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Is It Worthwhile To Invest In A Family Legacy? (Hormozi Reaction) · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  One of the things I struggle with is listening to guys like Alex Harmozi talk about this topic at their age, because so much of where this gets really intense is as you get older. 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.
• 0:30
  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. So we're going to talk about some fatherhood topics today. I'm joined by Riley Pilgrim and Chris Cirillo. Thank you guys so much for jumping on here today. Thank you. Yeah. Glad to be here.
• 0:44
  A lot of you guys, I think, are familiar with Chris. He has recently published a book. So head over to missionfit.co slash book. It's called The Mission Fit Father, and you can get the Kindle and the Audible edition on there. The print version is coming soon. We're waiting for Riley and his wife to work on their Elderberry company. We'll be talking about that soon. Awesome. Thanks. Yeah. So, guys, we need to talk about...
• 1:09
  this perspective of fatherhood that, you know, I, there is a kind of like, it isn't often explicitly stated. I believe it's almost always implicitly believed by highly ambitious people.
• 1:23
  that there is sort of a, it's sort of a waste to build a multi-generational legacy. It doesn't really work anymore. And so it oftentimes isn't explicitly stated, but recently Alex Harmozy, a lot of you guys are, I'm sure familiar with him.
• 1:40
  he just explicitly said it and it sort of started a discussion. And I wanted to get Riley and Chris, your guys' take on this and then kind of dive into some thoughts that I've been having on this area. So I'll just kind of frame this up. So Alex tweeted out this, your great great grandchildren probably won't have your last name, look like you, or even know your name. And if you dedicate your entire life to helping them,
• 2:06
  You might as well just help other people now and enjoy the benefits now. Better to live your legacy than leave one. So his point is, if you really are to do the cost-benefit analysis of spending a lot of time focusing on your kids and your grandchildren,
• 2:27
  You're not going to get as much benefit in this life as you would if you focused on others, other people is what he's saying. And I think there's some truth to that. It takes faith in the future and an understanding that what we're trying to build is not necessarily just for us.
• 2:44
  to understand the importance of building a legacy. But I'm really glad he said this out loud because I think this is really a deep reason why a lot of men in particular struggle having the motivation to father their children and get excited about having large families. For example, if you have this belief, even somewhere deep down inside, I would say I had this belief.
• 3:04
  for a long time as a christian i was like well yeah this is what he's saying is they're not going to have my last name it's not going to benefit me to focus on my grandchildren my great i'm not gonna be alive to see it and i'm alive now and who knows what the future holds solomon says something pretty similar in ecclesiastes and then sean sweeney then kind of reposted what alex wrote and kind of expanded on he says i actually agree with alex
• 3:30
  I'm almost 50 years old. I've seen a lot of people come and go at this point, including my own parents. I don't know any of my great-grandparents. I don't know anything about them. And I think that's true for most people. I think when you die, your immediate family misses you forever. And most people think of you from time to time, but mostly move on with their life. And the world moves on. You are a blip in history.
• 3:57
  Leaving a legacy is important, but no matter how amazing you are and whatever you're doing and how much joy and love you're spreading after you die, you're mostly forgotten. Okay, so they laid out the case. Okay.
• 4:12
  I think it's a pretty strong case for why men should focus on this life, the people they're encountering now, and not necessarily put too much emphasis on the future legacy of their family. I'll start with you, Chris, and then go to you, Riley. I'm curious what this stirred up for you guys. So then we'll kind of unpack this.
• 4:34
  Yeah, it's the cultural norm right now. I mean, like you said, they're just explicitly saying what everybody already feels and believes about this topic. The initial thing that stirred up for me was actually in relation to vision.
• 4:50
  Last night I was at a birthday party we were throwing because we have two boys, three boys with February birthdays and one of their cousins is a February birthday. So we did a big family thing last night and I was talking to my brother-in-law about what he's been reading lately and he just finished this like 600 page David McCullough biography on John Adams and it's like a Pulitzer Prize winner.
• 5:13
  And he's just describing some of the big takeaways from it. One of the big ones was that he had this huge future-oriented vision. Like all of these guys who went through the Revolutionary War and actually helped orchestrate what we now have today in the United States.
• 5:30
  They sacrificed tremendously for you and I. They were thinking about us, generally speaking, with everything that they were doing. So much so that John Adams ended up spending something like eight or 10 years separated from his wife as he was the ambassador in France.
• 5:50
  And it was all around like these strategic things related to better vision for, you know, what a country could look like and how politics could go and like how you could actually run something that would better the experience and the lives of the people that lived underneath it. That was very actually commonplace then, right? And John Adams and some of these other guys, they were like their early 20s when they did all this stuff.
• 6:16
  And they just had a much bigger vision and they were thinking generations beyond themselves. And it resulted in them actually sometimes to the detriment of their family, right? Like I'm not suggesting that we separate from our wife for 10 years, but they were willing to sacrifice the here and now for other people to experience the benefits later. And I think that we've just, as a culture, we've totally flip-flopped. Yes. Part of this is you get to invest your life.
• 6:46
  You're going to die. It is one of the things that these guys are saying. And as a second guy, Sean, mentioned, he was almost 50 years old. And so at that point in your life, when you start getting to that midlife point, you start to calculate, make this calculation about, okay, what exactly am I investing in that's going to last beyond me? And I think a lot of guys that decide,
• 7:06
  that say the stuff that Alex and Sean are saying in this, oftentimes at that point in their life, there's usually some kind of reason why they don't have hope in their own family. I don't know if that's always the case, but I'm always a little suspicious about that. So like in what you're describing, John Adams had a massive impact on our country.
• 7:25
  But he also left us John Quincy Adams, his son, who then became president. That's a big deal. You can do both and you can bless the world. Billy Graham, who was an incredible evangelist, but he also left us Franklin Graham so that his legacy continued through his son. These are important things to trace and to see. We're watching this right now. Bobby Kennedy was, you know, sadly assassinated right at the prime of his life. And now his son is really carrying on a legacy for him.
• 7:55
  And these are not this like it's important not to just lump these together as like one thing and say, OK, there's this thing called legacy and you can either build a legacy by blessing other people or you can build a legacy through your family. I think that what what sort of the Bible was written to an audience that everyone was bought in to building a legacy through their family and they needed to be taught the importance of actually building a legacy outside their family with others as well.
• 8:24
  Now we have kind of this opposite, really confusing problem, which is that people are being actively taught. And if they're not being taught, their intuitions are telling them they're better off building a legacy primarily through others. And that causes men, I think, to underinvest in family. And I think that it's really important that these two values not be attacking one another, but we start to understand the importance of both. Riley, what does this start for you? Yeah, man.
• 8:54
  one of the things that stands out to me right off the bat is kind of a sneaky assumption that if you aren't the one receiving the credit, or if you're not the one who's remembered, then it's not important or it's not impactful and that it should be foregone. And so like, that's kind of snuck in there under the radar and kind of assumes that you accept that point just in the statement itself. So for one, like, you know,
• 9:21
  They're kind of bringing up some of the earlier people in the United States. Think about all the families that came over here that aren't remembered. Thousands and thousands of people. But the only reason a nation exists today is because those people came. Had they not come, there would be no...
• 9:41
  United States of America, so on and so forth. And that's a quick off-the-cuff example of something where they may not be remembered, but the results of their decisions have a significant world impact as a conglomeration. And I think just Western society, modern society, and individualism and materialism, those two things just are at the forefront. All of the philosophical debate,
• 10:09
  America have nowadays, they're centered on individualism and materialism. And those like stand in the forefront of promoting this quote right there, individualistic and materialistic. Nothing matters except what you can experience for you today. And it, and it gotta be, you know,
• 10:27
  It can't be esoteric. It can't be spiritual. It can't be any other thing. It's got to be what can you tangibly experience in yourself in your lifetime. That's what matters. This is kind of a tricky way that was phrased because he kind of said, look, I do want to leave a legacy, but I want to leave it in others. But his argument...
• 10:45
  was exactly what you're saying. His argument for saying others instead of family was to say, I'm not going to be around to enjoy it, which then sort of betrays the reality that a legacy primarily exists for your benefit. This is kind of what was your point, Chris. It's like, I thought a legacy existed for others. And as soon as you admit that, then I think it's really difficult not to be swayed by the argument that investing in your family is going to have a different impact. One of the things that I often ask people when I'm initially...
• 11:14
  describing this difference is how much of the value of Abraham's life did he create in the course of his lifetime and how much of the value that Abraham created came through having and raising Isaac. If you just actually compare these two buckets. Abraham was a really good
• 11:37
  camel trader. Abraham did a great job forming alliances 4,000 years ago, 3,500 years ago. And so I'm sure there was a lot of individuals that were really impacted by Abraham over 3,000 years ago. But compare the amount of impact Abraham had with that generation 3,000 years ago to the impact he had just by having Isaac.
• 12:06
  through Isaac, every Jewish person that's ever been born, all the Nobel Prizes, all the way, all the other patriarchs in the Bible, you know, obviously Jacob and Joseph and David and Solomon, but also Jesus Christ, right? So you have to then like stack up all of that and then compare it to what Abraham accomplished in his one little life.
• 12:31
  And you have to come to the conclusion that 99.9% of the value that Abraham created actually came through Isaac and having and raising one son versus his decision to really invest in others in his lifetime. And that's really the power of this exponential multiplication of the impact of a legacy through a family line. And again, this is what was just kind of intuitively understood.
• 12:57
  by people in the past that's being questioned today. And so that's kind of the tension I'm always feeling. Chris, anything else that this is starting up for you? Need a blueprint to revise your family to be a multi-generational team on mission? The book Family Revision by Jeremy Pryor is the book that summarizes all the big picture ideas you hear on this podcast. Available on Amazon or familyteams.com.
• 13:24
  Yeah, strangely, this quote by Inky Johnson is coming to mind. He's like a motivational speaker that was like a football player and his arm went completely disabled from a weird hit. And one of the things he says, it's like one of those kind of tweetable throwaway line. He says, how you view what you do changes how you do what you do. And I think the point that you were making earlier that you can choose one and possibly get both or you can choose the other and for sure only get one.
• 13:54
  And I think if I am intentionally approaching my life with the perspective of multi-generational legacy and impact, something about the way that I operate today is probably going to up level in such a way where I actually experience a lot of the fruit and the benefit today, as well as get to see the legacy. Yeah.
• 14:16
  Absolutely. Yeah, both are possible. And I believe that the Bible explicitly answers the question that we're teasing out here. So a lot of Christians are totally unfamiliar with where the Bible answers this question. I would phrase the question like this.
• 14:33
  Is it worthwhile to invest in your family? And if you do, will you be remembered? But there's basically a thesis that both Sean and Alex are articulating, which is, look, I don't really remember my great grandparents. And therefore, why should I think that I'm going to be remembered someday? And one of the things that's a very strong argument, because you have to ask the question.
• 14:57
  why don't we remember our great-grandparents? Is that basically because they're not relevant to our lives today? And therefore, why remember their names? I ask this oftentimes at a family team's weekend, like how many of you can name your eight great-grandparents? And it's incredibly rare that somebody can name all of them, or sometimes they can't name any of them. That's a shocking reality given the incredible impact they've had on our lives. I mean,
• 15:22
  But we just don't remember what that impact is. It's so far in the past that we've created a culture that's so hyper individualistic that we think our story began when we were born and people that lived before we were born are literally irrelevant. Now, this was not the way that the Bible talks about relevance. This is not the way that the Bible talks about family. The Bible cares a lot about remembering.
• 15:42
  Remember is one of the most common commands in the Bible. The Bible is filled with genealogies because God really wants people's names to be remembered for generations, for a thousand generations. But the passage I want to like tease out with you guys is Psalm 112 and...
• 15:58
  This is so important, you guys, because this psalm, I think, just puts to rest this question. It exists to answer this question, to really help resolve this tension. Now, a couple of things just to say about this psalm before I read it. And this is so important that this has become a much...
• 16:14
  much more popular psalm than I think it is currently. One of the problems with this psalm is that most of the modern translations have rendered this psalm as gender neutral, and it is not supposed to be gender neutral. So this psalm is actually about a particular kind of man.
• 16:32
  the exact kind of man that we're talking about, this guy who said he's about 50 years old. That's exactly what this psalm is written to somebody who is in that phase of their life. And it's written to specifically the leader of a household. You can see this when you read it in its proper translation. But if you read the NIV, the NLT, any of those translations today, they will only use sort of neutered language for the pronouns. The reason why this is so important, you guys, is that imagine...
• 16:59
  Imagine Proverbs 31, that we translated it with gender neutral pronouns. You know, this is not the woman of valor. This is the person of valor. It's not that she has strength and dignity. It's they have strength. That's the way this psalm is written.
• 17:14
  This psalm was clearly written to a man and is specifically aimed at a particular kind of man who is, all of us are going to struggle with this. A man who's asking the kinds of questions at midlife that these men are asking. So I'll read it to you guys. The ESV, thankfully, preserves the actual male pronouns that are here and they're critical. So this is what it says. Praise the Lord. Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments.
• 17:39
  His offspring will be mighty in the land. The generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches are in his house and his righteousness endures forever. I want to like highlight the time language used in this. His righteousness endures forever. Light dawns in the darkness for the upright. He is gracious, merciful, and righteous. Is well with the man who deals generously and lends, who conducts his affairs with justice. For the righteous will never be moved. He will be remembered forever.
• 18:07
  How long will he be remembered? It's like this righteous, so this is the psalm to the righteous household leader. And what he's saying here is if you are a righteous household leader, your children will take certain positions within the land. And this will create this multi-generational legacy in which your righteousness will be remembered forever. Now we're used to thinking about this from the perspective of God, but again, you guys, this is the Bible. Why is the Bible...
• 18:34
  motivating us with the thought that our righteousness will be remembered forever. This is really hard for a lot of Christians, I think, because we're hyper-individualistic. We understand that our righteousness is derived through the gospel. And so that pathway, I think, has really caused a lot of people to, I think, misunderstand what the psalmist is saying here. And remember all the way back in Genesis 12, one of the things that God promised Abraham
• 19:00
  was that you will be famous, you will be remembered. And of course, Abraham is remembered today. And this is not a statement given to Abraham. This is really a teaching given to a righteous householder. And a lot of what it's describing when it comes to righteousness is really the specific things he's talking about here.
• 19:20
  It is well with the man who deals generously and lends, who conducts his affairs with justice, who is gracious, merciful, and righteous. He will be remembered forever. He is not afraid of bad news. His heart is firm, trusting in the Lord. His heart is steady. He will not be afraid until he looks in triumph on his adversaries.
• 19:36
  He has distributed freely. He has given to the poor. His righteousness endures forever. His horn is exalted in honor. The wicked man sees it and is angry. He gnashes his teeth and melts away. The desire of the wicked will perish. So Psalm 112 is a prayer.
• 19:51
  that a householder prays as he is interacting with God around the questions that we're describing right now. So I've been, over the course of this whole month, I've been memorizing this psalm, praying through this psalm, and really trying to let its truths seep into me in a deep place because I have all the intuitions
• 20:09
  that Alex Harmozy and Sean Sweeney, they articulate. I was raised in a hyper-individualistic culture. I've taken in those stories, and I'm very tempted to think of my life in this way. And part of why I really need to meditate on Psalm 112 and to really push against these beliefs and really look at the scripture and say, okay, these beliefs, I need to receive these beliefs
• 20:34
  This is something I just need to wrestle with. It's really been challenging for me. And the meditation of this prayer in Psalm 112 isn't super helpful. So Riley, what does that stir up for you? Yeah. One of the things that kind of comes to mind right off the bat is just kind of the different, I don't know what to say, like people like Formosie, for example, or
• 21:00
  Anybody who's not striving after the Lord, what you end up with is kind of this, kind of like a futile attempt, which is you cannot be righteous on your own. And so this can never be a promise to you, right? And so it's a futile attempt for them to try to have a legacy that's remembered because it's not a promise for them. So that's one thing that comes to mind. Another thing is...
• 21:27
  How a lot of times, like you said before, in modern culture, the shift has kind of been from instead of creating a legacy with your children, let me just create a legacy through everybody else. You know, let me, an entrepreneur hustle culture, it's like, give value, give value, give value, and then that'll return to you and this kind of thing. But the thing about all that is it doesn't actually cost people.
• 21:52
  It's not very cost. You might have to spend hours behind a computer screen making a course that you're going to sell. And you're going to call that giving value. Maybe you give it for free on YouTube. But it's not actually going to cost relationally. Having a family is what costs relationally. And, you know, it's like, what are you investing in? Okay, well, if you're going to invest in worldliness...
• 22:15
  you know, which one's going to yield a higher ROI? Well, the one in worldliness isn't going to be very costly to use. You're not putting that much money out there. There's not going to be this lengthy legacy, but when you invest in something that is costly to you and you actually do it with all your heart, fully, you're all in. What,
• 22:34
  You know, most people are all in on business and halfway in and family. It's like, now be all in and investing, not just financially, but like in your children, in their raising up in the discipline and admonition of the Lord and all of those things. And that is what will yield a return. That's, that's what this promise I think is about. And it says the feudal attempt, so you don't know the Lord, but they're right. Like we're going to give it a few generations. They'll be for God. Right. It's unfortunate, but it's true. Right. Right.
• 23:03
  Yes. Well, yeah, that's a really good point. This promise is not given to guys like this that aren't building a legacy in righteousness. And I think part of the reason why God is promising that you will be remembered if you build a household in this way is that there are actual structures within the Bible that really assist a righteous household builder.
• 23:32
  in creating the kind of family line that does have an incredibly long memory. And part of what we're all about in family teams is trying to resurrect the kind of family that will...
• 23:44
  really live out these tools that allow for the family members to be remembered. And the reason why it's so important to remember the people from the past is not because we're trying to glorify them. I think this is a huge kind of misunderstanding. You're, you know, I think to...
• 24:03
  Alex's point, you're dead. Why do you care? When you're dead, I don't really know what that experience is like in the future in heaven. There's not a lot of information given to us about exactly how your family's legacy impacts your eternal life. I think the reason is what you were starting out with, Chris, and that is because you actually care about the future.
• 24:23
  that God actually designed you as a man to build something for the future and that it's in your descendants best interest to remember you. Like if they remember you, then they have a continuous story and,
• 24:35
  where they understand who they are, they understand where they came from, they understand why we value these things. They have a multi-generational legacy of wisdom that they can pull from, maybe resources that is furthering them. And because they are experiencing this, this also is going to cause them to build the kind of family that also will
• 24:55
  have, they're going to build the kind of parent their children to be the kinds of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who can also pass that on. And that creates a certain kind of family that's not hyper-individualistic, but one that's dedicated to service. The word righteousness
• 25:10
  And the word that probably for us, we don't use that word very often today, but I really think probably the best way for us to think about the idea of righteousness, especially in this psalm, is a life of service. It's really the decision to serve, serve, give things away, make sure that my life is creating that value you guys are describing. So yeah, Chris, what else is this psalm going to bring up for you?
• 25:34
  I have been meditating on Genesis one and two a lot over the last probably year. And what strikes me about Genesis one and two is like,
• 25:47
  Maybe this is not new for most people, but it just kind of hit me one day, the weight of the reality of those passages. It was like, we have this eternal God who in his infinite wisdom, creativity, imagination, power, and authority, when he could have done anything in the world that he wanted to.
• 26:06
  Like our imagination has a cap, his does not. And he could have literally created anything. And he chose to create the earth and to make humans and to put them on the earth as vice regents and ambassadors of the heavenly kingdom in the physical space.
• 26:22
  And then what he did from that is he formed a family and gave a head of that family as the father and said, this vehicle is the vehicle to take my goodness and ways and principles and to follow my commands and to take that into all the untamed spaces of the earth. And to bring order out of chaos where my ways are not, you know, and so he.
• 26:48
  I think the idea of a father, the idea of family, like that is of the utmost importance and preeminence in the mind of God, in the heart of God. When he looks at the unadulterated view of humanity, it's like, this is his vision.
• 27:03
  And when he could have hit reset after the fall, he could have done anything else that he wanted to. He didn't. He continued this pathway and he said, I'm going to retain the human form. And then by the end, I'm going to spend eternity with it. I'm going to resurrect those. So there's like this, he's maintaining this thing and basically doubling down on saying, no, I made the right choice in the beginning to create man and family. Yeah.
• 27:31
  And the kind of Matthew 28 is an addendum to this in a sense is like, there's kind of a different formation of family that is going to be continuing to do this by the power of my spirit. So with that as kind of the backdrop, I then think of the Hebrew word here for man is ish. And it's like, it is a father. It is a household leader. It is a husband.
• 27:52
  And he's saying that like, oh, no, remember what I once had in mind for how humanity would go. And when a father owns that responsibility and owns that role and owns his position and his authority in that and then tries to live out the kingdom.
• 28:10
  through those means, then all of these things are the benefits. I'm reminded that the scriptures also tell us that do not forget the benefits of the Lord. And so, you know, I think you may have been trying to say this without saying it, but it's kind of like the old adage where people want the kingdom without the king. So they want the benefits.
• 28:33
  but they don't want to follow the ways and the commands of God. And they end up with these temporary means of wealth, perhaps, but they have no legacy. There's no richness, there's no righteousness, and there's no eternity. There's no foreverness, like Jeremy was calling out in this passage, that they will experience as a result of it.
• 28:51
  It will be like vapor in the wind and it will be gone. And no one will remember Alex Hermosi's name in 60 years because he has no kids and he will have no grandkids. And there'll be another Alex Hermosi doing the same things. And God says, no, like there is a way where this is going to play out and your name will be remembered forever. But only if you honor my name, my commandments, my ways, and my principles in the process of doing it. Otherwise, no.
• 29:20
  Yeah, as you're talking, Chris, I kind of got this picture. Anybody who's listening to this, imagine if when you turned 13 years old, your father presented you with a book.
• 29:32
  like a really thick book and said, this is the story of our family. Every one of your descendants is listed in here and their story, what they live for. You'll see the whole family tree. Like if imagine getting that gift so that every person in your family line was remembered and that you can actually look at some of the major themes of
• 29:51
  I don't, I'm really curious how that would impact you. And I think a lot of people in our culture today are like, I don't want that because that infringes on my individual freedom to do completely invent my own, my own identity without any, any larger story, which the problem with that, you guys, it's, it's a lie. You are the product of that story. Even if you never got it, I mean, even if you open the book and you looked at certain elements of it, you're like, wow, I don't want to repeat that. Yeah.
• 30:17
  Like that's actually really helpful because it's like, okay, we've overcome what this is all about. One of the things that, and I think this is something that older men, as they get into the later part of their lives. And one of the things I struggle with is listening to guys like Alex Harmozy talk about this topic at their age, because so much of where this gets really intense is as you get older. I remember when we were touring a, this mansion in Puyallup, Washington, and I was like,
• 30:44
  And the mansion, the Meeker mansion was actually built by one of April's descendants. And so we walked into this mansion. And so her, her grandmother's maiden name was Meeker. And, you know, we knew where Ezra Meeker, the guy who built the mansion, you know, 150 years ago, where he kind of fell in April's family line. But as we walked in there.
• 31:04
  We said to the people that were kind of at the gift shop or the tour guides that she's actually a part of this family line. They all freaked out and brought her all the way upstairs to this attic. And in the attic was this guy who was like 93 years old or something. And he was sitting there bent over a computer.
• 31:21
  tracing the Meeker family. And this is what he does all day. Like this guy in his nineties was piecing together that book that I described for his descendants. And he has traced all the way back to the revolutionary war. When the Meekers first started coming over to America, he's been putting their stories together. He's been writing it. And so we bought everything we could from this guy in order to provide for our family, a little bit, our kids, some kind of insights into that. When April's dad was just before he died,
• 31:48
  he began to write out the family story. One of the stories that he sat all of our family down and told us was about his grandfather, April's great-grandfather, our kid's great-great-grandfather. And this guy, as my father-in-law Don said, he kind of named him the rascal of the family. This guy was not a very good man. His righteous deeds were not resounding. He had made a lot of...
• 32:10
  major mistakes and had really hurt our family. And one of the things that Don was describing was his father, who was raised by this man, his whole life was trying to recover from the damage done by this man. And he had a mixed story, but it was much, much better than his father's story. And then Don, who really built a family, kind of took our family to the next stage,
• 32:34
  He then told the story, and we were all living the story, of how much he had redeemed and recovered in his generation. And now April and her generation was taking the ball, the baton and carrying the family farther. And now Don was talking to our children and saying, okay, like, look, it's taken us four generations to recover from what this man did. Yeah.
• 32:52
  Super helpful. And we are, we really are living in this sort of, I just think it's a delusion that somehow our stories are one generation stories. And anybody who has studied the challenges that people have, whether it's mental health challenges or parenting challenges or any of the kinds of issues that people have, if you go to a therapist, they're going to constantly...
• 33:20
  talk to you, not about your teachers or your coaches, but your parents. Like there's an awareness
• 33:26
  that we are living a multi-generational story and that we are being deeply impacted by these generations. And so it's like there's this thin veil over this when we have these conversations about legacy, that, man, what a gift to make sure that, yeah, whatever God's called you to pour into other people, definitely like pour into others. A lot of Psalm 112 is a story about this righteous householder
• 33:53
  who is serving others, serving the poor, lending freely, being gracious and compassionate. His deeds of righteousness are really profound. But it says specifically that this man who fears the Lord, who delights in his commands, his children are mighty in the land. That is one of the coolest descriptions of what we're all trying to build.
• 34:13
  We want our children to be mighty in the land. We want them to have influence. We want them to form a ruling household, right? This fruitful, multiplying, subduing and ruling household that's described in Genesis 1. Like this is what this righteous householder is being able to build. And it's really to everyone's benefit, but you don't want it to end in your generation.
• 34:36
  Are you following us on Facebook and Instagram yet? Look up at Family Teams to get even more free content and never miss out on event announcements. I took one thing that it stirred up like you were saying that. It reminded me of that previous episode you did about generational traumas. I remember one of the guys had mentioned that wanting to shorten the span of healing, usually it takes multiple generations. People come out of that. But kind of like what you just said is...
• 35:06
  If you can have the context or the story that you are born into, because we don't define our own story, whether we try to or not, we're born into a story that already exists, whether we like where we're at in the story or not.
• 35:19
  If you had a father that was not as present as you would have wanted, but you understood that his father was actually abusive and traumatized by World War II or something like that, that can put into context to accelerate your feeling from your father's lack of whatever, because you understand and can have compassion with the context in which that story played itself out.
• 35:47
  And it can, I think, limit the effects of that kind of generation trauma if we can keep track of the stories, which is, you know, that that would be an interesting conversation as I'm thinking about this, too. It's like, how how do you keep track of the story? Yeah. We need to do the ups and downs. Yes. Yeah. Whatever you guys know, anyone listening to this, whatever you know about your family line.
• 36:10
  So much of that's going to die with you if you don't write that down or put that in videos or do something to pass that on to the next generation. And like what you're saying, Riley, a lot of what we're trying to do here is encourage you guys to accelerate the healing and redemption of your family through being clear. And if there are really hard things you're trying to overcome from your parents or grandparents, it's really important that your children are aware of those things.
• 36:34
  not in a way that dishonors those in the past. We want to be telling the full story, including all the blessings that came to us through those people and we want to honor them. But we also want to say, okay, but how do we take this further? You know, here are the things they did and here are the things that we're going to help redeem. And we know, we hope that they would be cheering us on and continuing to further our family line. And it's so exciting to be part of a story like that. Why are people choosing...
• 37:00
  to be a part of these one generational stories. My favorite movies are always multi-generational stories. It's so much more fun to watch an epic that goes across generations. You kind of can see the, the, the impact of these generations. Then this, this one little romantic comedy of somebody, what they can do in like a six month period of time. It's so shallow, like compared to the epic, uh,
• 37:20
  that we're all writing through our families and what we're trying to create. So this is, this is really where such deep meaning comes from. So Chris, any, any last thoughts that you're, this turn up for you? One, uh, thought is that I actually have a book like this. Um, my grandmother did a wonderful job of keeping track of a lot of this stuff. And as she was, uh, in the final, even weeks of her life, my uncle went and sat with her and he's, uh,
• 37:49
  He's a journalist and a writer for Vanderbilt University. And he sat down and wrote the entire family story with pictures and news articles and all the stuff. And then he binded it and printed it for us. And so I've got several copies of that. And it's just...
• 38:11
  It is such a, it's been such an important book just because like, I can even see my own tendencies coming out of my family line and the implications of people's decisions and what I want to continue. Like you were saying, and what I don't want to continue. Like I have a family line of, of Methodist ministers, uh, bootleggers, um, and like that.
• 38:34
  I can kind of see all the things that my life kind of ended up getting wound into. And what do I want to put a stop to? And where are the generations going after this? And how do we add to that book? So that's been really, really cool. And so I encourage just reiterate what you're saying. If people can write it down, like it will bless future generations. I've got 130 years of information about my family and it's a lot of fun.
• 39:00
  Um, and then I just think the last thought you had mentioned the, the mighty, um, I was thinking about that earlier and the word is a Gabor, right? Like it's like this mighty warrior almost, but it was, it's a, it's a name that God even took upon himself at one point or multiple points throughout the scriptures. And it can mean several things, but one thing is for sure that it's powerful and influential. Yeah.
• 39:29
  And I think God is waiting to give power and influence to people who are pushing forward his principles, his ways, his commands. And the other thing that stuck out to me at the end of this was just it kind of like hyperlinked me back to Psalm 128, where it's like you're getting a picture in multiple places where the Lord is saying, this is how I will bless the man who fears me.
• 39:55
  And there's so many kind of correlations in Psalm 128 of like, your wife is a fruitful vine and like, this will be established and you'll see this and your grandkids. And, um, I think we just, you know, need to pay attention to that. And anytime that phrase shows up, we should like, our ears should park and we were like, okay, how do I orient my life around this? Yes. I love that.
• 40:21
  Yeah, geber. Geber is actually a really common word in modern Hebrew. It's kind of the masculine word when you see a really manly man, you're like, that's a geber. Yeah, that's interesting. Mighty in the land. Well, and I think this really answers one of the most important questions people are asking today. The most popular...
• 40:42
  occupation for young people today is to be a social media influencer. And I think that one of the things that looking for is, is fame. And, and, and I've, I've really wrestled with the question, should we desire fame? I mean, in this, in this passage, it says that this righteous man is remembered forever. God promises Abraham that he's going to be remembered as well. He'll be famous. And I think that the answer to this question is really, you should want to be famous in your family line. And that's good enough. Yeah.
• 41:10
  And so a lot of people are exchanging the fame of their peers in one generation or maybe their 15 minutes of fame for what they could have received, which was be famous in your multi-generational family. Like, I want to be famous to my great-grandchildren. I hope I impact them enough that they can remember my name.
• 41:33
  Not so that I can be remembered when I'm dead, but so that they can actually receive the fruit of my life. Why wouldn't I want to invest in that? Like that's a much better investment than else I could ever invest in. And so desire to be famous in your family line. Like as people are tracing the family line, all of a sudden they see, oh my gosh, and then this person was born.
• 41:53
  And, you know, that's when everything changed. That's when this giant ripple effect occurred in our family. Like we want to see that. And every one of us can be famous in our family line in that way. If you're having children, like driving at that, I think is really what God is really saying in Psalm 112. That's a good thing. You go to Riley? Yeah.
• 42:18
  that just reminded me really quick I was going to throw out for everybody if you're listening and you haven't heard the song by Luke Cone called Front Door Famous I love that song it's
• 42:28
  It's a really good modern song. It's about coming home to your kids and your wife and being front door famous. That's awesome. Yes. That's the kind of thing we want. Yes. Famous in our house and famous in our multi-generational family. I think those are good desires. Those are noble desires. Yes.
• 42:48
  And I think they create the kind of life that is a blessing to everyone and a blessing to the future, especially. So thank you guys for listening. And thanks, Riley and Chris, for not here today. Thanks for having us. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.