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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. If you haven't gone to Amazon and searched dad tired, they have a ton of sales on all the dad tired books. Some of them are really, really good sales. Right now, if you just go to Amazon and search Dad Tired, you'll see all the dad tired books there and you can pick one up.
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man. Any parent with a lot of kids know what it's like to try to juggle everyone's lives. And you know, the dance recitals and dentist appointments. And last week we. My wife and I, we had kind of a breakdown of communication. I didn't calendar something I was doing, she didn't calendar something she wanted me to be at.
And uh, we just had this, you know, moment of frustration and tension and we found ourselves spread thin, you know, just doing way too much. And so we went out to dinner and we were trying to communicate and articulate what was going on. And we got into this conversation about me in particular, being better with the Google calendar and making sure that my life was.
Kind of laid out well for her to see, but also my, uh, my team to see. And I found myself getting ruffled in the conversation, getting kind of uncomfortable, and I couldn't articulate why that idea so frustrates me. I used a calendar and I, and I have a paper calendar that I really like to use, but I was finally able to articulate that for me to lay my life out on these nice little neat blocks on Google Calendar and to.
Try to fill it, fill every moment so that my team realizes that I have an extra hour on Tuesday, or I have a moment on Wednesday afternoon where I could be in another meeting. Like that idea for me, especially the idea of having that all the way down and then attached to my side and a cell phone, it rubs against who I'm trying to be and in the sense that.
Western culture idolizes productivity. It idolizes efficiency, and I was trying to say to my wife, like who I'm trying to be right now is not the most efficient, productive member of society. I am trying to find rhythms of rest. I'm trying to have moments alone with God. I'm trying to have solitude and prayer and read, and it's finally when I was able to articulate like my idol is not productivity.
It's to know Jesus and to walk with Jesus. And I was reminded of this Henry Nowan quote where Henry Nowan said this. He said, I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term burnout was a convenient psychological translation for a spiritual death. In other words.
And Alan was saying that he had so worked himself to this place of exhaustion and, and we call it burnout, but in reality, his spiritual life has begun to collapse, be he was malnourished and empty. And, and I've experienced that in my life before. Feeling totally burned out. Totally exhausted. And the solution to burnout, I think is to understand and to embrace.
The idea of of Sabbath and of rest, and to dethrone the American idol of efficiency of productivity. Now, let me say this. We find solid evidence in the scripture for the ideas of work ethic. Adams tending the garden, and Colossians 3 23. Whatever you do, work, hardily as for the Lord and not for men. Second Thessalonians three 10 for even when we were with you, we would give you this command.
If anyone is not willing to work, let 'em not eat. And so as Christians, we are to be productive members of society. We're to engage in work, we're to work hard, we're to have work ethic, and we should teach our kids work ethic. But we also find solid biblical support for the idea that work or productivity has its proper bounds that we're supposed to place restrictions on work.
And those restrictions are kind of divine pauses that we insert into the rhythms of our life to break up the tendency or the need to constantly be striving. Obviously, Sabbath was given in response to the idea. That God created for six days and then he rested on the seventh. There are so many prohibitions to work given in the Old Testament, so many guardrails.
And when you read through the Torah or the five books of Moses, you'll find Moses saying on so many occasions, giving instruction from the Lord, you shall not do any work on this day. You shall not do any laborious work on this day. You shall have a holy convocation and you shall humble yourselves and you shall not do any work.
And so Moses gives from the Lord to Israel. All of these divine pauses that they're supposed to honor. They're not supposed to work themselves to death. They're not supposed to burn out. They're more than machines. They're created in God's image to know and enjoy God, and that requires seriously knowing and enjoying God requires space.
Time, and I'm not arguing necessarily for leisure. I don't know that Sabbath is like a hundred percent about leisure, but it is about space to worship and to go on long walks with Jesus and just to commune with him for a little longer. I. And so we see this pattern in the Old Testament that there were inserted, ordained divine interruptions.
Now, when we think about the life of Jesus, I thought about this quote from Richard Foster when he said that oftentimes we rush to expand upon Jesus' death, and in doing so, we neglect Jesus' life. He's trying to say that especially in the evangelical stream of Christianity, we really focus on, uh, like Substitutional atonement, what Jesus did on the cross and.
That's beautiful and really important. We really need to talk about the cross and to rest in the cross. But he's saying that oftentimes we discount the life of Jesus, or we don't pay it much attention. We don't really meditate upon how Jesus lived. What were Jesus' values as he walked the earth? Who Jesus lived with?
How did he live in community? Who did he stop for? And I think it's so important to consider the rhythms of Jesus' life. He's constantly interrupting the flow of ministry, of healing, the sick, and of casting out demons With these long hours of retreat, he's alone with God. He's even teaching the disciples and, and Mark six 30 through 31, the disciples come back from casting out demons and healing the sick, and it says that the apostles returned to Jesus and told him all they had done and taught, and he said to them, come away by yourselves to a desolate place.
And rest a while. So if Jesus rested and if he had extended time with God alone, if he withdrew and he kind of had retreats and he taught his disciples that after strenuous work they need to come away and rest for a while, then, then that meditation on the life of Christ should produce in us a, a lifestyle that embraces these kind of divine interruptions that break up the patterns of pure productivity.
I think even just about in the life of Jesus, the amount of olives, uh, was clearly a place where he went to pray. He went to be alone. He went to. To retreat, recover. And so when you think of him on Good Friday, you know, alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the mountain of Olives, praying to the father, he's in a, in a place that's familiar.
This is a kind of a, a retreat spot for Jesus where he has met with God often and he kind of had established times and even places where he went to break up the monotony of life and ministry and. When you begin to think deeply about Sabbath and about rest and about these divine interruptions, there's some basic themes that kind of pop up at you.
I think of Deuteronomy chapter five, verse 15. It says, you shall remember that you were a slave and the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. God commands Israel to keep the Sabbath day, and part of that is remembering that they once were slaves.
In other words, these interruptions in particular, the idea of honoring a weekly Sabbath, it's a declaration to my soul that I'm not a slave, that I don't belong to anyone. And if you're attached to your devices 24 7, if you go home and you're answering emails and you're answering calls and you're living stress and wound up tight, and there's no moment when you're truly liberated to just rest and hold your kids and laugh with them, you're a slave man.
You're enslaved to your employer. You're a slave to your own ambition. You are a slave to the idol of productivity inserting Sabbath in your life again. Liberates you. It quite literally sets you free from the bondage of always needing to be efficient. And when I realize and rest in the truth that, that God liberated me from the idea of productivity or, or of slavery in that way, God created me for more.
Than just what I can do. I begin to rest in the truth that he doesn't love me on the basis of my productivity. Your employer, yes, might love you on the basis of your productivity. Your coworkers might honor you on the basis of your efficiency, but God loved you first before you were. Able to produce before you had any sales, before you ever got that contract or had that level of income?
God loves me not for what I can accomplish. He loves me because I'm created in his image and he loves me with an everlasting love. Even if I fail to succeed, even if my abilities or talents or even my, my greatest projects fall flat on their face, I'm still totally loved. I'm not loved on the basis of performance.
When productivity or efficiency become the measurement of value, your entire worldview is, is turned inside out. You've lost the worldview of the kingdom. When we embrace the Western mindset that we are as valuable as we are productive, then we become ego driven. Uh, then we become materialistic really quick because material goods are a sign of how productive or how successful we've been in the workplace if I have the nicer car's because I'm more efficient and therefore more valuable.
And we grow constantly more and more discontent with the gifts that God has given us. And again, sooner or later, we just start to burn out and spin and spiral, and our spiritual life will begin to collapse and our hearts will grow hard and cold, and we've, we've got to work hard to get off the hamster wheel of needing to be so productive and so efficient and so successful in order to feel valuable.
I was chatting with my wife after we had this conversation and then we were kind of processing another time and she said she's a stay at home mom. She homeschools again. We have six kids, lots of kids, and she does all kind of like volunteer work with foster care and volunteer work with the church and basically when I got home every night, she was really glued to her computer.
When I got home, it was kind of, I got the kids now she's on the computer now trying to accomplish all the tasks, and I was talking to her about. Alright, we've gotta make sure you've got good healthy rhythms and you've gotta say no to some things. It's really godly to say no to some things. And after she thought about it for a while, she said, Caleb, I realized that I feel so overwhelmed with all the things I have to do that there are a few things that I.
A few productive things that I get to do that I enjoy, and a lot of that is like kind of graphics and design stuff that she does for different people. And she said, I realized that I was retreating from the fact that I needed to clean the house or work on homeschool stuff, and I was working on design things because I enjoyed it, but I still felt productive.
She said, the problem is I feel lazy when I stop working. And there is something so enticing about productivity. There's a snare to it that when you get on the wheel of constantly accomplishing, constantly checking off the boxes, there's a little bit of an adrenaline little buzz that gets going there.
And we have to recognize, biblically speaking. That, that enticing pattern of life of always producing and the idea that to ever stop and rest or do something for fun or leisure, the idea that that is somehow less than or sinful is incredibly anti-biblical. I. There's so much about celebrating in the scriptures.
There's so much about communing being with people and laughing and having a meal in the scriptures. If you don't have the boundary and the conviction and the intentionality to insert, again, these breaks where you're just with the community or you're just with God, you'll begin to embrace the world's view of what value is.
And again, that's. The moment you stop producing, you no longer can't have any, any meaning. And that's a good place to ponder is your meaning in life, your purpose in life directly related to how productive you are. Of course, to an extent we need to work and God, he's prepared good works for us, but, but sometimes those good works are parenting and love and grace and it's not necessarily pumping out the.
The latest project as much as it is sitting with your kids and listening to their stories and helping them memorize a scripture, just going on a walk with them. So we, we took a vacation to Charleston, South Carolina just a few hours away from us, and my wife got like such a bad Airbnb. It was so funny.
But we had a good time. And one of my goals on vacation was just to make sure that I was looking my kids in the face when we were playing and when we were doing things together. Because in my, my leadership, again, pastoring and being a dad and leading in other areas, other avenues, I find myself constantly replaying in my mind that this person's frustrated because I didn't make the decision they wanted me to make, or this person's upset because I didn't support their project in a way that they wanted me to support her.
There's some. Unmet expectation, and I'm just spinning in my mind all the time. And while I'm spinning in my mind about work and about what I didn't do and who's mad at me, I'm missing the kids in front of me smiling and laughing. And so one of my big goals, I know it sounds silly, is when I play with them to really look at them, not to be in my own world, but to engage.
And so just to, you know, swim until I was too sunburned to move and. I'm, I was trying to be intentional. I'm trying to be intentional just to go on long walks with Jesus, just to have worship on and just kind of commune and meditate and be with him. And every now and then I'm go on long walks. I have one daughter just talks my ear off.
She's so sweet. She just chats the whole time. And man, when productivity is God, I don't have time for that one. Productivity is God and I don't have time for the broken. I don't have time for the poor. When Jesus says things like when you have a feast. Make sure you invite the poor 'cause they can't repay you.
Productivity is directly related to, it correlates with the idea of networking. So the people you begin to relate to and relate with are people that help promote your, your work. And the gospel tells us to love people who have no ability to repay us, or we're not, we're not networking, we're just loving people for the sake of love, loving people to support them, to show compassion.
And when productivity is, my God, I don't have time for that. And when Predictivity is, my God, I'll cut people off at the knees if they're interrupting my flow and my schedule. And that's so anti the life of Jesus. He just is always stopping, always pausing for people. So again, I, I think we have to kind of ponder the biblical concept that work has to have guardrails in your life.
It should have a framework, it should have boundaries, the boundaries to stop and play. The pauses that need to be inserted are pauses of solitude, retreat. Rest Sabbath worship. And if you don't have these, you are teaching your kids that life is about what you can produce, what you can do. And I really think you'll miss Jesus.
I just think you'll miss Jesus if you don't embrace a life of rest, a life of Sabbath, a life of, of at times solitude. And so here are a few questions I just wanna lobby at you. Maybe jot these down as we begin to wind down here. One. When does your phone get put away? And I'm not just talking about scrolling, but are you texting and responding, or is your life so kind of webbed together in your device?
And are they always attached or do you put 'em away just to be with your family and be with God to, are you answering emails after hours? Are you answering emails late into the night? Are you checking your email on, on the Sabbath? Are you checking your email? When you should be looking, your kids in the face and laughing.
Three, do you actually honor the Sabbath at all? Do you have a Sabbath? I'm not super legalistic on what day of the week. I know I obviously understand it in the old Covenant. The Sabbath is Saturday, but I, if your work schedule is crazy and it's a Friday that you actually have a whole day off where you unplug, I'm okay with that.
But is there a day of the week where you're actually unplugging. For when is your next vacation scheduled, and do you actually intend to disengage from work and disengage from the stress and love your family and walk with your kids and splurge and spend more money on ice cream than you should? And I think those are really, really meaningful probing questions that you need to ponder.
If not, if you let productivity be your God. If you get caught on the hamster wheel of, I've always gotta be pumping out the next project, working on the next, whatever it is, design or sale. And when I'm not doing that, then I should be reading or exercising or bettering myself. I'm, I've gotta make myself into a machine.
You are teaching your kids very, very subtly that, that, again, our lives are only as valuable as we are productive. And what we wanna teach our kids is that. Our chief end is to know God, to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. And I enjoy God in the morning when no one's around. I enjoy God again with long walks.
I enjoy God serving the poor, uh, serving the broken. Everything is not about work. Again, work matters. No doubt. You need to provide, but it needs to have proper restrictions placed upon it. And so I love you, man. I hope that's helpful. I'm, I'm working myself to make sure I have healthy rhythms and that I'm pausing having these divine pauses, but I hope you'll implement it in your life too.
I think it'll really, really benefit your parenting, and I think it'll help your kids have a, a solid identity and, and who they are in Jesus that, that God loves them, not on the basis of how much they perform, but on the basis of. The cross and what Jesus did for us and that we're creating in his image.
And so I love you. I bless you man. I'm excited to be with you guys for the retreat this year. I can't wait to connect with you soon.
Hey guys, hope that episode was helpful for you on your journey of becoming more like Jesus and helping your family do the same As Caleb just mentioned, we do have our dad tired annual retreat coming up in September, and we would love for you to be part of it. Make sure you get tickets for that before it closes up.
We have hundreds of guys from all over the country who are gathered together every year, and we just chase after Jesus. And we also just kind of have fun as dads. We would love to have you be part of it. It's the highlight of the year for me at with what we do here at Dad Tired, and it's the highlight for many of the guys that come every year.
Go to dad tire.com, click the annual retreat tab and you can be part of that by registering today. Love you guys. We'll see you next week.