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Generations Over Today With the Schmoyer's · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:03
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. Hey guys, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. I got my friends, Tim and Dana Schmoyer with me today. Hey guys. Hey. Hey.
• 0:32
  All right, guys. So we're going to talk about something that we discuss a lot at our men's group integrated. It's a group that Tim and I are part of and lots of other dads who are entrepreneurs. And so at the beginning of every integrated, we go over kind of a code or.
• 0:48
  the unusual way in which we live. And there are these different elements. And one of them is generations over today. So there is, we're trying to, as fathers and as families and households, think about how to do this better, how to, how to think about the generations instead of just be fixated on what's going on in our little lifetime.
• 1:09
  So that's an unusual way for Western people to live. I want to read a little bit about that, get Tim and Dana's take on this. And then, yeah, I'd love for you guys as we're processing this to think about, like, is this a better way to live? Because this does take a transition for most people to think this way. All right. So this is living for future generations over living for today. Which horizon are you aiming at? Should you live for today, tomorrow?
• 1:33
  Next year, we live in one of the most short-sighted cultures in human history. Marketers and politicians have discovered that they can sell products and get votes most reliably by directing people to focus on their immediate self-interest. This approach has some short-term benefits, but it tends to be a disaster in the long run. But who cares? Many reasons. I won't be alive to experience those consequences. The Bible teases out this contrast by describing two fathers—
• 2:01
  a father with a thousand-year vision, or a thousand-generation vision, Abraham, and a father only concerned about his lifetime, King Hezekiah. We live in a Hezekiah generation. God tells Hezekiah it's time for him to pass the baton, but Hezekiah pleads with the Lord to let him live longer.
• 2:17
  God honors Hezekiah by adding 15 years to his life, and then it happens. Hezekiah only cared about peace in his lifetime and gave the rival kingdom of Babylon a tour of all the treasures of Jerusalem. Isaiah comes to confront Hezekiah saying, listen to this message. This is a quote from the scriptures. Listen to this message from the Lord.
• 2:35
  The time is coming when everything in your palace, all the treasures stored up by your ancestors until now, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. Some of your very own sons will be taken away into exile. They will become eunuchs who will serve in the palace of Babylon's king. Now, you would think this would inspire maybe repentance, but Hezekiah discovered that he cursed his descendants immediately.
• 3:02
  to this terrible fate, and listen to his response. Quote, Contrast this to Father Abraham. Everything Abraham did was a heart to bless his future descendants.
• 3:23
  Abraham's faith was that he could deliver all of the blessings he was accumulating to his progeny. The writer of Hebrews describes this as Abraham living for a future city. He writes, quote, It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land that God would give him as his inheritance. He went without knowing where he was going.
• 3:45
  and even when he reached the land god promised him he lived there by faith for he was like a foreigner living in tents as did isaac and jacob who inherited the same promise abraham was confidently looking forward to his city with eternal foundations
• 4:00
  a city designed and built by God. So who is your father, Hezekiah or Abraham? The ancient Greeks observed that society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. And are you living to bless yourself or your grand and great-grandchildren? The father with the farthest vision determines the future. So I kind of just want to stir up these sort of two ideas that I think we're wrestling with, and I don't think we're really highlighting enough
• 4:30
  as we are raising our children and we're and we are fathering and mothering the next generation so yeah tim dana anything that that's reserved for you guys you want to go first no you go first you've been thinking of it longer i have a few thoughts on this so one thing is you're reading it and this is going to sound very self-serving but it's just i'm just honestly answering the question
• 4:52
  I think it's been a while since I've thought this way. So when you're reading it, I had to put myself back into where we were maybe over a decade ago or, or, or just how I grew up. And so it,
• 5:04
  It felt odd to listen to Hezekiah. And I felt myself, something stirring in me, like, I don't know what it was, but something was like, that's so not right, you know? And so that was the first thing that came up for me. It was just like, wow, I had forgotten that this is how we've kind of lived. Even in that passage, Hebrews 11, we read that every year at Sukkot as part of Sukkot. We sit around a campfire outside of our house next to our sukkah.
• 5:31
  And I read that and we point to our house, our kids and I, and we, and Dana, we say that is not our house. We are, let me just quote this passage. We are confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God. And so even training our kids and families.
• 5:47
  Thinking that and believing that and that annual rhythm of a week of just remembering this isn't our home and we're living for something else. And I think that's impacted how we think and plan for grandkids now, how we build and sell, sold our business last year, how we take care of animals and livestock and gardening and everything.
• 6:07
  making our land, our property fruitful and learning sustainability for one day when some of these prophecies comes true about how people will not have enough food and water and things. And so someone's going to need to know how to like survive that. We know some people do because prophecies would say that there will be remnants of that, but those would be part of our descendants.
• 6:29
  How do we start passing those skills on so that they can provide for people during those times of age? I don't know. It's just – there's a lot there to unpack and think about. Yeah, it was just – the main thing that came for me is like I kind of forgot about how living –
• 6:44
  that it's like, so like I said, sounds self-serving, but that's honestly what came out. Well, I think, I think to your point, Tim, I think, I think this is why once you adopt this frame that I am living for the generations, it is, it is, it completely does take over the way you think about everything. Like it takes time to adopt it and to fully embody it and live it and think about things that way.
• 7:03
  But once you do make this shift, it's pretty complete. You just see things differently. And that's why I think about this list of things that we're going over, that kind of integrated code that we talk about, we live by. That's something that we are really working with each father and each family around. This is something that you have to decide to believe. But once you do, you're going to look weird. You're going to start doing all kinds of strange things that nobody's used to seeing people do. And they're not going to understand why you're doing these weird things. Yeah.
• 7:33
  They're going to have to go back to like these kinds of, I think the best way to describe to somebody who's new to this is to, you know, to try to articulate clearly the code. Like, look, we live for the generations, not more than we live for today. Like that's a different way to live. Dan, what about you? What does it start for you? The thing that stood out to me most was talking about the marketers and politicians and trying to sell products like for today, for the immediate self-interest.
• 7:55
  That's like, it's hard. Like, I know that's true. And I know that's what they go after, but it's keep people in that mindset because we've been living, especially most of this goes through in my head, like working on our homestead and teaching the kids how to take care of our home and, and not just in doing homeschooling and then learning skills that they are actually, that we are trying to get them to actually use in their day to day. But for me, it's like wanting to set them up so that when they are parents, when they are grandparents, that they know how to do things.
• 8:22
  And I think a lot of that takes teaching them delayed gratification. And that's a huge one for us. We are interested, we keep talking about wanting to get honeybees at some point and knowing at the same time, the day you get them, the day you start, you are at least a year out from even getting any honey.
• 8:45
  whole year of work that will go into it after we've educated ourselves and prepared to even get the bees. There's a whole year until you even get any fruit from it at that point. And there's a lot of that with gardening and things. Those are a little bit less time. Well, the apple trees for three years. Yeah. Yeah.
• 9:03
  And so that's been a great hands-on way to teach myself even that the kids are getting to see at the same time and just try to teach them like these things are so much more valuable and these like our apple trees will continue to give us fruit as we take care of them year after year. It's not just a one time and done kind of thing. And so that, so learning all of this, learning this new mind frame and having a tangible way to see it has been really helpful in the process.
• 9:31
  Yeah, man, that's really good. Yeah, I think I think that those to understand that we live in a world where our children are constantly being marketed to to tell them, pay attention to whatever your.
• 9:46
  like impulsive individual needs are and, and meet those. Like the more our society can, can really cause that, that kind of immediate sort of self gratification reaction, then the easier it is to sell products, the easier it is to get votes, the, you know, and so there, there is sort of like a, and this is something like one of the weird things that's happening today that I find interesting is, you know, when I was growing up and I'd watch the TV with my siblings and,
• 10:13
  You know, we just had to sit through all these ads, you know, and so, you know, we were just being constantly brainwashed and trained and, you know, by all these ads. One of the things that's happening today is that, you know, all these different platforms, you know, you can decide a little bit more carefully about what your children watch, you know, whether or not your children watch anything. But if we're going to watch a movie like like my kids don't watch as many ads as I did.
• 10:36
  growing up, you know, and I find it's, you know, and one of the weird things too is in these platforms, and I feel badly because I think about these two worlds, right? You've got parents who are not engaged with their children and that are letting them, you know, they're watching, you know, YouTube without a membership. So they're just getting in a day with ads while they're on YouTube. They're watching TikTok. They're watching TikTok.
• 10:57
  you know, TV streaming platforms that are being paid for by advertisers. They're just being inundated with ads. And then I go over to this other family that has been very careful about, you know, what their kids are watching. And their kids are just, you know, it's weird. Like these two kinds of kids are growing up in the same world. But one is just watching thousands of ads every month. And the other is watching almost none. And I'm wondering what that's creating to your point, Dana, because
• 11:24
  On the other hand, with the world, you know, you can create this sort of world inside of your own household where you are, you know, you are building things that are going to take years. So there's this delayed gratification. You know, there's a famous, you know, experiment where they gave the kid, like, I'll give you the marshmallow test, right? Where it's like, you know, here's a marshmallow. If you wait for, you know, two minutes, when I come back, I'll give you three marshmallows or you can just eat this one now.
• 11:49
  And so, and they discovered that you could really determine a lot about somebody's future by if they have that ability to delay gratification, but that's a lot of that times families can train in that. A lot of adults though, have the same problem because like when it comes to finances, for example, most adults don't even have a thousand dollars in an emergency fund somewhere to take care of because they consume and spend as fast as it comes in and the goal of, you
• 12:18
  making more money isn't to prepare for future generations and be able to serve grandkids better or whatever. It's to get a bigger house and get a fancier car and get, you know, like, and so the vision, even financially for adults, it's the same thing. It's this idea of delayed gratification and having a vision for something bigger than you. That's, and it doesn't have to be necessarily in someone else's lifetime. Like Dan was saying, like with our kids,
• 12:48
  fruits, trees, and things as a way to teach, like, we're going to do something now for a bigger payoff later. You know, it's going to be work now for a bigger reward later, but even like, but also health for how we eat. Like we don't say no to ourselves. We eat most of what we want to consume to our, our financial and physical detriment because it's gratifying in the present. And
• 13:11
  And we might literally, like Hezekiah, be cutting off 15 years of our life by some of these habits that we are forming. So I don't think it's – yeah, it is an advertising thing. It's a media consumption thing. But I think we poke at ourselves as adults, as parents. We start finding places where this applies to us pretty quickly, unfortunately, too. And those are all, as Dan and I have said.
• 13:32
  The learning over time, very difficult to overcome because often it's not just as easy as saying no to ice cream before bed every night. That was one of my hard things because sometimes we don't even have good ways to handle stress. And we grew up in certain households that taught us or didn't teach us certain skills of how to handle stress or stress.
• 13:56
  finances or we grew up a lot of insecurity around money and that leads us to saving too much and not giving enough and spending enough, right? So these are really complicated things, but I think having a vision for what it should look like or we want it to look like in the future can be one step in going the right direction.
• 14:15
  Yeah, that vision is really critical. I think that that's where kind of I try to start this and end the essay with like, you have to decide what your horizon is, like what you're looking at. And most people are looking at the end of their life as the furthest horizon.
• 14:33
  sort of horizon that they're primarily focused on. They're like, okay, I'm going to live. I mean, some people it's just like, it's the weekend, right? But I think even wise people in our culture are like, okay, I need a safer retirement. You know, I need to be able to, you know, make sure that I have healthcare when I'm older. Yeah.
• 14:48
  I want to live in a warm place or something. Right. So that's that. Those are like the wise, really far reaching thinking visionaries in our current culture. Whereas, you know, this Greek proverb, you know, which is about, you know, that society only grows great when you have these people who are who are primarily doing things they know.
• 15:08
  are going to not really bless them very much. They're really designed to bless grandchildren, great-grandchildren, future generations. And that was so intuitive for certain cultures. And I do think this is a cultural thing where some cultures really get this and they really think about generations and some don't. But Western sort of materialistic consumer culture is just destroying this, you know, so that you may not even know somebody who is primarily thinking about three, four, five generations
• 15:36
  10 generations from now. They're not that everyone you know is consumed with their own life and the wisest people you know are aiming at maybe their old age as the farthest horizon that they can envision. So
• 15:52
  Yeah, I'm curious, Dana, for you, you know, how, what else is this going to stir up? And are there things that when you think about, you know, how you're raising your family, things that messages or other practices that you find helpful to start to like pull your or the kids eyes to the future to generations instead of just today?
• 16:13
  One, one thing, it's kind of hard for me to say, because I think my parents did an amazing job. My mom is particular on how housework is done. And so I did not learn how to run a house until I was married and had kids and had to learn it on my own. So that's been difficult. And so maybe I'm swinging the pendulum.
• 16:32
  a little too far, but my kids are learning how to be able to run a house and so that they can grow up and know how to do things. But as far as the generations, a conversation that we've had many times, there's on my side of the family, we have a farm that's been in the family for over a hundred years now. So it started with my great grandfather and great grandmother bought the piece of property that is still in our family.
• 16:56
  And so our kids are one, two, three, five will be the fifth generation to own it. If we can pass that on to them right now, my dad is the owner. We don't own it yet, but we would be the fourth. And then our kids would be the fifth and our grandkids would be the sixth generation that own the same piece of property.
• 17:12
  And there's some really big depth with that of just having those stories and the identity that it instills into our kids is huge with that of knowing who they are and knowing where they came from. Just the importance that that plays on that is huge. And just in reading stories, we have a family.
• 17:30
  book, even a published book from our ancestors that came over from Scotland. And so getting to read that story to my kids and just reminding them where we came from. And, and I think it all kind of instills like, well, what do we get to pass on? What do we get to give to you?
• 17:47
  What do we get to give to the next generations that are coming? And I think that identity and building into the relationships that we have in the home and making those a priority. It's so easy for me to make the house the priority and all the stuff inside the house, but I try really hard to try to focus on those relationships. Not great all the time. There's a lot of relationships in our house having seven kids. So it takes a lot of work, but those relationships are what is going to last and not all the
• 18:15
  And I think it helped. I grew up a lot or I moved around a lot growing up. And so we didn't hang on to a lot of stuff for very long because we were constantly, I mean, we didn't want to have to move everything that we ever got. And so that was kind of a blessing in itself of not having this want to hang on to all the tangible physical things.
• 18:36
  And so that has helped me be able to focus on relationships a little bit more, but it is still like a constant, like having to remind yourself what is really important here, what is going to last. And, and yeah, the generations from past and the generations from the future, like that's, that's what's really important.
• 18:56
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• 19:21
  Having multi-generational assets is challenging with this mindset too, because currently what most people do is they just split everything evenly among the kids. When like, when your inheritance is passed down and it's all equal and there without any like question almost, but in scripture, that's not how we see it. It goes down like the family assets, typically they go to the oldest. Although it's not always true, obviously with Isaac and David and Jacob and a lot of them were second, second borns. But.
• 19:50
  But still, it was like, who is the one who's going to be most responsible for this? And who's going to steward this well? Because some kids will get an inheritance and it'll ruin their life, right? But it's more important to be fair in how the inheritance is split than it is to evaluate, will this be a blessing to them or not? So that's challenging because here comes this chunk of land and assets from future generations prior to us.
• 20:19
  And we have been acquiring assets and inheritance for our kids. What do we do if you don't split it evenly? It's really frowned upon. And so how do we raise our kids now so that if we don't split it evenly or put it in a trust for the family to manage together or something? I don't know. That's a whole world that I'm thinking about this in the future too that we think about differently because of a generational impact as opposed to.
• 20:45
  having one family's assets being dissipated and completely lost within one to two generations. Does it make me feel like my work was, I don't know, as well invested as it could have been, I suppose. Well, it's interesting. I think that you do have to categorize when you start thinking about generations, you have to categorize certain assets as being kind of like you were describing, Dana, almost like they're a –
• 21:09
  receptacle of stories of the past. They create identity in that what you're really looking for is not necessarily a child to own and just enjoy as an individual that land or that asset, but it's like, who wants to steward this on behalf of the whole family so that our family's identity goes deeper, right? I was talking to a gentleman that he was the 30th generation of a general in the
• 21:38
  When he was given this land, the general that was his ancestor, it's been stewarded for now 30 generations. And every year they go back there and there's thousands of descendants now that get to draw identity from this piece of land every year during this celebration they have.
• 21:55
  And, you know, that's a very unusual thing, but anybody could start that like some generation has to say, not be a Hezekiah, but be an Abraham and say, hey, we're going to, we're going to develop some assets that are going to have stories and that are going to give our family identity and give our family roots. So that's, that's huge.
• 22:15
  And I want to go back down to something you said when you talked about training your kids, you know, how to run a household. I think it's one of the most practical ways to think about this, which is you could raise your children to primarily be happy. So you're always looking at, like, you know, little Susie, little Johnny, like, what do you want? What's your individual needs, right? How can we meet those? And so we're building the whole family around it.
• 22:39
  how to help you be as happy as possible or even flourishing. But when you do that, you inadvertently often create a terminal generation. But when you train your children to be future fathers and mothers, when you start to talk, give them the tools and the language and the vision for raising a family, that is what causes them to want to, like, we have so much...
• 23:01
  ability to help our kids get inspired about the future about and so I know that I talked to a lot of parents who I feel like are actually they're not afraid at all to teach their kids about you know college and their individual identity but they are afraid to place on their child any expectation that they might have children that they might someday be a mother or father that that's too much
• 23:24
  And man, I don't know what happened there. Like why, obviously there are going to be some small percentage of, of children who won't, won't have kids, but especially if you are lifting that up as something that's, that's, you know, something that is super valuable and that you are, Hey, we're going to be here to help you. And, you know, and this, you know, this is likely a calling that God has in your life. That's going to cause them to, to become better fathers and mothers. Everything they're experiencing in your household is now, you know,
• 23:52
  becoming a lesson for their future. Like you are helping, you are blessing your grandchildren every day when you teach your seven-year-old, you know, how to pick up after themselves. Like that is loving your grand and great-grandchildren.
• 24:08
  But if you are training your child to pay attention to their impulsive desires, you might be inadvertently hurting your future grand or great grandchildren, or maybe they won't exist because, you know, it takes a lot of selflessness to have children. So, yeah, talk more about that. Like, what are your thoughts about how how do you how do you how do you talk to your children about the future?
• 24:32
  We were laughing because our seven-year-olds are the ones that really need some help and our five-year-olds. And when you have seven kids, it becomes more practical than just in a necessary way. You can't do that for seven. You can't parent in a way where you are looking after. That's the way you put it. But yeah, when you have seven, you need to.
• 24:49
  You're on a pulse of my desires. Yeah. You can't just by having seven kids. Yeah. That, that, that helps a lot. Like there's, there's only so much you can do to, to, uh, to craft everything around this one kid, you know, that's not going to happen with seven. I don't know how many, I mean, the conversations come up about future and if they're going to have kids or not. And if they want to, like, I think each kid maybe has an idea of how many they want. It probably changes every conversation we have. If anyone has the day to go into the house today.
• 25:15
  But I think it's more, I don't know, I feel like it's more lived out, like just day to day, how we are pitching in and taking care of each other. I think that's one thing that we learned early on, like shifting our lifestyle, learning how to celebrate Shabbat. Like when we stumbled upon this and we're like, we're going to like put God to the test on this. And like, this is what scripture says. So we're going to celebrate it and we're going to see how life changes. And it was such a blessing. But then like we were not good at communicating that with other people. And some people thought we were really crazy. Yeah.
• 25:45
  And so we're like, okay, well, maybe we'll just live it out instead. And, and so I feel like that living out is more effective. And so, and so it's been a lot of like checking myself, checking my own heart, checking where I am and.
• 26:00
  And knowing what do I need in the home? Like I don't thrive on a crazy, chaotic, messy house. Like that really throws me off, which then throws the rest of the family off. And so a lot of those lessons and our kids really love having a neat and tidy home too. Like you can just, you can tangibly feel the peace and a house that is well taken care of and we don't feel that every single day. And so that's, that's a practice of just trying to teach each other how to take care of things
• 26:29
  And I think probably the biggest one lately has been how to take care of each other, not just your own stuff, but how to how to encourage each other and how to build into each other's relationships. Because we're very quick to make sure we're OK and and put somebody else down. But we're not as quick to make sure how we're speaking and treating somebody else is good for that other person. One of the things I see you doing is that.
• 26:58
  And it doesn't need to happen often, and it doesn't happen often. But it's like you shared your story about how you grew up, didn't learn how to clean and things, so you don't want them to grow up. So now when they do their chores like cleaning dishes, cleaning the room, things like that, it's not from the perspective of like mom doesn't like to do any work and so she's trying to get me to do her work for her.
• 27:18
  Like the context through which they're doing their chores is based in this other story instead, which is not that my mom is lazy, but it's that my mom grew up with the other story. This is my language, not theirs, obviously. And it wasn't good for her and she's trying to help us learn something else. So I think it changes the attitude and the perspective that even our little kids have when they're like, it's your day to unload the dishwasher and it's your day to load it and clean up the room and you've got to do the chickens and all that stuff.
• 27:47
  In different days and different ages too, like they're doing their stuff on their own or I'm right there with them doing it together because it's the worst thing ever to have to do house chores by yourself unless you really just need that alone time. Most of the time the kids are not needing that alone time, especially when doing chores. And so getting in there with them and working together makes it into a relationship building time instead.
• 28:11
  What I wonder, and I've noticed this a lot, is that I think some parents, they actually feel guilty, you know, basically asking their children or directing their children to do things around the house, to contribute to the household in practical ways. And so I think these different ways of thinking about the future, thinking about what a family is really impacts how you feel. And man, if I could switch one thing for a lot of families, that feeling from this is really my task. Yeah.
• 28:40
  I'm so grateful that my children are helping me and okay, they don't really want to help me, they want to play or they want to do their own thing, their homework, even like whatever that is, then okay, I should do this. This is really my thing. I chose to have kids. That's such a hyper individual Western way of viewing these things instead of saying, we're a household.
• 29:00
  And like, this is our responsibility. My job is to help lead this, to train you guys, to help direct you guys. But it's all of our responsibility. And we're going to divvy this up. And the more I bring you into that, the easier it's going to be for you someday to run your own household. And so this is a blessing, not only for all of us now, for us to really help discipline you and train you to do these things, but also this is going to bless your future family.
• 29:29
  And I would say in the immediate, so we just got back from going to the Homesteaders of America conference. And one of the speakers there was asking like, if tragedy hit today, can your kids make it through today? Can they run the house without mom and dad today? Yeah.
• 29:44
  Can they last week doing that? Can they last a month running things? We're not at a month. Yeah. I don't think you should expect that either. No, but we've got five-year-old to 14-year-old. And so different kids can do different things. And we've had babysitters come and stay overnight and they're like, your kids didn't need me. I didn't, you know.
• 30:06
  I'd rather watch your stepping kids than that other family's two kids. But we had somebody that we needed like last minute babysitting for overnight when I was having surgery. And they were like, your kids didn't need us. They did everything. And we just like, we were just there and they were able to take care of everything. They knew the expectations. They knew what animals needed taken care of and what parts of the house. And that is such a confidence booster in our kids.
• 30:33
  For them to know like how capable they are of themselves is huge. One of the, one of our pillars for our family, one of our core values is sacrificing for future reward. And ultimately is how do we develop assets and develop families and relationship and land and property so that one day the master returns and says, well done, good and faithful servant. You've been trusted with little.
• 30:56
  Now you're being trusted with much and turn to my, my, what is it? Enter into my. Enjoy the master or the rest of your master, depending on translation. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so when it comes to like the parenting thing, like thinking about current sacrifice or future reward, when we train our kids in the dishes or cleaning the room.
• 31:15
  It's often much easier if we just did it ourself and it's much faster and it's more efficient and it gets done properly. But when our kids are little, taking the time to train them is another one of those delayed gratification things, even for us as adults, as parents is to say, all right, the goal right now is not necessarily get the dishwasher loaded. The goal right now is for me to train my, like if it's three years old, you can load a dishwasher, you know, like two years old, even three.
• 31:41
  One and a half, they can play the matching game with putting silverware away, you know, and the thing. So not with knives necessarily at that point, but you get the idea. So it's, but it's, we have the think as parents, like the goal right now is discipleship. It's teaching and training my kids to do this. Not necessarily, the goal is not for me to get this thing done quickly and efficiently. And then when they start doing it again, the goal is not to,
• 32:07
  Do you get the dishes completely clean every single time when they're doing it? It's like, okay, you did it well. Let's improve it this way for next time. And it's a training exercise. But I think as long as it's in the task category in our head to get this thing done, we don't hand it off. We don't train our kids in those skills that they'll need one day because it's much easier for us to do it ourselves than to train someone else to do it.
• 32:30
  I would pull those skills into spiritual skills too. Like doing mid-rash with our family a few times a week together. Let's teaching the kids to be able to dig in the Bible and know that it's okay to ask questions, especially when they see the two of us asking each other questions and asking them. They're like, well...
• 32:48
  let's dig into this even deeper and like, where can we find the answer to this? Or, and I think that helps train their hearts too of this isn't just a Sunday morning thing that we go and learn here, but this is like, this is a part of who we are. We really want to dig into what scripture says. And then,
• 33:05
  No, it's studying that scripture altogether comes to comes to life throughout the week, whenever we're facing different things that we're like that totally reminded me of the story here that we just read. So, yeah, I think that's been really good training to to see in the kids.
• 33:20
  Yeah, man. Yeah. So guys, this is our stories too. Oh, go ahead. Here are stories too. Cause like we're, we've been focusing a lot on health lately, working with some doctors that do a lot of preventative stuff. Cause a lot of the things that we would experience when we are in our sixties, seventies and eighties can actually be prevented. If you look for it, most people don't look for it. Like,
• 33:40
  decades before they wait till they have the symptoms and then they treat the symptoms of medication. But most of these things can easily be prevented. You know, if you start doing blood work and look for these things, 20, 30, 40 years in advance. So we're doing that now so that we can have the energy for our grandkids and not be like, Hey, we'd love to support you guys, but we're sick or we're retired or we don't have the energy or something. So we're working on like testosterone things now so that when we get older, we will have the energy we need.
• 34:09
  to serve our kids and their families as they're growing them. So I think our kids just hearing those stories about what we're doing now also help them start thinking about future multi-generation, their grandkids and things like that. So yeah, man, I love that. Longevity is a huge deal. If you, when you start to think about the future,
• 34:29
  having a high quality of life in your 70s and 80s, that's going to bless. I mean, you're going to be there to help train, help your children raise their children and help your grandchildren get that identity, meet your great-grandchildren and tell them stories that they'll remember for the rest of their lives. So yeah, this is all you guys in way of just understanding where are you aiming at? Where's your eyes kind of focused on? A mutual friend of ours, I remember when he first was starting to consider
• 34:55
  you know, what, where to aim his, his vision at. I remember he told me poems, I don't know if you guys remember this, but he had this dream where he saw this, this guy in a room with hundreds of people teaching them. And this man was like super old. And, and then when the sort of the camera angle sort of pulled back, he realized that the person on the stage was like his two-year-old son or something like that.
• 35:18
  And it was him when he was a grandfather and a great grandfather in all of his generations. And then just that vision of like, okay, I'm looking at my two-year-old now. And some of you guys have really young kids. Do you ever look at that two-year-old and say, that child's going to be a great grandmother or a great grandfather someday? How can I prepare them for that? How can I prepare them to be a blessing to those hundreds potentially?
• 35:41
  of people that are going to come from their family line. So yeah, this, this is, this is part of just like really how much time do you spend like looking at that future vision? So that's what we want to encourage you guys to do today. So thank you guys. We have one kid who has, we have seven kids and each of these kids have kids and those kids have kids. Like it doesn't take too many generations before Dana and I and our family is like hundreds of people. And if we can pass on skills of how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, how
• 36:09
  You train the next generation to the next generation, and then they are then equipped to train those skills to the next generation. Instead of just overpopulating the earth with too many mouths, you're like actually blessing future generations and people who know how to create assets and resources for families and serve people and give generously and, you know,
• 36:27
  and living their faith publicly and all that. So that's like the best kingdom impact I can think of is to have kids who raise kids, who raise kids to have, who think in terms of kingdom impact. So that's how you bless the future guys. That's it. Yeah. Huge. Well, Dana, Tim, thanks so much for talking to me today. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
• 36:50
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