Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 247 | How to Have a Vision When It Has Failed

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Ep. 247 | How to Have a Vision When It Has Failed · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:04
  What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here. Another episode of 5-Minute Fatherhood. We got a question from Tom. That's a good question. Tom, thank you for asking it. One I think we all deal with. So let's try to lean into this for a couple minutes. It says, how to have a vision when everything you had a vision for has failed? I feel like a failure at vision setting and achieving things.
• 0:21
  What would you say to that, Jeremy? Because this is real. This is the hard part too. And, you know, I think we always have to be very careful of every system, everything, anything that's helpful always has, call it dark sides or just things that like can hurt or whatever. And I think sometimes, you know, family teams, cultures can be so high vision, high culture, high all these things. But what do you do when like the, you're not meeting your own bar or you're feeling like you're not achieving this vision or things aren't happening? Because I think this is a totally realistic question.
• 0:49
  Yeah. Well, the first thing I tell every dad is that if you're breathing, you haven't lost. Yeah. I've talked to grandfathers who have done a lot of damage to their families and have become aware of it, are beginning to repent. And man, there is a ton of opportunity for them to continue to push into this. And so it's really important to understand that the fruit that we're going for is a multi-generational fruit. And so there's no way that you—don't judge yourself. One of the things that Paul says,
• 1:15
  is I don't even judge myself. And so be careful not to cast too hard of a sentence on yourself. The other thing that I just think is super important to keep in mind is that when you're trying to figure out who to compare yourself to, it's really discouraging to compare yourself to other families.
• 1:32
  Yeah, be careful. Yeah, the best thing to compare yourself to is your own family and in the past. Yeah, where were we? I want my ceiling to be my kid's floor. And so I don't want to look around at other families who maybe generationally are light years beyond us. I have friends who are the fourth or fifth generation of just incredible faithfulness, and I'm watching what they're accomplishing in their generations, and I can get really discouraged.
• 1:59
  Likewise, there are a lot of people who have come from really tough families and are doing so much work in their generation. And it's important to be okay with that and to say, man, we're not going to recover everything in one generation, but we're going to do our best. And so make sure that you're making progress as a family, but don't set the bar according to other families.
• 2:19
  No, I would totally agree. And then, you know, I think that that's the beautiful part about the gospel is the gospel doesn't... There is the truth of you reap what you sow, but then there is the truth also in Scripture of like God's a miraculous God that just can make restoration happen out of something. You know, what's that Old Testament class example of like the... He can restore what the locusts have eaten or whatever, you know. Yeah, he can bring back to life places that are dead, right? And to bring something back from the dead is not...
• 2:44
  normal. That's a miracle and God can do that, right? And maybe it's smaller stuff too that maybe you just feel like oh I failed to this That's a bummer. I think sometimes it's easy to be discouraged as a dad not by the huge failures But just like the compounding small ones of like oh why are you know, why the kids acting this way? Why did I not do this? Why did I you know business failure or whatever? One thing I would say to to end is that it's really helpful to look at it like a tree, right? I think one I think a lot of times in America and our spirituality in the West as we
• 3:07
  we so want to watch the tree grow. It's like you can't watch a tree grow. You literally just have to like stay in your house, do your life and peek out the door every five years. And you're like, oh, that's taller than it was five years ago. And I think a lot of times we so quickly want to just put our face against the glass and just be like, grow, grow, grow, grow. And I think it's similar with failures of like, it's like we get into the micro failures and it's like, well, you really got to understand this the long game.
• 3:31
  Is the tree growing as the tree being built? And will the tree produce fruit 50 years from now, right, that you can eat from? That's a bigger, better question than like, oh, I used the wrong pesticide or, oh, I actually messed up the bark right there. You know what I mean? It's like, no. The big question is, is the tree still standing, you know, or has it totally been eroded and decaying? And is it going towards the trajectory of growing fruit and blessing? So that's what I would say. Awesome. Awesome.
• 3:52
  And you guys, we would love to invite you to look at these super long-term, multi-generational families through coming on an Israel tour with us. One of the things I really—one of the reasons why April and I love to take people to Israel is that oftentimes in the West, we have such a micro view of family. Yeah. And it's so hard—
• 4:12
  to sort of break that thinking. But when you see a culture that has been really thinking about family multi-generationally for thousands of years, um, and that's a super encouraging and it really gives you that sense of, wow, what we're doing is, you know, we're a small link in a very long chain and it's really important for us to keep that in perspective. So if you want to check that out, you can go to familyteams.com, check out our Israel tours. We head out there every year in January. Um, so check those out. We'd love to, uh, experience that with you guys.