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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 another episode of the Dad Tire podcast. Today I sit down with Jeremy Pryor. Jeremy often says on his Instagram, I see him post this all the time, where he says, what I'm about to say is unpopular. He'll say, unpopular, take or unpopular opinion. And then give some of his thoughts on today's culture, uh, regarding family and men.
Most often, um, today in this interview, he says some things that will probably be unpopular to you and definitely to our culture. It might even be offensive. Uh, I wanna preface today's episode by saying just take it and listen and listen to his whole context, his whole view, and see. Is there something in you that is offended by it or rubs you the wrong way?
And is it because it's just culturally offensive or is this biblically untrue? If you think it's biblically untrue, like you have some biblical, um, you know, sound biblical evidence, why what he's saying is not right? Jeremy would love to have a dialogue with you. I know that for a fact. Um, go on his Instagram or he's on Twitter a lot and you can just dialogue with him.
He would love to have a conversation with you, but listen to the full context. Really try to get an idea of like, what is he saying? What's the heart behind what he's saying? And is this biblical? I listened back, um, all week after doing this interview. I'm like, man, this is hard stuff to listen to. Is should I cut it?
Like there were some things I'm like, should I cut this out? But I'm like, no. I think everything he's saying is true and right. Uh, but some of it is hard. And so anyway, all that to say, listen, listen with a biblical lens and uh, and just let it kind of. Go against your spirit. Ask yourself some good questions and see what you can come up with.
But I highly encourage that you listen to the whole thing. Before we jump into that interview, I do wanna thank my friends over at lifeway for sponsoring today's episode. Lifeway put out a CSB Men's Daily Bible, which is amazing, and equips men with the truth of the Bible to take on the challenges of everyday life.
There are unique challenges, as you know, for every man, and oftentimes it can feel lonely. And with the men's CSB Daily Bible men are drawn into the word to be effective leaders, husbands, fathers, sons, and representatives of Christ. It's gonna offer you daily connection, daily discipleship, daily accountability, daily wisdom, and prepare you through the word of God to be the man.
God has called you to be. If you're a woman, this is a great gift for any man in your life. Um, there's nothing really greater that you can give your man than the word of God. And if you're a man just looking to figure out, you know, some resources to help you become the man that God's called you to be, the CSB Men's Daily Bible is a great resource for that.
You can go to lifeway.com, use the promo code mdb, that's Men's Daily Bible MDB 50, and they'll actually give you 50% off this Bible, which is incredible. I've given this Bible as a gift to many guys in my life. They've really enjoyed it. Again, go to lifeway.com, use the promo goat MDB 50 and they'll give you 50% off.
That being said, let's jump into today's episode two, one.
Jeremy, super excited to have you back on the podcast, man. You've been here a bunch of times, which still doesn't feel like enough to scratch the surface on your wisdom. I was literally, as we were hitting record, I was like, just finishing up your latest YouTube video. I think it's your latest with your kids on Jack and the Beanstalk, how to get out of poverty as a family.
Dude, your mind, like, you just, you've got a lot of wisdom in like a lot of areas. Like sometimes I'm, I'm watching you and you're talking about Bluey, and sometimes you're talking about Israel and Hamas, and sometimes you're talking about Jack in the Beanstalk, dude. Like you're, you're just, oh man. Yeah.
Well, it is fun to kind of get to play in whatever. Yeah. Like in the family Teams podcast, it's like, all right, I need, I need to try to stay focused on family stuff. And then I, I started my own podcast just so I could go nuts and talk about anything. Especially with my kids. I'm like, can we just like be free flowing?
There's a lot, there's a lot of important stuff in the world, so, yeah. Yeah, I do like to do that. So I try to stay focused in certain lanes, but, but then I just need to kind of free flow 'cause uh, yeah, it, it is fun to just explore. Yeah. Various topics. It feels like you have a really good pulse on kind of culturally what's happening and.
Would you consider, I, I've heard you talk about this before, but would you consider yourself, like in the, those sage years, I feel like you are, but do you feel like you you are, I'm in the transition, you know? Yeah. We, we just had our first grandson, we got two more on the way. I, I mean, we definitely were trying to design our lifestyle to be maximally available for our kids when they started having kids.
Mm. To transition and be able to spend a lot of time working with our kids, helping them. Kind of get stuff started. So yeah, both my wife and I are really, we've, we've been kind of holding our breath looking forward to this, this transition. So I think we're kind of, yeah, in the beginning stages of, of really that focus.
We still have a lot of our own projects going on, but, but we do, we do want to have a lot of bandwidth for that generation and what they're going through right now. Well, it in some ways it feels like you have come out of like the Rushing River, just trying to like, you know, for some of us young families, we're just trying to keep our head above water, not drowned and make sure that the kids don't drown.
But it seems like you've kind of gone through those rushing waters and now you're kind of sitting up on a rock watching other people go through them and like speaking, speaking wisdom into it. Anyway, you've been really helpful for me. If you guys as listeners haven't like checked out what Jeremy's doing or followed his YouTube or Instagram podcast.
I've described you to people in private as like one of the most underrated voices of generation. Might feel like a huge, you know, like a huge statement. But I mean, you, you have so much wisdom man, and more people need to hear what you have to say. 'cause I think God has given you a really unique way of viewing the world and some wisdom.
So I'm not saying that, uh, hype you up, stroke you, ego or anything. I just really. As a young dad, I'm, I'm getting a lot out of what you're doing man, so thank you for sharing. Awesome, man. Yeah, thank you for saying that. Yeah. It's exciting to see like this, there's so much untethering, I would say of like, of how to think about really important concepts from their root structure, and I just felt so confused for so long and I think that.
That that situation just continues. Things continue to get untethered from what you know, things really meant. What, what is the family? What is fatherhood? What is motherhood? So yeah, I do feel like we do need to start thinking about that stuff. It's hard to know how to talk about that, those things. And does scripture really give us a.
Like a proper grounding. And so that's kind of the bullseye of what I like to think about. So yeah, I think part of the reason why maybe there's, there is I dip in this of the popular world, but I I, I do really enjoy the philosophical, theological abstract, like kinda getting into that stuff. And I think sometimes a little heady for people.
But yeah, I, I want to get back to first principles. I wanna build my life on bedrock. I don't want to be constantly swept away by every little trend that's happening in the culture. So trying to find that bedrock, trying to have conversations. People and, and seeing, you know, how do we build our lives on that?
So yeah, I would say that's, that's kind of the bullseye for me. From a high level perspective, as you're gauging culture, what are some red flags you're seeing in terms of family and manhood? Yeah, I would say the thing that culturally I've been kind of really trying to understand is it seems like that we are defining fathers as mothers and daughters as sons.
When I say that, people are always like, what? Yeah, there are objective ways to think about those things. Like, no, no, no. They, they're just individuals. And so, but, but the way that I think about each of those roles, and again, I, I'm trying to understand what bedrock is, what is a father, how is a father different than a mother?
And I do think that basically what's occurred culturally is that we have tried to define motherhood and fatherhood, both as parenting, and then we define parenting as mothering. And so therefore, for a father to succeed. What it looks like. And if you were to talk to most people about what it means to be a good father, the way that we're describing it today, the way it's being popular, and this is good fatherhood, this is not like neglectful or whatever, but, but what does it look like?
You gotta be really present. You gotta be playful. And so there's all those things are really important. Those are good things. But there, there is an aspect of fatherhood that's about like. Kind of pushing your kids, challenging your kids, having a vision for the family, leading the family. And a lot of this comes down to whether or not you think the family is a team or a nest.
So this is always, I've been talking a lot about that for a long time, that historically the way to think about family is as a team, they work together. For most times in history, you would be starving if you weren't working as a team. But the nest metaphor is really what has dominated our culture. And it's really hard to be a father in a nest because the nests are really maternal, they're self-destruct, they're designed for nurturing, and those are good things, and those are things that fathers can participate in.
It really isn't to dis those things, it's just that what's being, there are elements that are being squeezed out of what fatherhood traditionally look like, and I think what it necessarily ought to look like, uh, for the flourishing of families and for the kids in the family. So I think. That's a trend that I've been really interested in understanding and trying to just dialogue with, especially young fathers about like, because I think that as you start looking at all the real popular descriptions of good fatherhood, and to me when I look at them, they're like, if, if you were to just like swap out mothers for that role, that depiction, then it would actually look.
More like what motherhood used to traditionally look like. And then you even see the inverse happening as well. You see a lot of the ideal depictions of motherhood being traditionally what fatherhood used to look like. So I've always like reference, you know, bluey as an example. The reason why, like in our culture, the only way to appropriately describe any kind of gender roles in a popular way is you have to invert them.
You know, this is true in movies. This is true in the way we're retailing fairytales, and this is true in. Even children's programming. So you don't want to see like a traditionally strong, masculine leading father that that's way too close to the patriarchy and that's what's causing all the problems according to so many people today.
So in order to ensure that we have a good depiction of fatherhood that doesn't skew into the patriarchy, it's really important to make sure that he looks like a mother. In order to make sure that women are, are fully released and totally liberated and we're aligning ourselves with where really feminism is pointing women at.
We need to really reflect women as traditionally what fathers used to look like. So I think most people's reaction to that is, well, it's not a big deal and there's a lot of families that function that way and it's not a bad thing. The problem you guys is that it does make it difficult, and I would maybe throw this out as maybe kind of the, the larger idea that, that I think culture is struggling with.
One of the things that culture no longer believes is that there is an ideal depiction of motherhood. There's a, an ideal depiction of fatherhood, that there's an ideal depiction of family. There is no such thing as an ideal. There's nothing to aim at. Hmm. There's no ideal. There's no ideal sonship. There's no ideal, you know, daughter there.
There only is, uh, unique individual expressions of those things. Hmm. And so that sounds really good on one hand, but the problem is it gives us nothing to aim at. It's really difficult for me to figure out how to level up as a father. If I don't know what ideal fatherhood looks like, right? It doesn't mean that ideal fatherhood is some kind of incredibly rigid, you know, here's a man who is the ideal father.
A lot of people misunderstand when you talk about ideals. The way that you depict ideals is symbolically so that you can see yourself in those ideals. I was just talking to my daughters on the podcast recently about one of the TV shows that we, I watch with my kids a lot is Star Trek. The Next Generation we're T Truckies and we're all very nerdy in my family.
Um, and one of the things that. We were discussing was that Captain Picard. This was, this was a show made in the nineties, if anybody's familiar with it. Captain Picard is, is an a almost perfectly ideal depiction of a father. Now, you could never make a show even in the nineties with a father being depicted that way because it's too triggering and it's too rigid.
But he's not actually a father at all. He has no children. He's not married. He's gotta be single. And he's, that sort of frees you up to see him as a symbol. And you have a really good depiction of, of motherhood being symbolically depicted by various women in the show. You have sonship being very powerfully depicted by various other men in the show, so a lot of us don't understand how important these kinds of things are.
We have, again, something to aim at, something ideal to look for. This used to be the role by the way that the royal family would play in, in the UK, for example. So a lot of people like are very confused about why would you ever have a royal family? That sounds ridiculous. And so we have shows like The Crown that's really designed to just tear down the idea of the royal family.
Like, look, they're just like us. They're broken. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know where they're going. And all of that's true of course, but it's to misunderstand the real, the real purpose of why. The royal family exists. Uh, in that structure, the real role of the royal family was to depict an, a symbolic depiction of, of ideal family life.
Mm. And so every family is aiming at sort of this royal family life. It doesn't mean that, again, it's symbolic. So it's, it's not like we're all gonna, you know, have a castle. Right. So a lot of people are super concrete. When I, when I start saying these things, it's a symbolic depiction. So, in other words, the point of where you're aiming at as a, as fatherhood is kingship.
So if you were to go further and further and further down the fatherhood path, what you're really trying to get to is, is the ideal of a king What a woman is trying to get to? Who's a mother is the, the, the queenly ideal? Anyway, we could go down that rabbit hole, but I would say that that is one thing that has been completely destroyed.
I would say most people listen to this probably if they're not confused right now, they disagree. Those are the two options. You either, and I just want to like say as, as a very unpopular opinion, I think this has been devastating to families. To not have any ideal to suggest that what we want and what our culture has collectively decided is individual freedom is the highest value in our culture.
And ideals really make that difficult. I mean, as soon as you put out an ideal, you know, like what happens if I fall short of the ideal, I feel terrible. And also it really constrain my individual freedom. But that's one of the problems is that when you're playing a role, and fatherhood and motherhood are roles, and this is something that I think again, culturally, we really struggle with.
There are roles to be played and there is a lot of freedom in that role, but there are tethered to, to realities. And so if I try to play the role as father in a maximally individual way, it will end up hurting my children and hurting my wife and hurting myself. Like there are boundaries to these roles.
Just in the same way that if you're playing a sport, it's great if you're a quarterback and you're like, you need to learn how to throw the ball. But if you say, look, I just wanna play the quarterback. The way the linemen are playing. Mm-hmm. Like, you're gonna hurt your team. Mm-hmm. Like, things are gonna, there's a lot of freedom.
You could be the, the guy who throws the, the long pass. You could be the guy who like, loves the, the options and loves the running plays. Like there's a lot of freedom, but there's also, it's tethered to some reality. It's tethered to trying to score a touchdown. It's tethered to other roles that on the team.
And so if you have sons and daughters and a wife and a mother who's also playing the game with you, then it's important to understand. The role of fatherhood, and I don't think that we understand what that is anymore. So I have two questions. Based on what you just said, you can answer them individually or if it makes sense to answer them together, you know, feel free.
But one of the things you said was you can't have that character be a father because it's, you used the word triggering. How much of this where we're at as a culture is a reaction to previous pain from men. The quote, quote unquote, triggering like this, I don't want to see you as a dad because my dad sucked, and men suck, and men hurt me and men hurt everyone.
And so we're reacting. So that was one question. And then you used, you know, the, if the quarterback, if that player, if you, or if the dad, you said, I think you said something to the effect of the dad, you know, sees himself as an individual versus being part of the team. He hurts the team. How specifically?
You gave some analogies in, in the football realm, but how does that man specifically hurt his family when he is thinking him as an, as an individual and not part of the collective? Yeah. So your first question, I, I do agree. I think that, I think we've been hurt by these roles now. I think that there's two aspects of the, quote unquote trauma or pain or, or hurt that people have experienced from being imperfectly, mothered, or fathered, right?
So. One aspect is very real. In other words, there are a lot of people that have toxically taken advantage of these roles, like in any power structure and said, I'm going to use the power of fatherhood or motherhood to get my preferences met at your expense. Yeah, it's a terrible thing to do to a child.
It's been done to many, many people, and so people have experienced that and said, well, I don't want anything to do with that. I don't, I don't want there to be any power in the family at all. I don't want to exert any kind of leadership. I don't wanna make any suggestions that you're getting any kind of identity, like all of that is hurtful towards children.
And, and I don't want nothing to do with it because I've been hurt badly by that. So I, I, I think that's a very legitimate experience. I think that it's better to understand that they really abuse that role. So in the same way that you might say, like, there, I, I had a coach that was super toxic and they abused that role and it was horrible.
But then all of a sudden I'd switched teams to another team and I, I had this amazing coach and. They really cared about my heart and they figured out like how to level me up as a player. And so you can take out your pain on the role of coach. Yeah. Or you could just really understand that you had a bad coach.
And so a lot of us have been poorly treated in that way. So I think it's important to, to look at that. Now. I do think people have been triggered in ways that maybe it was being, uh, lived out because the reality is as soon as you have a role to play in a, in, in something that it, it can. It can be sort of, uh, it can come up against your, your desire as an individual and you might react against that negatively and say, well, I don't, I don't like that constraint.
Like we worship individual freedom in, in our culture. Yeah. Um, we, we've really elevated that to the absolute highest value, right? You guys, if you're a Christian listening to this, that is not the highest thing. Jesus said the truth will set you free. And one of the things that as a Christian we have to believe is that freedom always serves something higher.
Mm-hmm. We want to become free as individuals in order to serve something above freedom. And so what our culture has chosen to do is, this is, I know it's getting philosophical, but we put freedom at the as the highest value in the hierarchy and that there's something absolutely unbiblical about that in the scriptures.
Freedom is really, really important. It's very high on the hierarchy, but it does serve something higher. So we use our freedom to create the kingdom of God, to serve something higher. And so that it's important to, to understand that. And so in a, in a family context, you want to have enough freedom to be able to serve the design that God created the family to be.
But you don't wanna have so much freedom that you violate that design. And so that's where a lot of, I think this, this, this occurs. And so I, I understand there's a very understandable, kind of triggering, I think we experienced. And then there's a very, I think there's, there's a kind of trauma or triggering.
That really is being, it's sort of created by this value inversion that's happened at the value hierarchy within our culture that we think we need to resist. Yeah. And to just sort of like, yeah, the role is important. In 2016, I was making a transition from working in a church, and I won't get into all the details, but a lot of people in the podcast know my story.
I had been hurt by working with a friend in church plant. I didn't really know what I was doing, and that tired hadn't started yet. And I had had this business where we were making videos and I was on this work trip, so it was me and my buddy and some other teammates from another company. And these team, there was two gals and they were from Portland where we.
I've lived the last several years before I moved out here. So we went on this workshop, we were traveling across the country and like we got a rental car and I, like, I offered to drive and then there was one point where I like offered to put the bags in the car and then I held the door open. Anyway, we're like three days into this trip and one of the gals at dinner is just like, tells me, she kind of goes off on me like how offended.
She had been by my behavior the whole trip. And I mean, I was so caught off guard people back then. I mean, even in Portland, I had kind of heard of like feminism and, you know, but not really, you know, I never really looked into it, but she was legitimately mad at me. I was like, what? What did, I'm so sorry.
You know, what did I do? And she's like, well, you, you know, you offered to drive. Why do you feel like you need to drive? And you offered to put the bags in the car. Why do you feel like you, um, I was just like, I was raised with, uh, by a single mom and three sisters, like. This is the only way I know how to love women, you know, to like serve them.
I know that bag's heavy and I'm the strongest one in this family, you know, to like lift that bag physically. And so anyway, it, it was just so shocking to me and I was like, it was the first time my eyes were kind of open like, okay, this, there's a whole, that was the step one of what became many steps of learning, that this was becoming a cultural thing.
Fast forward, I mean, that wasn't even 10 years ago. I do think, obviously our culture is going in some weird places and, and we're having some wacky conversations as humanity and as a people, but I do think some people are starting to say even from a secular perspective, like, yeah, but isn't it good like when a man just like loves his wife and is like faithful and like protects her and serve like, you know, I guess what the, the question I'm painting here is.
Do you think that we're gonna swing the pendulum back? I heard one pastor say like, eventually, like stupidity catches up and people realize like, this isn't working for us. Like the things that we are saying is, is valuable are, they're not actually serving us as humans. We're not flourishing. Are you seeing any signs of that pendulum swinging back or do, do you have any hope that we will get back to it?
Well, it's, yeah, it's, it's challenging honestly because I think, I think the. There are various ways to find your way back, and I think that when, when you have scripture, for example, you can find your way back because you got access to first principles of divine revelation. So when I read in the scriptures and, and I think the absolute tethering for fatherhood is found in the person of Abraham, the point of Abraham is to be the symbolic father that we tether our idea of fatherhood on.
In the Jewish world, they, they understand this. If you talk to Orthodox Jews about what is fatherhood, they will bring up Abraham every time in, in detail. You ask the average Christian, talk to me about fatherhood. You know, they're more influenced by cultural things because they're, they're untethered from, from Abraham.
Part of that is just in Hebrew, you hear it. You actually, the word avram is an original name, means exalted father. And so you actually hear in Hebrew that, that the Bible is presenting Abraham as a meta father, not a perfect father, but a perfect depiction of how God interacts with the, the concept of fatherhood.
And so I've spent years and years studying Abraham and with other fathers, and we midrash every single verse in Genesis about Abraham and try to, we were tethering all of our understanding to that. But to answer your question, the problem is that even if you see something that isn't working and then you're like, oh, we need to respond or react or maybe recover something, we've lost something in the past.
Have to have a way, like, sort of like you're in the woods and you have no way of finding your way back. Yeah. And so you don't know what they're gonna tether to next. It doesn't mean that they're gonna find truth, they could just tether to something more strange. Um, or, or less stable. Yeah. And that happens all the time.
Yeah. And this is sort of what's going on with the, with the new atheist movement. Right? They imagine this world in which if everyone became atheists and everyone became perfectly rational and they made all their decisions, ra through rationality alone, then we would basically usher in some kind of new utopia.
They're being shocked, one after another, seeing what culture actually started tethering to when they successfully destroyed people's faith in God. They didn't suddenly become these hyper-rational beings. They started tethering their ideas of reality to things that were even less stable. And so all the things that are happening culturally really are coming out of this inability to be tethered to reality.
So unfortunately that the news isn't great, I think you still have to find your way back to something that's, that is bedrock, that's objective. That is. That is not susceptible to being manipulated by, by any person's sort of ideas, their philosophies. We're gonna see even weirder stuff, I think emerge. The only way back is to find something objective.
And I think that that's why as as Christians, one of the things we have to, we have to say about nature of reality is that God has created the world and created human beings to be dependent on divine revelation. As Christians, we need to understand that, that we are dependent on the Bible. It's not just like the, oh, the Bible's there.
It's nice, right? That we, we are revelation dependent creatures. In other words, if you, if you, even if you believe in, in in God and you believe in Christianity, but you don't actually spend a lot of time studying the Bible, what you're really saying with your life is that you're practically saying, I. I'm really more, uh, dependent on ideas of psychology or literature or, or my moods or the latest trends.
Yeah. And, and so we are people of the book. In other words, we believe that God, God actually didn't put within humanity the ability to create a perfect map of reality and then find our way just internally through our own feelings and our emotions, and through our own intuitions back into reality. That's actually something that sort of the secular world believes and it's destroying us.
Yeah. We are, we are revelation dependent, so we have to be studying and tethering reality to scripture. Yeah. I think there's part of me too that, going back to the pendulum swinging that I might be naive, but you know, I, I, I saw an article recently where there was a school in Texas, I believe, and there were some kids who, I can't remember the exact circumstances.
I think there were some boys. That didn't have any dads around. And so the school had kinda just put out, Hey, if you want to kind of be a dad to some of the, uh, boys that don't have any dads, you know, we're gonna do a informal meeting before school starts. And it was something like, again, I, I'm butchering the details here, but it was hundreds of dads showed up to this thing and they showed a picture of this cafeteria full of hundreds of men who said, I will step in to be a father to these boys who don't have dads.
Or in some way act in a fatherly role. And that post and that news story ended up going viral. It had millions of, because there's something kind of in us that's like that, that feels right, that feels right, that a boy should have a dad, that this is the way things are meant to be. And so you have some these kind of crazy conversations.
But I mean, even Obama had like a, had a, uh, fatherhood initiative because they recognized, like when dad show up, things go better. So I, I just think it's like, I don't know, man, that you, you kind of go off into the crazy and then sometimes I get lost in the news. I'm like, dude, we are. Jesus. Come back. This is insane.
Yeah, and I think you're right. I think it's only gonna get more insane, but I do think there's something deep within us that just resonates with the design of God. It's like, this is not how things were meant to be. Right. Well, yeah. Even those ideas of fatherhood initiatives are being considered to be inappropriate today.
There are countries that are erasing fatherhood and motherhood and going with parent Wanted Parent two. I dunno if you saw this story, you know, roll Dolls books, you know the guy who wrote Charlie and Choc Factory and James and the Giant Peach? They said, we're, we're gonna get rid of the 10 most offensive words in these books.
And two of those 10 were father and mother and they are offensive because it creates inequality between genders and. One of the things a rabbi pointed out to me once, I've never gotten over it. He said The word parent and parenting does not exist at all in ancient Hebrew. It's not in the Bible. Wow. I was like, what?
I did, I did a deep study. I was like, is that true? Because it does exist in the, in modern Hebrew, which I've studied as well, but, but I couldn't find it. It's not there. Wow. It's only father and mother and so fathering and mothering. When it says, honor your father and mother, you know, we could just as easily say, FA, honor your parent, but you're not, no one is ever parented.
You've never parented anyone. Mm-hmm. You either father them or you mother them. Wow. And the God has designed the world in such a way that children need to be fathered and mothered and they are not the same. And this is why I'm, I'm really trying to raise the flag. And you asked a question earlier, what is the cost of, of saying, like, erasing that and just saying there's just parenting, like what happens?
You know, because, because one of the reasons why, of course, this is deeply offensive is that once you've, you've created, you know, what we call marriage equality. You say that you wanna be able to make the case that a child that has two moms or two dads has no disadvantages over the child who has a father and a mother.
And so in order to get to that political desire, you erase fathering and mothering and you invent this new category called parenting. And then what? What kids really need is just parents. And that's not true. That's not biblical. They need fathering. And they need mothering. And sometimes there's tragedies that happen and father dies or a mother dies or there's a divorce and, and when those men show up at that Texas school you described, they are saying, these boys need fathering.
Every boy needs to be fathered. And so this is why I think then we have to take this big step back and say, what is fathering? Like? We have to somehow disentangle fathering from parenting. And that's why I am, I'm trying to make the case that what we have done culturally is we have invented this new category of parenting.
When I study what a normal person needs by parenting, I just see mothering. Mm. This is, and this is why I started this way. Basically we have dis described and there there was a video we, we discussed on our pod podcast where there was a, a stay-at-home dad that was, you know, doing all kinds of nurturing things, making food for his kids.
And it was just really clear. Like any other time in history, every activity show showed, you know, he was like vacuuming with his kids and. Doing all these very, very traditional kind of trad mom kind of things. And, and, and the whole point of the, of the video and what by was, this is the new father. And I'm like, a hundred percent yes.
That is a hundred percent true. That is the new father. The new father is the traditional mother. And people always ask me like, what's missing? Like that, that is what parenting is. It's just mothering. And I'm like, yeah, I know, I know. That's what we've decided culturally. Because we used to have, you know, fathers used to be these visionary leaders.
And again, where this causes all the triggering is in the word patriarch or patriarchy. You used to have the idea that fathers were leading a tribe, they were constructing an entire clan. And so they were out there leading their sons into like an expansion. And this is the reason why I believe in this so deeply, is because when God created the first family, he actually told us why he created family.
He says to the first family, be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. There's five things that he told the family to do, and it takes a father to do those five things. It takes a, you know, you can't just have a parents. You need a father and a mother. And the further you get down the line on those, on those elements, the more, the more the biblical idea of fatherhood and the reason why the Bible does talk about the patriarchs, the more that role becomes clear.
The word patriarch, of course, is, is the word for ruling father. And the reason why it's important is because father, uh, households or families were designed to be ruling units. We were designed to work as a team with our children, with our, and most. When you hear, like, when you think about the word family, part of the confusion here is that in traditional cultures, when you heard the word family, you, you didn't think about the way we think about.
A mom and a dad and a couple little kids, they thought of a much larger thing called a household, right? Where you have a grandfather and a grandmother. You had multiple adult children and their children and lots of grandchildren, and then, you know, other extended family members as well as other people who were serving the family.
So it was a, it was this large unit that had economic engine in the middle of it that, that had a spiritual rhythms that were happening in and through that, that household. This ancient household thing requires a father like Abraham to lead a father who's training who's, who's a visionary leader, and who is, who is leading his family.
In order to expand the family, expand us through lots of different means, economically, physically, spiritually. So, so if you're going to build a household, a ruling household, you need to have a father. Who is, who's aiming at becoming a patriarch, that's the biblical idea you have. And so this, this is of course, anathema culturally today, and that's why the only way for a man to discover some role that still exists for him in the family, he must become motherly.
And I, I'm not willing to make that exchange. I don't think that's a good exchange. And I think it's not good for children. It's not good for the future of our civilization. Wow. I agree with you. And uh, I can already. Anticipate the emails that I'll get as a result of you saying this on the desk. I just send those emails to jeremy@likemyspace.com or something.
I dunno. Gonna send those. I agree with you, but I think that there are gonna be people who are offended by what you just said because it's hard to hear in our culture. I think about the scenario you, you shared about the, the stay-at-home dad, and that's nice. Those things sound nice, but I, I grew up without a dad.
And I would've loved my dad to be around and to vacuum and to make me lunch and things like that. But that's not really, when I think back on what I desired as a young boy, that's not what I think about. I think about a man. What I really would've wanted was a man to look me into the face and say hard things with love to call me into something to challenge me, to push me to become a man that I was afraid that I could be, but I knew that, that he saw something in me.
I didn't know I had, you know, those kind of like. As you're describing a coach that showed me hard love and tough love, and yet pushed me to be the man God's called me to be. That's really, really what I wanted from a dad. My mom made me sandwiches and kept the house clean, not to, you know, again, I, I can already hear all the, uh, mad emails I'm going to get, and my mom did a wonderful job as a single mom, but she would say, I could not fill the role as a father for you.
My mom has said that to me. I could not be the role of dad that you needed. You needed a man, and I didn't have that. And you didn't have that. So you mentioned grandparents there, which is originally, I think I reached out to you. I wanted to touch base on this and we had had a chance to scratch the surface on that topic, but a lot of my peers are trying to navigate the relationships with their parents and in-laws.
Because I think we talk about that nest family that you talk about. We raise our kids. It's very hyper individualized. We send them out. That's kind of the end of it. What you've described is even at the very beginning of this interview, you said you're, you try to build up to a life that made sense for you to be involved with your kids and your grandkids later.
A lot of, uh, my peers were just like confused on what is the role. My parents in my life, in my child's life and with my in-laws, like how should I be thinking of them biblically, what is right as a disciple of Jesus to be thinking through in that realm? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Bible makes us really clear, um, in terms of the word we need to focus on when we're focused upstream.
And that is honor, right? It's one of the 10 commandments. It's fascinating. There's more verses. The Torah, the first five books, the, the kinda legal parts of the whole testament. There's more verses about how to care for parents than for children. This is was a much closer to bedrock of the way that you create a culture, and that is how do you honor upstream?
I think the challenge that we have in our culture is that, you know, most of us within the last 30, 40 years, we're the first generation or first couple generations now that were really raised with, with sort of like an understanding of psychology and. One of the things you learn about your life is that your parents screwed you up.
And so what, where a lot of people start the conversation about their parents is they begin by saying, my parents owe me an enormous debt. They screwed me up, and they'll never pay that down. And so there's a, there's, we're constantly walking on eggshells. But if our, our, if our parents say one thing that's like negative or our in-laws, you know, impose on us in some way.
There's a sense if you feel like you're owed and then somebody like layers on top of that, some kind of demand or, or you just have to deal with their idiosyncratic, you know, quirks or something. You have a very short fuse for that. You have very little tolerance. And so I, I think that one of the things we have to say at the beginning is, yes, our parents screwed us up and the Bible makes clear that we are to honor them anyway.
And that we, we don't remember the things that they, many of the things that they did to provide for us, we just take for granted, right? Mm-hmm. And so, one of the things that says in one Timothy five. Which is a really crazy verse if you, if you want to study family from a New Testament perspective, you gotta really, really dig deep into what Paul says in one Timothy five.
It's one of the most neglected chapters, uh, in the New Testament. And it's also one of the clearest in terms of application. He says literally in that passage that if you have a widow in your family, then you, you first responsibility as first responsibility is to repay them what they've done for you.
Wow. And so, I don't know when the last time you ever were in a church in the past was like, Hey, look, if you're serving a ministry in this church and your mom needs help. Please stop serving and help your mom. It's right here in the Bible. Your first responsibility is to care for your parents. If Paul had a very, very few things to say, this was one of the very important things he felt that that needed to be said to, to people in our generation, right, with with aging parents.
And so it's really important to God that we care for our parents. And part of the problem, of course, is we live in a world where the ideal, again, going back to ideals, even our parents probably imagine that the ideal. Is that they would be not a burden like that. They would need nothing from us or that the government through social security and other, other benefits would basically take care of, of themselves or take, be taken care of by the government.
And this has been devastating to families because we families are supposed to be by nature, multi-generational. Yeah. Right. Right now we have four generations living in our house. My parents live here, you know, me and my wife, and then my daughter and her husband, along with my grandson. Wow. And so, four generations in one house.
It is incredibly awesome. Yeah. It's like one of the most, I mean, I, I just, it's like scenes around my house, like would bring you to tears every day. It's, it's unbelievable. My dad was hanging out in our garden this morning and people were posting in our WhatsApp family chat pictures of my, my grandson with, with his great-grandfather.
That's incredible. I was like, that is the good life. Yeah. That has been robbed from us because again, going all the way back to the beginning, we don't, we don't know. We're aiming at, we we're not aiming at an ideal. Yeah, it is ideal you guys. To spend time with your, your aging parents caring for them.
Mm-hmm. That is a privilege. That is not a burden, but because we've redefined family as a single generation nuclear family, we have destroyed the ground on which the value and the desire to care for parents existed. I, I talked to one Indian family once, we were doing a discipleship program up in Seattle, and, and I was having one-on-one with this kid, and I was like, what was, what was your favorite thing about this last year?
And he told me. My grandfather lived with us. He's in his nineties, and, and this family was from India, and so we were having a, uh, like a banquet, and I met his dad and I, and I pulled his dad over and I said, Hey, your son told me that your father is living with you guys right now and he's in his nineties.
Can you tell me about that? Like, how does that work? He said, oh, yes, this is, this is one of the greatest things. Mm-hmm. So he said, he told me the whole story. He's like, my, my father, he had five sons. All five of us immigrated from India to the United States, and we all are fighting over who gets to care for my dad.
Wow. So we all have to take turns. So each of us, all five brothers have a, have a room in their house Wow. For our father. And then he, he, in order to, to not take advantage of each other, we take turns. And so every three months, my father moves from one of the son's house to the next. Then he said this, he said, one of the reasons I want my son to see this is I want my son to know how I want him.
To treat me when, when I'm old. Mm. And I'm like, this is the absolute opposite of everything I've ever heard. Totally. About the way that aging is supposed to work. Right. I think this guy in the Indian culture and so many other cultures mm-hmm. That are more, have a more ancient understanding of family, have this Right.
We are in such a bad spot culturally when it comes to understanding this. So where this starts is first of all just you have to value this. You have to say. It is my privilege to find ways to honor my father and mother. And again, I know there are some incredibly toxic situations where that's inappropriate and you know, you were badly abused by, by family, but, but let's say that your parents were imperfect, like every other parents were, are, are like my parents.
I'm, I'm imperfect. Me and my wife we're screwing up our kids in all kinds of ways that I'm sure a psychologist will tell us about. As our kids are getting older, that is not somehow negate the obligation and the privilege that, that I have towards my parents or my children have towards me and my wife.
To honor us. And the word honor was always understood to mean care for in old age like that, that, that, that's epicenter of what it means. Wow. And you see that, you know, Jesus was actually confronted in the gospels where, where there was a, there was two brothers fighting over an inheritance and, and they were trying to decide.
And one of the things that, that happens in, in that story is that, that he's fighting with the Pharisees about whether or not they can just give all that money to the synagogue or the church or the temple instead of give it to their parents. And. And Jesus was like, what? Like, no, of course not like you.
You have a fine way of, of coming up with weird traditions to negate the word of God. Yeah, the word of God says, honor your father and mother and so and so if you're, and so there, there's lots of subtle ways you can honor your, your parents. Ultimately you want to create a situation where you're interdependent with aging parents.
And, you know, one of the things we do culturally today is we just throw parents in nursing homes and, and they get to spend the rest of their lives, like, you know, eating food around other old people, bad food, and, and watching reruns on tv, I'm like, this is supposed to be the best period of their entire life.
If you want to understand the way an old person is supposed to experience life. Study. Psalm 1 28, Psalm 1 28 describes the good life. And what it says is, may you live long, why in order to see your children's children. And it describes a table where a man and a WA wife is sitting in seeing their multi-generational family around a table.
And we experience that every single week. You know, we have a, a, a special dinner where my parents are in the seat of honor before my father-in-law died. He came to this meal every week. There was a time, basically every single week, usually about two hours into the meal. So we would eat this meal and we'd have kind of family story time, and it was just really an incredible experience.
There was always this moment where he would literally start breaking down in tears as I was watching when it would happen and how it happened. I think what was occurring was when he was sitting there seeing his children and his grandchildren, he just became overwhelmed by the meaning of his life. Wow.
Like that's the way you're supposed to spend the last decade of your life being overwhelmed by the beauty and the meaning of your seeing your descendants and what they're doing. And he was so interested in everything everyone was doing. It was so, it was just my privilege. I just, our job And just to answer your question really simply, like is to set the table for your parents to tell stories and to interact with their grandchildren.
And as you do that, you sit back and allow the generations that cross-pollinization that, that, that God designed generations to have. And a lot of times, you know, because culturally we've, we've forgotten this, you know, we don't have really good rhythms like this. We, we have to, like, have prompts for our parents and, you know, ask them questions and, you know, part of what we, we try to do is, is, is even I'll send emails to my dad like, Hey, you want share this, you know, story about this topic or my mom.
And so there's a constant conversation happening on those Friday night dinners. That's, I think the, the core of what it means to honor your father and mother, care for them in old age, provide for them. Integrate them into, into a life in the most healthy way you can if that's once a week, twice a week, three times a week into the rhythms of your life so that they have an opportunity to pass wisdom onto their grandchildren.
And this exchanges wisdom goes downstream and honor goes upstream. Mm-hmm. And the, the, it's amazing how when you start to experience this symbiotic relationship between the generations, like how much purpose there is and part of what's gonna happen to you. To me or you, Jared, in our generation is, guess what?
We start looking forward to getting old. Yeah. Like, I can't wait to be that kind of grand. I mean, when my daughter had our first, you know, our grandson, I was so overwhelmed with just so, I was so excited. The meaning of my life felt like it. It just, it exponentially increased. Mm. To be alive and seeing that generation come into being and to see my dad hold his great grandson.
I was just, I, I mean, I, I've never gotten over it. And if you want to have that experience, it starts with honoring your own parents. Mm. Because then you're showing your kids and your own heart, you're building up in your own heart the excitement. About those last decades of, of life. When you get to see those descendants begin to exponentially increase underneath you and, and your ability to begin to, to perceive the future and pass that wisdom on.
So there's a lot there. But that's, that's how I, no, that's good, man. Part of that's convicting, you know, the thought of like you're teaching your kids how they'll treat you one day. That's an interesting kind of convicting thought. Layla, my wife, she's a nurse and she works at the hospital, but she does have a couple patients who are in some of those nursing facilities.
And dude, it is, so she comes home and tells me the stories. Like she'll go check in on these patients and they're just like, they haven't talked to another person and like two days and like that. It's just so, it's so, so sad and so wrong. Not the way that. Our parents should be dying and spending the last 10 years, like you said, the last decade of their life.
It's so sad. I, this, this happened, I, I was in Jerusalem a couple months ago and April and I were with a Palestinian taxi driver. Mm. And so one of the things we loved, we just, we go to Jerusalem and we, we pummel any stranger that Will is wanting to talk to us with questions about family. Hmm. So this Palestinian Arab amazing guy, we had such a good conversation with him and he said, he said, look.
Every morning I go to my mother and I kiss her hand and I say, mother, how are you today? And, and, and he, and he was saying this very similar idea, which was all of my brothers and sisters wish they still lived here so that they could be with her. And I'm the one, I'm the youngest. I get, I had to get the privilege of caring for the mother.
Wow. I mean, we weren't like, specifically, we just were kind of asking very general questions. Yeah. But this is what just poured out of him. Yeah. This incredible affection. This, I will check on my mother every single day, and April looked at me and she's like, because you know, I'm like, like I never would think to do that.
Right? To kiss the hand of my mother every day in order to get close enough to her to sense if there's any needs that she has emotionally. Are you okay? Is there anything going on that you need? Like I would love to serve you, man. That's the way these ancient cultures think. Yeah, my, it's amazing. Yeah.
Layla's mom is Persian and so we get a glimpse of like, she has kind of just. Not even, I don't even think she's intentionally doing it. It's just so second nature for her to like be part of our family. We moved across the country. She just started searching for houses nearby, which we were delighted, like we wanted her nearby.
But she just, like, we, we, there's, of course I'm gonna be near you. Of course I'm gonna be with the kids, which kind of leads me. I, I had posted on Instagram that I was gonna have this conversation with you about end loss, and I asked people like, what questions? Or frustrations or whatever they have around this topic of in-laws and parents.
And by far the number one thing that kept coming up was boundaries. My parents don't know, know boundaries and my parents are toxic. Or my in-laws, you know, vice versa. My, my in-laws are, my parents are, they don't know boundaries and they're toxic. Like, what do you think about that? Just take that. Yeah, take that and just solve that issue.
It's very difficult because part of, like, so I, I relate this a lot to our diet culture in, in America. So we don't have an ancient diet culture, right? So if you're in the Mediterranean world, you see like there's all this ancient wisdom about how to eat and because we don't have that. We just eat toxic food all the time.
Yeah. We don't know. We don't know anything better. Like we, we have nothing to defend us. We we're at the, we're at the mercy of whatever kind of cultural trends hit, hit us, and all of a sudden we're all eating this, we all stop eating that in the next year we're all eating this. Totally. And so it, it's very, it's very destructive and so it's what's happening to.
There's supposed to be a dance between the generations and, and there's supposed to be specific roles and responsibilities and opportunities and, and boundaries that exist between in-laws or upstream generations. And the current generation and all of that is like played out. It's not something that's explicitly said.
It's just a, it's something that ancient cultures have practiced for so many centuries that it just becomes, you, you grew up with it. Yeah. And so we've all grown up without it. And so now. Who's to say what's toxic or where boundaries are the boundaries? Cer certainly should exist. Toxic in-laws definitely cause problems for lots of families, but one of the things that you have to say, first of all, is that it's actually really difficult to discern for both, both parties.
Like I feel, I feel bad for everyone in this, in this situation. Like it's really hard on in-laws to know like, where are the boundaries? Like they're, they're also outside of their cultural context where they haven't spent centuries building up. The dance. And so we, we just, we don't know what it is. And so, and then, and then on, on our side, like we need to have a lot of grace for the fact that it, how confusing that is because it's like, like they wanna be part of our lives, right?
But, but there's no clarity culturally on, on how, how to resolve that dance or how that works. And so, and so this is, this is the, so the first thing I would say is we need to need a lot of grace for each other. Understand why this is so difficult. Understand that we, we weren't supposed to all reinvent the wheel in one generation or how the generations are supposed to interact.
Like we're supposed to grow up in a culture where all of these things were sorted out over the centuries. And so that's the first thing. And then I think that when you want to draw boundaries or you're, you're sensing that, okay, something's happening, where an upstream generation is, is sort of like, okay, they, they wanna be part of our lives.
If you really sense, like, this is really unhealthy and we need, we want them to be here, but we want it to be kind of on our terms and we want, we want our boundaries to exist, then I'm really a big fan of creating an arena for, for this, this conversation, this honoring to occur. This is why I love the idea of, of a meal.
And so part of, part of what happens is when you're at their house, it's very difficult to create that. Environment. But, but a lot of times I, so like you can kind of create it your own culture. And this is what we kind of did was the Friday night. We're like, we, we first spent a couple of years as a family figuring out how to do a multi-generational family meal just between us and our kids.
Mm. And then we started to invite once a month my in-laws and then my parents. And then as we got better and better and better at this rhythm. We started to invite them more and more often, and so there's sort of a faucet that we have in, in, so we have our rhythms as a family and, and our goal is to basically invite into our rhythms any extended family members.
My parents, April's, uh, mom now certainly her mom and dad when, when he was alive. Also, other extended family members, cousins and, and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles. And so we have these various rhythms. We have, we live a very like repeatable week, and so we have like a Friday night is this sort of epic family dinner that we have.
For example, on Saturday night where April and I go off on a date night, we have game night with Papa. And so my dad comes over and hosts like a big like board game night for all of his grandkids and. Usually like 12, 15 people. April's mom comes, my mom. It's, it's an amazing time. And then April and I always show up at the end after our date night.
And you know, it, it's just an awesome, awesome time. So part of what we want to do is if, if it's you want to create your own culture and your own family first, get, get your cultural values, get, get your rhythms in place. Then you want to experiment with inviting in the in-laws, inviting in your parents, and you wanna think about how to do that, like how to do that in a way that will honor them.
You know, do you want it just last a couple hours? Like how, what kind of things do you want, do you want to experience during that meal? So when it's in your house, you get to control the culture. And so there's a gravity that starts to happen. You have a few more kids, your kids get a little bit older. If you have enough money to like afford it, you know, you've got a decent dining room or, or a table that could, you know, seat everybody.
And so then you, you wanna start crafting that culture and then you just start by inviting them over for a one-off. Like, just come over. And if you have a great experience, like it's usually difficult. But now, like, when I set this up really well, when I ask my father-in-law to tell, tell stories, like tell us like what it's, it's, you know, it's school starting.
What was the first day of school like for you when you were growing up? Like. Summer. What was summers like for you? 4th of July. What was 4th of July as Veterans Day? You served in the military. What? What was that like? Can you tell some stories? So you start to honor them, you start to involve them. You start to create and that intergenerational, and you just see if it's, if it's positive, and if you're able to pull that off in a way that isn't toxic and where that those boundaries are respected.
And if that's happening in a really good way, then you can increase the frequency. If it's really bad and you leave and they're miserable, and you're miserable and everybody's fighting and frustrated, then it's like, okay, we gotta dial that down. You want to be careful, you know, dialing things down to a zero is usually when there's something like abusive, really dangerous happening, and that there are situations where that's the appropriate response.
But I like to think about these things as dials, and you don't want to dial down to a zero just because things are awkward or a little frustrating, or, oh, that person said that inappropriate thing again. Like, man, be really careful. That may be a good reason to go from like a six to a four. Like, okay, we were doing this like twice, twice a month.
Now we're gonna do it once a month. Right? We were inviting them into this, you know, so. That, that's the way I think of it. You want to have these dials and then if, if you find that when you're in their territory and things are really. Difficult, then take some responsibility for crafting a culture in your own home and then invite them into that and see if that works.
And man, I've seen so many families get healed that way. Mm. So I'm a, I'm a big fan of that, of working it out that way. At the beginning of the, the podcast I, this episode I had shared about how I feel like you have so much wisdom and I feel like you just put that on perfect display with that, that last question I had asked you, and you gave like such a good.
Cultural answer from a high level perspective, and then very, very practical. I would highly encourage every single listener who just listened to that, send that to your spouse and listen to it two or three times. I thought that was incredibly, from a, again, from a high level perspective, all the way down to very, very practical.
That was so good. Man. Jeremy has podcasts out. You have books on Amazon, you have Instagram where you're constantly posting stuff. What am I missing, man? Where else can people find you? Yeah, all, all, all the places. Twitter, you know. Yeah. Family teams.com. If you wanna check out some of the products and stuff that Jeff and I are working on.
Yeah. So that, those are all the, all the places. I, we have a ministry called 1000 Houses. It's at one k one kh.org, and that's where we help people that wanna do ministry through it, through the household. Mm. That's our nonprofit that we're working on. So, yeah. Um, but you can find me on all the socials, man.
Thank you. Truly, every time I spend time with you, I, I feel honored and, and feel like I'm closer to Jesus and I have some great tools in my tool belt. So thank you, bro. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks Jared. Love it.