understand it. A reason and an excuse are two different things. The reason my kid is lashing out irrationally is because they are a kid.
It's not an excuse for the bad. It still needs to be disciplined. Even if I get where it came from, understanding why someone disobeys and sins is not excuse for that sin. It just helps. Me better paint a picture when I'm trying to correct it and, and maybe to lean into recognizing and seeing myself in their disobedience.
Sometimes more than I'd like to admit, but something that I've been doing lately that's actually been really fruitful is what do I do in those moments? And I think the answer has become, how do I create a gospel opportunity in this moment so that I can look at my kid and help them recognize that? I don't really need my kid to be good at adjusting to fairness because you don't really need to learn how to navigate fairness.
Have you noticed that Jesus talks so much in scripture about what to do when you're bankrupt and little to do with what happens when you come into a large sum of money? I. It almost seems like we're more intuitive when it comes to having success and it's more counterintuitive on how to behave when we're in failure or injustice.
Like I, I know what to do, like, think about going to, I think about going to a, like a concert. I. I grew up like a, probably a closeted like emo Christian, where like I didn't have a lot of reasons to be mad at my dad, but I found enough of them so that I could listen to, you know, like something corporate and taking back Sunday and all these like sad emo bands, uh, yellow card and starting line and these guys.
So if you have any clue what I'm talking about. We are peers at heart. You know, somem 41, like just that you were angry at Good Charlotte and story of the year. You were angry at your parents. You didn't really have a good reason for it, right? I, I grew up in like upper class white suburbia, but. Doesn't mean you can't complain about something.
And anyway, so I, in listening to all that music and all those things, you'd want injustice in your life and you want those things, but because you wanna be relatable. But at the end of the day, growing up, there wasn't a lot of that. And I didn't really need help with navigating sections of my life that have been simple or easy.
And what I found the most difficult is arenas where. I've experienced suffering. I lost my wife to suicide two years ago. And, uh, being like a single widow and figuring how to raise kids in that environment and everything, and even now as, even like flipping through channels or flipping through like Netflix or Disney Plus or whatever it is, and I know everyone's got their own little thoughts on those things.
I'm not here to be divisive. It's really not my heart on anything. But instead to say like, how do I help my kids navigate Babylon living in San Diego, California, which is like, we're like Babylon. Like if you live in Kansas and you're listening to this, I feel like I'm coming to you from the future. Like, and the future's not bright friend.
It just came, it's, it's coming for you. Like the trends move from the west of the coast to the east coast and from the east coast back across to the west coast. But so often I find myself having to ask the question, what does it mean to navigate Babylon with my kids? And I've found this really contrarian and very difficult way of figuring out what to do when my kids experience injustice.
And that is. To not put my hand on the doorknob when my kid tells me that a teacher was unfair to him, and go, that's it. Mrs. Greenlee is gonna get a talking to from old Chris or to say, you know, if my kid's in a sporting event and the ref not just makes a bad call, but makes like an egregious call where your kid is clearly two feet behind the line and they shoot a three pointer, they say that they touch the line, you've got it.
Video evidence and everything inside of you wants to run on the court to open up your iPhone to show them the video of it, and to do all that stuff. And, and I, I think one of the questions I've been wrestling with a lot lately is, what? Why would I do that? And a lot of things are really simple. Like it's, I think the first thing that comes outta my mind.
And it is to say like, well, because they were wrong and they need to be told that they were wrong. And what if they keep calling these things wrongly and then a whole generation of kids comes through this sports program and their feet are called that they're on the line when they're not really. But the more you talk about it, the more kind of silly you sound of going.
What if that's the case? What if this whole league of people constantly is behind the line and they get called on the line? I don't think it'll make them bad parents. I don't think it'll make them bad dads or friends or. Relatives, they won't make them bad kids or parent like it's, it's really irrelevant to the real conversation of what makes people happy.
It's not whether or not they're good at basketball or whether they can shoot threes. We all know people who are good at basketball, who are miserable, and we all know people who couldn't dribble ball to save their life, who are living life. On cloud nine constantly. And it's because of their relationships.
And, and that really what it comes down to, like your, the happiness or sadness of your life depends on how healthy are your relationships, how healthy is your marriage, how healthy are your kids, how he, like, that's shown time and time again through articles and surveys and statistics across the board.
And so really if I, if I look at. A hill slide, uh, I'm saying hill slide. It's a slide on a hill. So you climb up it, you roll down whatever. If I instead look at the hill slide as how do I make my kids. Better adjusted for life and relationships rather than, how do I have my kid be first? How do I have my kid have a fun day here when sometimes I've, I've almost found myself hoping that someone commits some injustice to them.
Like, don't take it too far, right? Like, I'm gonna protect my kid from someone hitting them with a bat. I'm gonna protect my kid from someone. Making some inappropriate pass at them or an adult or someone else inflicting some sort of deep pain on them. So I, I don't mean don't be goofy with it, right?
There's boundaries on everything. But you know, when three or four kids in a row. Go down the slide in front of Leo, my knee jerk reaction is to go up there and be like, excuse me, I'm the pastor at this church, and we're gonna take turns. And it, I have noticed that it is my son's turn. There's something inside me that wants to do that.
But then when you ask the question, why do I want that? It's, it's because I want to remove any sense of hurt from my kid immediately at all times. When, when in reality, what would you do if I told you that there was a button that you could push and that button was predictive? Of pain that was coming towards your kid 50 seconds from now.
And at any point in your life you had this button on your chest and it lit up and it, when it lit up, it meant that your kid is about to experience pain in 50 seconds. It wasn't gonna kill 'em, it wasn't gonna be the end of their life. It wasn't gonna be, you know, wasn life or limb, but a button lit up on your chest no matter where you were in the world, whether you were near your kid or not.
And it said, you have 50 seconds to push this button, or your kid's gonna experience pain. How many of us would think that to create a well adjusted adult with healthy relationships, that we would push that button whenever it lit up? I think you could defend yourself pretty easily in going, how could you blame me for not wanting my kid to experience pain?
And yet if I told you. Two kids, one that whose parents push that button all the time, and the other one whose parents never push that button. And I said, I want you to predict which one is a better leader. I want you to predict which one is better adjusted for the pain of this life. Which one is better? I think we would all agree that though you have access to that button, it would be in your best interest only to use that in the most sparing of cases where you can.
Yeah, obviously we would want to. Reject any sort of deep traumatizing infliction between an adult or something else like that, that might take place. But for the most part, I think we'd be pretty shocked to find out that if we're making well adjusted adults, we'd let that button just sit and be read. I.
And gather dust. And rarely would we even know, you know, your kid's in the middle of a school day and you're at work and then the button lights up. And I think there'd be an internal moment where we would go, oh man, do I push it? Do I not push it? And I think you have to make a commitment one way or the other.
Either you're a guy who pushes it all the time or you push it never. But to almost arbitrarily. Every once in a while, tap it. You, there'd be really no rhyme or reason to it. So you either say, I'm gonna teach my kid to navigate and be there with them to try to have them have healthy outlets for their pain and their, and help 'em to, to have conversations or else I'm gonna be someone who says you're gonna not experience.
And I'm watching The Crown right now, which is obviously the, it's the royal family, the, the monarchs of England. And my wife's really big on. British culture in general. Like if a show sounds boring, my wife loves it, and if a show sounds exciting, my wife's afraid of it. And so we've had to try to navigate that.
So we find, so what we do is we sit down and I go like, I wanna watch, you know, I wanna watch the terminal list. And she's like, I wanna watch the Crown. So we have a compromise and we're watching the crown and never the terminal list. That's the compromise we found in our household. But, but I, I love like the.
That's really great acting and everything and whatever, it's fine. And I find it pretty interesting. But what I find is you, you kind of get this litany of really poorly adjusted adults because from a young age, they kinda had everything at fingertips. They didn't get, injustice wasn't permissible. And even if they got bullied, someone came in and fixed it.
But they, their scrapes and their, their scabs that they have from growing up sometimes were mitigated because people came in and stepped in and made sure they didn't experience any sort of pain or trauma or anything. And. I'm interested in this idea of taking a really. Stand back approach with this. I think it's something that we discuss.
If you, if you're co-parenting with a, with a spouse or you know, situation like mine that I had for the past couple of years where you have other people entering the picture to help or an uncle or aunt watches them consistently. I do think you need to be consistent with this parenting style, but I'd be interested in what would happen if we all kind of made a commitment to.
When I was working with high school students, we, we stopped calling 'em helicopter parents and started calling them lawnmower parents, where not only did they hover around, they went before their kids and after their kids, and made sure that there were no obstacles in their way. And what you found is the parents that you had the most conversations with that were making sure that everything was just, and that they, you know, if they applied for the missions trip, that the, the correct process was being done and there some was being considered for X, Y, and Z.
You almost always found a kid behind that process that. Had a little bit more difficult time with not getting the internship or not doing that. And the ones that you spoke with more rarely that you knew were at home, uh, just kind of fostering the emotions of their kid and not getting it, or in preparing for it, were the ones who typically were better adjusted to hear hard information.
So I've just kind of taken that and said, you know, to my wife and myself, what would it look like to commit to letting our kids experience. Small pain and small injustice, and not looking for it, not searching it out, not hoping for it, but when a kid's getting cut in front of you, when a kid's cutting in front of my kid going.
And when Leo starts to cry to go, Leo, what happened, bud? Oh, these kids cut in front of me. Okay, what do you wanna do about it? Well, here are the options that I have. Okay, well, what does God tell us to do? What does your conscience tell you to do? What would dad tell you to do? What do you think is right in this situation?
Okay, if we hit him, what do you think would. Take the place in, in that moment and then to go like, all right, man, I, I'd love to see how you want to handle this because I don't think it's gonna be the last time that someone cuts in front of you in line. 'cause whether it's a future relationship where one of your friends dates someone that you were interested in, or whether it's a job that you feel like you were in line for, it might not look like a hill slide when you get older, but it will be unjust.
And so if I can stop looking at it as. It's just a hill slide, and instead I have to teach my kid what injustice response looks like. I have to teach my kid what pain response looks like. I have to teach my kid what happens when someone else doesn't parent, because that's gonna be part of it. Like I have to teach my kid what happens.
When a referee is making bad calls, but not just doing it accidentally, doing it on purpose because we will all have referees in our life, not just in sports, but in life where we feel like something did not go our way. A call didn't go our way. We might even have evidence that someone was being rude or impulsive or whatever, or capricious in their rulings.
But if we don't really have a proper system by which to lovingly and respectfully correct it, most of life is learning to deal with punks. Most of what separates people, well adjusted from people poorly adjusted is how do you deal with injustice and punks it? I don't need you to teach me how to deal with beautiful women who think I'm awesome from a very early age.
For whatever reason. That came very natural to me that I liked being around them and I liked talking with them. Or the people at AT church growing up with that. Were your friends that. Had the same interest. No one ever had to teach me how to be friends with people who wanted to be friends with me and who show difference, and were kind, and were gentile and were, um, amenable to the things that I wanted.
I really, really did not need help with that. What I needed to learn was how to deal with the eg the extra grace required kids that wanted more of your attention and gave very little I I I needed to learn how to deal with the teachers who had teachers pets, and they weren't me and I didn't need my parents going in and talking to them about.
Fair treatment under the system for all kids, including my kid. You know, I, I had a teacher named Mrs. Kite in fifth grade. I don't know if she's still with us, but she was mean to me. She got together one day and had all the class lineup and tell why they thought that I was a bully. 'cause I had a lot of influence as a little as a young kid.
This is fifth grade though. I had my teacher. For sure there's things that I needed to hear, but she just laid into me. I remember thinking now as an adult, like, you can't do that. Like you can't just sit down a kid who's emotionally unstable. Especially if, if I was inflicting any sort of like, uh, pain on someone I, that means I was experiencing some sort of pain myself.
Not that it excuses behavior, but as a teacher, I would want to delve into the roots. And I remember now thinking back and going, man, that was rough, but it was something I needed to navigate. So maybe a challenge, maybe I'm just. Help and talk through something that I've been working through with within the gospel and seeing how many times did Jesus have disciples who were feed treated unfairly, or how easy would it have been as his followers were getting martyred for him to stop and have every spear turn into jelly when it went to go through, you know, uh, as Thomas's stab with the spear and the Cape of Africa to have the spear turn to jelly or when, um.
Peter's being crucified upside down for the nails, not to penetrate his skin. Or, you know, when Paul's being beheaded in neuro circus for God to make the executioner last minute, change his mind and decide he's gonna cut the ropes rather than cut off Paul's head. And, and yet Jesus seems to say in this world you will have trouble.
Right? Uh, do not conformity patterns of this world. Romans chapter 12, John chapter 14. Just don't freak out when trouble comes because I've overcome the world. But in the meantime, you're gonna need to learn how to navigate it. So how can we as parents, look at these opportunities and try to take a really difficult position, which is I am going to create a buffer zone around to make sure there's no lasting damage or anything, or significant abuse that goes on.
But how do I sit and say, I need you to learn how to navigate injustice. Far more than I need you to learn how to watch me take care of all of the helicopter and the lawn mowing that I need to do to make sure that your life is easy. And I know as someone who's had to navigate with my kids about the loss of their mom and suicide and mental health, and I had one of my kids one time going to a classroom for the first week they were at this church.
And a kid stood up in my son Brady's second grade classroom and said, you're Brady. I heard your mom went crazy and killed herself. And my knee-jerk reaction is, I gotta find this parent. I gotta find this teacher I gotta talk about. But instead, sat down with Brady. And I said, Hey, why do you think a kid said this?
What do you think might have happened? Have you ever heard something? And. You heard it and you, you repeated it when you shouldn't have. And what do we know to be true about mom? What do we know to be true about these things? And so I'm teaching him skills like breaking down the affront, breaking down the problem, breaking down the injustice, and asking helpful questions rather than just going, alright Brady, watch, watch me.
Come take down eight people. 'cause sometimes in life. Not the response, but there will always be pain. There will always be people saying dumb stuff. There will always be injustice if I can teach my kid to adjust his sail to the pain around him rather than to always jump ship or call for the commander of the fleet to come in and bring the battleship.
I think I'm gonna have a much better adjusted kid and and I wonder, and I just. I fail to think that Jesus wouldn't take a similar approach in going, yep, this is the way that the world is now. What does it look like as a follower of Jesus to respond to these things? Hopefully this is helpful for you here at Dad Tired.
We're, we're always looking for new ways to challenge ourselves and just to invite you into the journey. Thanks for, for listening to this, and we'll catch you guys next time.
Man, so thankful for Chris, uh, and his wisdom and how he makes things just so practical. Chris is gonna be one of the speakers at the dietary retreat, so again, if you haven't picked up your registration for that, make sure to do that@dadtired.com. Caleb, who was hosting the podcast last week, he will be another teacher there and then myself.
And so, um, we're just, we're gonna do our best to point you to Jesus and have an opportunity to meet other guys. It really is the highlight of what we do all year. So if you haven't picked up your registration, go to dad tire.com and you can register for that. All right, love guys.