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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. Before we jump in, I want to thank my friends over at Samaritan Ministries for sponsoring today's episode. I have two questions for you as we jump in. The first one is, how are you paying for your family's healthcare? And the second one is, how is that working out for you?
If it's working perfectly, then great. You probably don't need to listen to this, but if not, then listen closely because I do have a solution, a biblical solution, and it's called Samaritan Ministries. Samaritan Ministries. Is a community of Christians paying one another's medical bills. It's not insurance, but it is assurance that you're part of a healthcare sharing community where members care for one another spiritually and financially when a medical need arises.
Here's how it works. There's no networks. So when a medical need arises, you choose the healthcare provider that's right for you and your family, and you have a say in the type of treatment that they receive. You can send your medical bills to Samaritan Ministries and they'll notify fellow members to pray for you to send money directly to you to help pay those bills.
And when another member has a medical need, you'll do the same for them. This is what biblical healthcare sharing looks like. It could be more affordable than what you're currently paying now. And if it's the right fit, you can even join today. Learn more@samaritanministries.org slash dads hired. Again, that's samaritan ministries.org/dad.
Levi, super excited to be hanging out with you today, man. Uh, for the audience who may not be familiar with you, maybe tell us who you are and what you're up to these days. Sure. Thanks for having me on. I love this resource that exists and we need more things like it. So yeah. I'm a husband. I. Father, five kids altogether.
So I am definitely tired and a dad. And we live in Montana, where we've been here since 2007, so going on 17 years. My wife and I'll be 20 years married this year. Wow. My oldest will be turning 18 in two weeks. So first adult child. Dang. And then I've still got a 6-year-old on the young side, so we. We're young parents and our old parents.
Yeah, I hear that bro. Uh, we, we like to joke that we feel lo more like grandparents to our youngest son than mom and dad sometimes. And then, yeah, we pastor a local church here and then we also, both my wife and I write books separately and together. And then we also, you know, travel and adventure and camp and hike and all those sorts of fun things.
That's awesome, man. I saw you were just, uh, doing some fly fishing with Carlos. Recently, did you catch any good fish? You know what? We had a great day on the Madison River. I had never done fly fishing with crawfish, so there were flies. Oh yeah, that looked like crawfish. They're bottom water, so you're not on the surface and you twitch.
You have to do a reverse. Men, this is very nerdy, but you cast off the drift boat and then you reverse men. Normally you're mending to where the lines behind the lure, but this time it's in front or the fly. And so then you're kind of twitching with your wrist. It took a little to get used to it. Yeah. But we were having great action.
Caught a ton of cutthroat, some brown, and then some rainbow trot as well. But I'm headed out this week with my dad. My dad's 72 today. Wow. And so we're gonna go, he wants to fish for his birthday, so I'm gonna take him up on the Rio Grande north of Santa Fe and fish for some trout there. So. Dang, bro.
What's your relationship with your dad like? We have a great relationship. Uh, he's my best friend. Hmm. Was my best man at my wedding. Wow. Uh, as a child. And to this day, a hero to me. Just a picture of manhood, you know, not perfect, but for sure. But definitely a good man. Integrity, kindness, generosity, loves Jesus.
We talk on the phone every day. He's battling pancreatic cancer right now. Oh. So it's been a struggle last, you know, three or four months since Easter when he got diagnosed. But it's, it's been also really impressive to watch his faith through the midst of it. And it's pushed him into his relationship with God more.
And so I'm excited to go fish with him. Bro, that's super rare to hear somebody speak like that about their dad. A lot of guys that listen to the show either had dads who were completely absent or like physically absent or just absent in all the other ways that you can be absent, you know, like in the house.
But not, is he a believer? Was like he was, he always a believer. My whole life, he's been a Christian. Okay. He was a hippie. His testimony is radical man. He grew up in a very affluent home. His dad not present. His dad bailed when he was very young. His mom remarried, his stepdad adopted him, but his mom and stepdad were not Christians.
They just had tons of money. And so for them, literally, he remembers his stepdad one time telling him like threw in a hundred dollars, build down on the table and said, this is the only God you need. Like this is the almighty dollar, basically. Wow. So he was raised to kind of just see. Money is kind of the thing.
Wow. And he saw the emptiness of it, you know, his parents party, lifestyle, all that. And so he knew that wasn't it. So he dropped acid, got crazy big into the Save the whales movement at the height of the seventies Wow. And sixties, and got into drugs and rock and roll, and ended up moving to Hawaii to join Greenpeace.
And there he was. Empty. And he was searching and he knew money wasn't the answer, and drugs were making him depressed. Sex and all the things weren't filling the hole inside of him. So he literally got down to, maybe it's Buddhism and maybe it's Christianity, maybe Buddha, maybe Jesus. And he was standing at a crossroads in Maui, Hawaii, very close to where those fires moved through in Lahaina and was looking on one side of the street was a Buddhist temple, and the other side of the street was a Christian Church.
And he thought like he was literally like flipping a coin. He ended up going into the Christian Church 'cause they were having a service that night. Wow. And he was the only person that showed up for this service. Literally, no one else came. But the pastor, God bless his heart, went through the service as though it was a packed house.
Wow. For only my dad, literally an audience of one. Wow. And my dad ended up giving his heart to Jesus that night. Holy cow. And so that's how he came to Christ My whole life, I've known him only as a Christian. That's just like a story I've grown up steeped in. I think it's even more amazing that he has been such a good dad when he didn't have a dad at all.
Yeah. In in his whole life. Wow. That's incredible. That's incredible. What was your relationship with Jesus like growing up with a dad who loved Jesus? Like how did that play out for you? Well, I've never had any problems praying the Lord's Prayer. You know? I know for some people it's a real challenge and a hurdle to pray, father to God, considering the earthly father as an obstacle or a liability right?
For me, there was never that issue. My father was present, kind, caring. Consistent. You know, every Saturday morning we'd go wash the car traditions like that. Actually, now that I'm a dad, I think back to, it wasn't the money, it wasn't anything ever that cost a lot. Like I went to Disneyland one time as a child and that was awesome, but the car washes on Saturday mornings were just as great, like that ritual and that, hey, let's do this.
The, the fishing trips, those kinds of things, that pushed me to God. But that being said, we all still have to find our own way. There had to come a moment in my life where I had to decide like, was this what my parents are into or is this for me? I made that decision as a freshman in high school, trusted Jesus' savior, got baptized on my own as of my own decision, and then really have, have had very few serious derailments from that moment, you know, walking with Jesus.
Wow. That's incredible. You said you have five kids. I'm one of five kids as well, so I, my, my dad and mom had five kids, two brothers, two sisters. Then I went on to have five kids as well with my wife and we have four girls and a little boy. Wow. Awesome. I have, uh, three girls and a boy, but my boy's the oldest, so.
Okay, so you had it flipped? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Flipped around. What has it been like for you, trying to figure out, do you feel pressure to like live up to your dad's the way that your dad parented you? Do you feel inspired? How has your dad raising you, like motivated or impacted the way that you parented your, are you parenting your kids?
I've tried to take all the good, for sure. My upbringing, while my dad was a solid figure in my life and is a solid figure to this present day of my life, his marriage was not great. His marriage to my mom broke down and they got divorced when I was in high school. Mm. And so there's a lot of aspects. In my parenting that I've been able to pull the little things, the bedtime prayers, the church, the, the fun, the, you know, the care, all that on the marriage side of things, which I think so much of the strength of parenting does come down to a strong marriage.
Right? Yeah. I've had to kind of like find my own path because that was substantially more rocky and turbulent growing up in. So yeah, I think we try and take the good and learn from the bad and find our own path as well. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good perspective. You just recently wrote a, a children's devotional, right?
Yes. Was that like inspired, was that, were you thinking through your own kids when you were writing that? A 1000000%. Actually, I wrote, I wrote it more for me than for my own kids. Really? Which I joke. But what I mean by that is I've read my children a lot of books. Yeah. And I've, there's things I've liked, things I didn't like.
When my kids would latch onto a book, like everyone listening, I. You end up reading it every night, right? Totally. Yeah. And there's certain books that you've just like, if I have to read this to my child one more time, I'm gonna poke myself in the eye with a fork. Those sorts of things. The chapters have to be long enough to where it's like satisfying, but not too long to where you're like, oh my gosh, I wanna flip a couple pages every time I turn.
Yeah. I want illustrations that were bright and colorful. That would be eye catchy. I wanted something. Fun to, I always loved when you would go to the dentist's office as kids and there would be, you have to find the things in the images. So in the children's books that I've written, you have to find things.
So in Marvel at the moon, I knew when there's hidden telescopes throughout the illustrations and the kids get to like say, oh, there's one. And then that keeps 'em more engaged. There's also sidebars that have data and, and stuff that would be interesting to a kid, but I think also genuinely novel to a parent as well.
Mm-hmm. And then I wanted there to be actual like scriptural content too, where it's not just like some flowery language, but actual dealing with hard things. My first book for Kids Row, like a Lion, we talk about death and talk about loss and grief and challenging and bullying. This one, there's a lot about loneliness and anxiety and different things that kids are dealing with that hopefully can actually be transferable to.
Greater conversations with their parents, but then also help them in their lives. Yeah. It is interesting you mentioned that loneliness piece. You have an 18-year-old, it's crazy how, like, how connected and how lonely kids are. Like you hear so many teenagers talking, so my oldest is only 12. He, he's entering into those teenage years, but.
It's so fascinating. Fascinating is probably not the right word. It's sad, but how lonely the, like, the, the generation behind us feels like, what are you seeing in that as, as a pastor, but also just as a dad? Well, the data is bleak, bro. I mean, it is, the data is that 58% of Americans now describe themselves as lonely, and that's higher the younger you go.
Wow. So if you're talking about 18 to 24, it's as high as like 80% say they're lonely. Wow. But they're more connected than ever with connections. And then. You have the surgeon general saying, Hey, this is worse for you than being a chronic smoker. You might as well smoke 15 cigarettes a day. That's how bad loneliness is on your body.
Or drink six alcoholic beverages per day. Wow. Which we know is not, not great for your system on any level, and that it's the same level of danger as being obese. So it's just harmful to you to not have, 'cause we were created for connection. Yeah. You know, and so I think it is really important. I think this book for me was an attempt to say, Hey, you're not alone.
God's with you. And God has put people in your life and these, these actual connections face to face, you know, heart to heart, where you can disclose who you are, what's going on, what your fears are, that hopefully can lead to the, the kind of wise choices when, when kids are young, that can lead to meaningful connections and friendships.
Mm-hmm. How many of your kids are teenagers? You have one that's a teenager. Uh, two are teens, and then one will be a teen this January. Okay, so three. I'll have three altogether. Yeah. You're in that world. Are you seeing It's hard for them to establish real friendships? This is something that's been like I.
Really fascinating to me. I want to, I'm gonna do a podcast on this, but like the qualities that, um, were rich maybe a hundred years ago, maybe even like 50 years ago. I'm wondering what qualities I should say that were around 50 years ago and they were rich, might be non-existent and like 50 years from now.
An example of that could be like. Solitude. Like you just silence it. For a lot of our childhood, you were just used to being quiet. Yeah, it being quiet. Like I could be in a long car ride and the only thing you could do is like think, but we don't have that. Like my kids, they have a hard time just literally sitting in silence and like just thinking, contemplating things.
But another thing, the reason where I'm going with this is like even just like friendships where you would spend lots of time with another human and you had to like talk to each other. And I'm wondering, as my kids get older and I'm watching their, their friendships develop, like how much of their, they won't have those skills to like just sit and have in-depth relationship.
I don't know. That's not really a question, but you kinda get where I'm going with that, with the, I do think that's real. I think not only that, but you also have less and less within culture. Institutions that allow for, for friendship. Where I live, there's still a lot of four H, so kids do you know, the four H thing?
But there used to be bowling leagues and sewing clubs and you know, all these different kind of like things that would allow you to have opportunities to make friends. The New York Times did an interesting article about maybe pickleball being the only thing that can. Solve male loneliness because, oh, interesting.
In pickleball, you do have a thing where you can walk up to a group of strangers at a park and put your paddle down and then start just playing and striking up friends. Interesting. But more, less and less do we have in our society, even ways to bump into people and make friends. Yeah. You know, people work remotely.
You sadly, church attendance is kind of down all across the board. Less and less people go to church and if they do, maybe they watch online. So you're not really bumping into people to become friends with. And I mean, even you go into a grocery store and you don't even talk to the checker anymore, it's self checkout lanes.
Yeah. You know, there's autonomous Ubers driving around now, like we're literally building this like lifestyle of insulation. And I think what we're discovering is it's not really good for us on the inside. Yeah. Hey guys. Hope you're enjoying this conversation so far. I just wanna take a quick minute to say we would love to bring a dad tired one day conference to your church.
We do these on Saturday, all over the country and all over the world, and we would love to do it at your local church to help equip the men in your local body. I. You can do that by going to dad tire.com. Click the conferences tab. You can fill out a form there to tell us that you're interested in bringing the Dad Tire conference directly to your church.
Again, it's just one day. We start about nine in the morning and about lunchtime. Uh, but it's really, really encouraging To the guys in your local community, we'd love to partner with you. You can do that by going to dad tire.com. Click the conferences tab. I think a lot of dudes feel lonely and they would like never say that We've talked about this on the show before, but like, 'cause sometimes loneliness can for whatever, I don't know how this happened, but it can like be attributed to kind of a feminine feeling.
Mm-hmm. So you don't, it is a uniquely male problem. The, the data does not lie. Men have a worse time having and retaining friendships than women do into their thirties. Oh, interesting. And there's a sort of a, they're calling it a friendship recession on just how difficult it is to express friendship.
Part of that is, is is, like you said, it feels macho to not say you're suffering or you, you, you need help or you need to let the vulner, the veneer down. Part of it perhaps is for some homophobia. You know, sort of like, I don't want to have that kind of friendship where there is an actual. Greek word that's in the Bible for love for a brother, which is philo.
There's a way in which we love, like David had a love for Jonathan. Mm-hmm. Wasn't it gay love? It was a love for someone in a way of a brotherly kind of love. Yeah. So I think we as a church should validate that, that that's a need we all have that need, that need for friendship, that need for like brothers and friendship.
And I think it is important to talk about that. Yeah. We, we just did a retreat with our dad, tired guy, so we had 200 guys from 30 different states. Go to Arkansas and just be together for a weekend. And Arkansas was like the middle of the country and place we could find this retreat center. But it was super cool.
But one of the guys said he was kind of speaking to that like loneliness feeling and was just like, dude, I didn't realize how badly I needed like, like-minded dudes to be around. Like I just, that was one of the biggest things that stuck out to me is just like I was so not looking forward to coming with a bunch of strangers that I didn't know, you know?
But now being here, I didn't realize how badly I needed. To like have guys in my life that are like-minded that can speak into me and I can be vulnerable with. I think you find the answer in Genesis one. God said, let us make man in our image the Triune God, father, son Holy Spirit is in relationship even within himself.
And we were made in his image to crave that dance of friendship. So I think. Yeah. There's always gonna be a deficiency. I got to sit down with some men in my life this morning over around the table. Hey, what's not great? Yeah. What's hurting? How can we pray for you? And just the, the power that came from me spending the morning going like, what stuck out to you in in your reading today?
What's hard? How are you? Fine? And all of us had variations of, I'm tempted to feel. My identity and validation comes from what I do. Yeah. My podcast numbers, the sales numbers, the whatever. That's a uniquely, I think, kind of male struggle to feel like maybe I'm only as good as what I'm producing. Yeah. And therefore I don't have value, which it, it, it allows our value to fluctuate like the market.
Right. Right. How do you gospel each other as you're admitting those things? Like how are you gospeling each other in that, for a guy that might be feeling that, I think there's dudes who are feeling that today, like. I am not successful today and I feel like my value's down. Like how do you gossip? Yeah.
Wasn't a great husband yesterday. Wasn't not a great to my wife right now to my kids right now. My work performance. I think we have to continually remember our true identity is not based on us. I. It's placed on us. Hmm. And it was placed on us by the love of God, the image of God within us, and then emphatically a once for all at the cross.
Yeah. And that's how God sees us, so that we don't ride or fall on our own accomplishments. That just makes us like the elder brother of the prodigal son standing outside of the banquet with his arms crossed, complaining. Mm-hmm. He didn't get a goat instead of sitting at the table and enjoying. The robe, the ring, the sandals that the son did not earn.
That was what the older brother was so mad about. He doesn't earn. He doesn't deserve, deserve that, right? Welcome to the gospel, right? We don't deserve any of it, right? But we get to enjoy the feast, enjoy that life, and then that standing, that doesn't make us worse, husbands worse at our jobs. It makes us better because we're not doing it.
To earn something, we're doing it because we have what can never be taken away from us. Mm-hmm. And I think that causes us to rest. Yeah. To be comfortable in our own skin, to be able to enjoy each other. Our ego gets pulled out of it. Yeah. It just makes life so much better. Yeah. That's a good word, bro. I really appreciate you sharing that.
That is a good gospel truth that I think a lot of us students need to be reminded of daily and we need friends who will point us to that kind of gospel truth daily. Yeah. Because the rest of the world is kind of. Sizing us up. We're in a constant hamster wheel of like, what are you accomplishing? What are you accomplishing?
Another thing that one of the guys said was, you know, I've been here two days and I don't know what anyone else does for work, and like, what environment do you find 200 dudes who aren't talking about work? You know? Yeah. Right. It's just so, so rare. It allows you to, what's, so we're human beings, not human doings.
Yeah. And I think we always shift into what are you doing? What are you doing? Yeah. It's like, no, the gospel says just be, be my son, be my, my child. And then rest out of that, you know, as a pastor, leading local church, like I was in the church world for 12 years on staff and like the hardest demographic to reach is men.
And so you're trying to figure out how do you engage men? How do you create environments where they can find those kinds of relationships? I know so many dudes listening to this are like, man, it's cool that I'm listening to a podcast and I'm finding like-minded men like that, but I wanna like. Rub shoulders with dudes, you know, that go to my own church and it feels like I, I just don't have, frankly, men's ministries are struggling all over the country.
Sure. Like how do you as a pastor. Shepherd, think through. How do you engaging men at your church on the local level? Well, I'm a firm believer in culture being something that is not what you tell people to do, but we live out, you know? So I think for us as, as staff, as a team, I'm not saying you need to get into a groove.
I'm saying, Hey, here's what this is doing for my life. Yeah. You know, this is what it means to me. And I think you model, Paul said, follow me as I follow Christ. So I think there's always gonna be a deficiency if you're not living out what you're. Calling other people too. Yeah, so I think that's one huge thing.
The second thing I'd say is if you're looking for that, be the answer to your own prayer, start a group. I'm sure your church has groups. You can start. You can sign up to host one or be a part of one and just dive in. Then I would say serving is great too. Jesus' disciples, were all kind of trained on the job, like doing this, try this.
So I think, you know, you join, sign up to be an usher, sign up to do Sunday school. Within the ranks of everyone serving, there's gonna start to become that kinda life. Yeah. Like I know our team, I. Whether it it's a kid's ministry hangout night, like that creates a culture of friendship and accountability too.
Hmm. So I would say just dive in, get into a group. If it's not great, try a different one. Start one. Like, just start activating, Hey, who wants to go play volleyball? Be the one going first. Don't wait for someone else to initiate, put the pickleball thing together. Go out and, and go fi. Like just. Be agitated, put yourself out to the Bible says if you want to have friends, you gotta be friendly.
Hmm. You know, and so I think take those steps. It's easy to sit back and go, oh, there's not great community, but what are you doing to be the change you wanna see in the church? Right. Yeah. Bro pickleball is taken over the world, man. Is it, uh, is it, uh, exploding in Montana too? I feel like Pickle pickleball.
Yeah. I'm actually, I'm actually not a big fan, but I do think the social aspects of it are compelling. I'm a tennis player. Okay. Oh, yeah. I don't have a problem with pickleball except for when the pickleball comes onto the tennis court. I'm like, get your own courts. Quit putting your tape down on my tennis court.
That's funny man. I don't know anything about either. I don't know how to play tennis and I don't know how to play pickleball, although we just did a family retreat and, uh, they had a pickleball tournament there. I did sense, like my inner competitive, like I was going back to my 13 when I was a junior high pastor and like trying to destroy 13 year olds and, and ping pong pickle ball's.
Cool, because here's what I like about it. Anybody can play it. Yeah. Your grandma, your kid. You don't have to have super hip mobility, knee mobility. You don't have to actually have really great racket skills. Like people need to take lessons to learn the strokes of tennis and that's difficult. And it's a kinda lonely sport.
You play, you can play doubles, but you can't, you don't really go do pickup tennis, you know? You don't just go stand and play with strangers. Pickleball is communal. It's amazing. I love, that's what I love. I don't love the sound of it. When I'm playing and I walk by here, it's like the, the plunking sound.
It's, there's something there. Dude, we've, we've hit a nerve. We've hit a nerve for you. Like I feel, I can sense I'm not a big fan of the pickleball. I can, there's the sound of. There was an article, though I read, it was making me laugh. There's like lawsuits breaking out that pickleball courts have popped up next to people's homes and they find the sound just like aggravating 'cause it's very high, uh, frequency noise.
Yeah. There's one guy was saying, I have cancer right now, and pickleball listening to pickleball. Last time I went, it was worse in the cancer treatments. And I was like, well, there's a, there's your pull quote right there, bro. Oh my gosh. Is it hard for you to find the friendships that we were just talking about?
Is it hard for you as a lead guy, as somebody who's has a more public. Face. Is it hard for you to find those kind of friendships? I think it's the same hard for anybody. I think it's easy to go, it's lonely at the top. No one knows the troubles I've seen. I think we all uniquely have to, to fight it. Fight for it.
I think I would say what's harder is to narrow down the ones to really, you have to listen to Holy Spirit tell you what are the relationships to really pour into. Yeah, because we physically cannot, with the cult connections we have on Instagram, Facebook, I mean, a hundred years ago, you knew the people who lived in your community.
That was it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we know everybody. I know everybody. You know what I mean? Yeah. And like we meet all these people, but you have to really hear the Holy Spirit say, Hey, what relationships to pursue? Everyone's great. But Jesus didn't hang out with everyone. He had 500, he had 70. Narrowing it down, he had 12 and then he had three.
Yeah. Peter, James and John were his guys. And then it seems like he had a really unique friendship with Lazarus and the Bible. I think he knew which relationships to really commit himself to. And so for me, there's a number of guys that do what I do, preaching and leading churches, and that I can have a unique communion with them.
Mm-hmm. In the sense that when we go on a weekend trip together with our wives, we can all commiserate on the level of. We're all in the same industry in that sense. En encourage each other in the Lord that way. But then I also, you need local guys. You know, guys, you can look them in the eyes. And so having, of course, yes, people on our staff, on my lead team that we pray for and encourage each other.
But then the guys that I was with this morning that are, I'm in a small group with are guys who are, you know, just entrepreneurs. They lead in industries, but they wanna love and serve their families well. And we just encourage each other in, in that way. So, yeah. That's really good. I think that's a really good encouragement for the guys that are listening right now to like, that you would actually pray and ask, holy Spirit, would you speak to me and give me wisdom on what guys to pour into and to be poured into by.
I think that's a, I don't know if a lot of dudes are actually taking it that serious. Like I, I really need friends around me who are like-minded who are gonna push me to run this. Race? Well, to finish strong, I know that I'm prone to wander and quick to sin, man, you leave me alone. I'm gonna be on the side of the road quickly.
I need Jesus. And to find friends who are gonna keep pushing me in that direction with that kind of weightiness, not like what guys do I get along with? What guys do I have the same hobbies as and all that stuff. All those things are great, but to say no, I need dude who really are like-minded in the goal here.
And then with that seriousness, like you said, pray Holy Spirit, guide me, lead me to figure out who are the two to three guys. That you want to have me partner alongside of so that we can run this race really well? Absolutely. Yeah. Because you feel bad, like I, oh, I just wanna be friends with everybody.
It's like, that's not realistic. Yeah. And you can't really do that, you know? Yeah. So I, sociologists would say you can't really even have, I mean, more than even a hundred relationships period now that a hundred you can't do life with in that intense way that many people. It's just not practical. Yeah. When does your children's devotional come out?
It's out. It came out sweet on September 14th, so. Oh dang. Yeah. Just came out, man. That's awesome. Well, we'll have to tell, tell us the name of it again so we can get that in the hands of our listeners. Yeah. Marvel at the moon 90 devotions to knowing that you're never alone in God's majestic universe. Mm.
So it's pretty cool and the little hidden telescopes throughout our fun. So is there like a, uh, like a space element to that? To the, the virtual? Oh yeah. This one's all organized around space in general, but then the moon in particular, I. Oh, interesting. All my conspiracy hats just went on when, you know That's funny.
Yeah. All the flat earthers and all the NASA conspiracy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I always say the two things that we don't talk about enough are death. Like we're all gonna, all of us all seven. However billion of us are gonna be gone here in about a hundred years. We should probably all talk about that more and two space, like it's so fascinating.
Yeah. So crazy that we live on this. Ball floating in the middle of the universe. Like you could just look up and see. It's so. Fascinating. The fact that we can get so hyper-focused on little things, and I'm like, dude, just look up at night. Like, it's incredible what's happening. Yeah. The, the launching off point for me is Psalm eight.
David said, when I consider your heavens the work of your hands, the sun, the moon, the stars that you made. What is man that you were mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him. So I really suspect that we would all do better on the inside of our dark spaces if we would spend more time lifting our eyes and, and considering those things that you mentioned, you know?
Mm-hmm. If you have, if you're a dad, get a telescope. Yeah. Go out on clear nights and look up at the, at the heavens with your kids. They'll get a kick out of it. It's gonna be better for your soul. Everyone's off their phones. Yeah. When there's a solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse, get out there when there's a super moon, you know, which are, where the moon comes closer at, uh, at, at the moon rise, where it's on the horizon.
It appears bigger. This happens about once every, you know, 45 days or so. Get on the counter, look up the super moons, go out. Okay, this one's the beaver moon. This one's. The strawberry moon. We just had a harvest moon. Most of 'em are named by Native Americans that had associations with what would be happening in agriculture around the time that that moon showed up.
Mm-hmm. It's fascinating. And then as you read this book, you're gonna learn all sorts of interesting things, like the fact that there's a Bible on the moon. 1972 astronaut Dave Scott left a Bible sitting on the dashboard of his lunar rover. Oh wow. So that if anybody came across it, they could read the Bible.
Wow. The fact that the first thing ever eaten on the moon was the last supper, buzz Aldrin brought bread and wine and partook of the Lord supper before Neil Armstrong exited the vehicle and took his small step. Wow. There's so many interesting connections and nerdy facts that, that are in this book that are like, Hey, that's cool.
That is cool. How many devotions are there? 90. Oh, sweet, sweet. So you can take a couple months to go through 'em. Yeah. And that gives us enough variety. Then reading the same like five pages, uh, to, to our kids every, I've got a 4-year-old and I think it'll be interesting. I think you'll learn and it'll be like, huh, that's interesting.
You, you'll find yourself the next cocktail party sharing like, well, did you know there's a bible in the moon? Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, I appreciate your time and uh, I appreciate what you're doing to point people to Jesus and I'm excited to get my hands on that devotional. I've got a bunch of kids who, uh, I know would be excited about that and I know a lot, a lot of our guys will be excited about that too.
So thank you for taking the time, man. This has been really fun. I. Thanks for having me on, bro. Hey guys, as always, I hope that episode was helpful for you on your journey of becoming more like Jesus and helping your family do the same. Again, we would love to partner with you and your church to bring a dad tired one day conference to your church.
You can do that by going to dad tired.com. Click the conferences tab, fill out the form there, let us know you're interested. We'll send you a bunch of information about what that would look like. I love you guys. I hope you have a great rest of your week, and I'll see you next time.