Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 159 | Why It's Important to Tell Stories About Your family

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Ep. 159 | Why It's Important to Tell Stories About Your family · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  What's up, 5-Minute Fatherhood listeners? Have you guys seen that Family Team's Weekend Live is officially open? You can register. You can claim your spot. A two-day event, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 18th and 19th this year. We're going to pack 250 couples in a Memorial Hall historic theater downtown where we're going to lean in, roll up our sleeves, and we're going to be able to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a chance to get a
• 0:20
  and have a workshop about building a multi-generational family team on mission. You're gonna get practical tips, you're gonna get practical tools, you're gonna leave with a family blueprint and manual, and officially you're also going to be not alone and realize there's other people who want to do the same thing as you. We want you guys there, it's selling out fast, so make sure to go to familyteams.com slash weekend to register and claim your spot. And there's also a special little discount code if you're part of our Facebook group, which you can find a link to that,
• 0:48
  in the info section on audio or the info section on the YouTube channel. So again, familyteams.com slash weekend. It's selling out fast. Claim your spot. We'd love to see you there. The reason we're able to read the scriptures is because there was faithful generations who passed it, wrote it down and then passed it down.
• 1:09
  Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.
• 1:30
  All right, what's up guys? Welcome to another five minute fatherhood. So we love to tease out what certain verses mean specifically for dads. And if you guys have ever read this incredibly tragic book called Judges in the Bible, it's a tough read. And one of the things that the book tries to do is in the beginning, it sort of sets up why Israel was in such a spiritual crisis. It says things over and over again, like, you know, there was no king and every person did what was right in his own eyes.
• 2:00
  And there was also another, at the beginning, kind of it's in the prologue of the book in Judges 2, it has another description for why things went so badly right after the Israelites got into the promised land. And let me read this to you guys, because I think this is really relevant for us. It says,
• 2:30
  Then Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord died. All that generation also were gathered to their fathers, and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which he had done for Israel.
• 2:48
  So the thing that really caused this next generation to completely fall away from the Lord and fall into idolatry, one of those things was that they did not know what God did for Israel. They weren't given the story. In other words, the previous generation did a great job of obeying the Lord, but they apparently didn't do a great job of storytelling and explaining to their descendants all of the great things that the Lord had done.
• 3:15
  And this really reminded me of the reason, you guys, why you guys probably heard us talk about this incredible holiday in the Bible called Sukkot. It's the Festival of Tabernacles, and the whole point of it was to make sure that the generations coming remembered...
• 3:31
  the things the Lord did for them in the wilderness, all of the ways the Lord was faithful to them in their journey from Egypt to the promised land. And so during our Sukkot celebration, it lasts for seven days. We tell stories around seven categories, and all of them relate to what happened in the wilderness, because I believe that that was as well
• 3:49
  It really is a description and a symbol of the way that we come out of slavery as people who are enslaved to sin all the way through the wilderness because of the faithfulness of God and into the promised land where ultimately we're looking in the future. We're going to dwell with God forever in the new Jerusalem. But we do things like...
• 4:10
  And our seven themes for Sukkot are provision, guidance, wilderness, the shedding, companions, the shelter, and the destination. I want to give you guys an example of what we do. So during a celebration like this, we want to make sure that we are telling our children the stories of God's faithfulness. So if we have a theme, so like one of the days of Sukkot, we're around the fire under our little sukkah, which is sort of like a little hut we build, temporary dwelling, and we're going to talk about provision. And so we just ask
• 4:36
  the elders of the family. My parents are usually there. My wife's parents are there, her mom now, and others in the family, and then me and April and the kids. And we ask, okay, guys, this is the moment every year where we ask the question, how has God provided for our family the way that God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness? He gave them manna. How has God provided for us? How has God been our shelter? Right.
• 5:00
  is another theme. How has God guided us? Another theme, like with the pillar of fire in the wilderness. And so our kids will hear over and over and over again us telling stories about the provision, the guidance of God, our parents telling those stories, because we do not want this problem to occur. And so holidays, I think, are a great way to prompt...
• 5:23
  storytelling conversations to make sure that the next generation hears, and don't be afraid to repeat the stories every year. Like, Oh yeah, yeah. Tell us about that one. Tell us about how, you know, what, how God brought, you know, you and mom together and how God like provided a first that way. Oh, yeah.
• 5:38
  remember when our business was almost about to fail and then all of a sudden that thing happened? Like, what was that again? What are the details? Again, we want them to have these stories down cold so that they can tell their kids during their times of really celebrating. So I love this idea, Jeff. What does this start for you?
• 5:54
  Yeah, I would say one encouragement too, I would tell people is like, when you die, are the stories going to be remembered? If you want to tell multi-generational stories, you have to write it down. It's that simple, right? And I think have an active cadence of writing your story down, reflecting on it, putting it in journals, maybe even going so far when you're older as putting it in some type of kind of more like pretty form of like a book,
• 6:17
  or something so that your family can have it, right? And maybe it's a video, maybe it's some type of notes, maybe it's audio, maybe it's you talk. Like how cool would that be if like, you know, you talk into a recorder for 50 years, right? And then all of a sudden, you know, your family gets those audio files. Like imagine right now,
• 6:33
  If you had audio snippets of your grandparents talking from 40 years ago, just telling stories and reflecting on the family and reflecting on God's goodness, I think we see that in scriptures. The reason we're able to read the scriptures is because there was faithful generations who wrote it down and then passed it down. First it was oral, but then wrote it down after that.
• 6:54
  And man, like we have these testimonies of God's grace because there was a faithful telling of the story and capturing of the story. And so I love all that of like in these holidays, in these seasons, in these moments, make little efforts. It doesn't take huge to capture them, to make them systematic, to think about them, to write them down. And then like Jeremy said, keep retelling them because then you also, I think one of those ways you actually capture them is by retelling the same one so that they're memorized in the next generation. Yeah.
• 7:19
  If you just tell it once, it's not. And so that actually is one way of metaphorically writing it down, is making it almost an oral tradition that's so memorized and known. And so that's what we would say is think about that today and what would that look like for your family?
• 7:34
  Hey guys, we know it's really challenging to try to build your family team when all the tools you've grown up with or seen essentially are aimed at only helping develop family members as a collection of individuals. That's why we launched familyteams.com where you can find all the tools we've developed with tons of resources at different price points, free courses, videos, writings, etc. that help you build up and transform you and your family into a multi-generational team on mission. Check out all the resources we have over at familyteams.com.