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What Happens When You Ignore The Family's Design · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:01
  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.
• 0:19
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the Family Teams podcast. I'm here with my friend Tyler Graham. So Tyler was shooting me a voice memo earlier today and said, hey, I got a idea for some topics that might be helpful for dads to hear from you on. So I'm going to let, we're going to turn the tables and Tyler's going to interview me on some topics that he's been processing. So Tyler, why don't you describe a little bit about what you had in mind?
• 0:42
  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Jeremy, and for being willing to be on the hot seat for a little bit and take some questions about, yeah, your fatherhood and your family. So I think just to set the stage for today and for what I'm hoping that we'll get to talk about is this idea of living in harmony with the end for which you were created. So my wife and I have been going through the Ignatian spiritual exercises, and there's this idea of being,
• 1:08
  being created to kind of broadly for all people who are following Jesus to praise, revere, and serve God. But then within each of us individually and within our families, we're created for a specific purpose, a specific end, a specific mission that we're built and wired and gifted to carry out.
• 1:29
  And I think that you and April and your family have done that really well. You all have kind of set the bar for what it looks like to be that family team on mission. And so I'd love to just talk for a little bit today about what that's looked like for you. Not only what that process has looked like as your kids were younger,
• 1:48
  to kind of seek out that end, that mission for your family, how it's evolved over the years as your kids have gotten older and started to have their own kids. But then also some of the rhythms, the tools, the practices that you've leveraged to help decide and determine what has been helpful for you as you've pursued that end and what has been unhelpful, things that you've had to avoid, or as Ignatian says, become indifferent to. So that's what I'd love to dive into today of your
• 2:18
  Awesome. So maybe to start us off then, you obviously talk a good bit about being a family team on mission. Maybe start us off for dads like myself that have young kids, maybe in the early seasons of building and forming a family. What did that look like for you in April as you had young kids, let's say 10 and under, to start maybe seeking out what that mission was for you and your family, that end for which you were created?
• 2:48
  Yeah. Yeah. That's really a good, great question. Yeah. I would say that the, for us, especially in the early phases, we were, you know, we were trying to recover the family. What is the design of the family and what, what, what is the mission? Like, I think, I think that, you know, one of the things that we're, what's happening today is that there's sort of two, maybe three huge ideologies that are,
• 3:13
  that are really hitting the family. And I think we were really influenced by these. Freedom is one, you know, equality and individuality. I would say those three values have been so elevated in culture that it really militates against the family in various ways. So individuality is obviously can really, when cranked all the way up to a 10, can really create a huge tension for people.
• 3:40
  trying to live life in a community, which is a family is a community. And freedom is also another value that if you're trying to maximize freedom, and that is sort of like the impulsive side of your life, family is not very friendly to that kind of freedom. And I think that one of the things that a lot of people have been pointing out lately is that freedom...
• 4:01
  always exists to create something. One of my friends was just posted on Twitter yesterday that, that when you look at something like, you know, your blood, blood that is maximally free will flow out of your body and make you dead. But when it's channeled properly, in other words, and this is kind of what I really like about the framing that you're describing, when it was actually channeled within a circulatory system. And in other words, if it's, if it's working according to its design, it actually, it's,
• 4:29
  it actually makes it, it serves something greater. So freedom always has to serve something greater. Once cranked up to the top value, it's a disaster. So, so as a family, we had to figure out, and this is where a lot of the child-free movement, a lot of the things I think that are hitting families today, you know, we've had to deal with those. And I definitely growing up in the West coast, man, I was like,
• 4:50
  Man, it's not easy to, you know, family, kids really function badly when it comes to freedom. And then equality, of course, I think that one, that value in terms of trying to say, has God created a family? Is there a design for husbands and wives, sons and daughters in a family that's more role specific? Or is equality essentially...
• 5:14
  equalizing everyone and saying that we're all, we all have identical roles in the family. And so there's parent and child, maybe those are the only two distinctives, but there's not a son, daughter, wife, husband, or father, mother distinctive. So in all of that, just, you know, in the early stages of our family.
• 5:31
  So people listening to me might think I always kind of thought, oh, about roles and, you know, a family in this way could not be further from the truth. I was in my 20s and early 30s. None of these ideas were intuitive to me. They all again, I grew up in the West Coast. I did not. I was not used to these to thinking in the way the ways I talk now was all something that was I'm trying to recover.
• 5:54
  from ideas that I had really adopted from the culture. And the way that I was trying to recover was studying scripture. I would say that's one thing is like, just it's difficult because we're asking families to not just function well.
• 6:10
  We're actually asking them to recover the design of family. And that is really rough. I mean, imagine if you have a blueprint that's really well designed and you're working, everyone is working on the same team to build a blueprint according to its specifications. Then that's hard enough, right? If you're trying to build a house and you're like, oh man, I've got really good blueprints, great architect.
• 6:32
  You know, we're, we're, we all are on the same page, but imagine trying to build a house where you're fighting about the blueprint, where you don't have a blueprint. I mean, so everyone's sort of like has intuitions and most of our intuitions are basically going to build something that's going to fall over by design. That's where I was. And I think that's where most people were. And man, that's why, you know, that's, I would say is the heart of our own ministry is like, man, let's talk about that stuff because.
• 6:57
  That's that if you're, if you're not, you're not functioning from a, a proper blueprint, then obviously things are going to go sideways quick.
• 7:07
  Yeah. So I think about what that looked like for Brie and I in early 2020. Yeah, early 2020 is when we really started pressing into more intentional rhythms of family. It's when we discovered family teams. It's when we discovered Sabbath, really implementing rhythms that allowed us to be more sustainable and intentional as a family. And I think about what that process looked like for us to...
• 7:34
  go through those paradigm shifts in the kind of the slow, almost painful work of undoing some of the systems that we had put in place previously, undoing and and kind of redeeming in a way some of the brokenness of the way our family had operated for many years that had left us in a place of feeling very burnt out, very frustrated, very lost.
• 8:00
  So as you talk about that idea of recovering those blueprints, so you imagine your family operating a certain way, you discover this blueprint of the ancient way of doing families. What did that look like for you in April to really begin to implement that blueprint for your family? Yeah. Well, the first thing we had to kind of have a bit of an ego death.
• 8:24
  Yeah, go through, which was, wait a minute, I, this has already been predetermined for me. Like, don't I get an infinite amount of freedom to, to as an individual decide how exactly I want this to go. And so I would say that that that's where so many people get hung up because culturally that's considered unhealthy to go through that level of like humble yourself underneath a preexisting blueprint. So
• 8:49
  So I would say there was a period where I think April embraced it much more quickly than I did, but I definitely fought this one much harder. Like, okay, I don't like the idea of being imposed upon me, some vision of fatherhood. And it's not all encompassing. There's a lot of individuality that you can add to the equation, but you do have to sort of agree to the under, you know, sort of the basic framework of, okay, this is what fatherhood is.
• 9:15
  So, yeah, I would say that that was a big part of it for me is just like, OK, I'm going to need to submit to this. I need to look at this role, study this role and play this role. And I've always been like super frustrated by anything as Phil's performance is one of the reasons why I could never be a pastor saying in front of a church. I just like there's something about that to having, you know, 500 people looking at you and thinking every single Sunday I've got to come up with something else like that level of.
• 9:39
  It felt fake. And I grew up in a culture that was so obsessed with like anti-performance kind of in the grunge era of Seattle. And so I just, I just had like a incredibly strong aversion. And then all of a sudden I'm like, oh, as a father, I have to perform a role. Yeah.
• 9:55
  that I didn't come up with and that some elements feel very like, like I'm, I'm, I'm actually properly living into something I feel like was designed for me. But in other areas, I'm like, I feel very ill equipped to do this and I'm going to have to learn to do this. And you can be totally authentic in your expression of that, that role in terms of being able to being honest about like, this is hard. This feels weird. Like you don't have to lie to yourself.
• 10:22
  But at the end of the day, you are playing out a role. I mean, as soon as you bring a son or daughter into the family, this is why I think a lot of parents, there's an intuition today of quickly wanting to turn their children into friends. And I think actually why they're doing that is they're personally rejecting the role of father or mother. Like they've adopted the role of friends. They grew up, they like being friends. They're friends with, you know, in school and everything. All their intuitions are all tuned towards that. That's a really good role.
• 10:49
  But father, mother, that's, what is that? Who knows what that is? That just sounds weird. And I don't, I'm a father, I'm a mother. Like, it feels like I'm, you know, I'm putting out. So, and it is, it's true. And I think that I faced that and resisted it for a while. And then, and then I, as I'm looking at my children, I'm like, man, I, they need a father. They don't just, you know, there's going to, they're going to have a lot of friends in their life. They're only going to have one father.
• 11:12
  And so if I keep resisting this role and, and refuse to understand it and grow in maturity in it, then my children are the ones who are really going to suffer. That, that's what really got me. I just was like, that's, that was too much. Like I, I need to, because I love them. I need to learn to play this role, however badly. And I think I was, I had a lot of failures as a father and a lot of struggles and a lot of things I had to learn and I am still learning. Yeah.
• 11:41
  And so that, that, that was, I think one of the first steps that we had to take at that age. Yeah. It's so interesting to hear you talk about this idea of, of performing under that, that blueprint of fatherhood and being even resistant to it. Because I think about what the alternative would be, especially in this cultural moment is it just another type of performance, right? It's this, this other blueprint for fatherhood, which is.
• 12:10
  be friends with your kids or your only role is to provide financially or just kind of the endless bombardment that we get through social media of the things you should be doing as a dad. And you end up completely overburned, overwhelmed by all of these things. And you're like you to your point earlier about freedom, right? The ultimate freedom. And that point actually becomes enslavement when you don't confine, when you don't put boundaries to it.
• 12:39
  And so I think about if a dad is listening to this and they're thinking about maybe they've been living under that mode of performance, that kind of that version of fatherhood of, you know, visionless, but just kind of going with the rising and the falling of kind of the cultural tide.
• 12:58
  How would you say it would, what would be your recommendation to that dad about taking those first steps into this new blueprint, this, this role of a father that that's been passed down for, for generations? I think, I think that, I think that you have to choose to embrace it. I think that, I think that that, that was, that's the first thing you have to stop resisting it. You have to find what you'll discover.
• 13:28
  that loves fatherhood, that particular role. And to me, the best way to do that is to hold your child and call them your son or daughter. Those words, they are spiritually powerful words. And I didn't even like using those words for the first like five to 10 years of my fatherhood. I wanted to come up with any word to call my kids besides son or daughter, because I realized that what was happening was I was rejecting a place in my heart
• 13:55
  But I didn't, you know, I didn't want to open up, you know, which is this father place, you know, that just says, I am your father. And this is this is a good thing. And so I think that that I think you have to open your heart to that and it's going to create in you a bond and a love.
• 14:12
  That is beyond anything that you've ever experienced. And it's there in your heart. And then everything else in your body from your mind down starts to make sense. Why do I have testosterone? You know, why does my wife have, you know, a cycle? All of these things are designed to create a father or mother. And so you have to let yourself in every dimension embrace this role. And sometimes it can be too specific, right? Sometimes your picture of fatherhood.
• 14:40
  is just so narrow that, you know, and this happens often because we just, we have had so few models, you know, maybe you've had a really bad model in your own father or very mixed, you know, and therefore when you come to this role, you're, you know, a lot of your reactions are negative towards it. And so then you have to really purify that understanding. And this is why I find scripture so helpful because this
• 15:02
  where I spent time just really meditating on fatherhood is just reading and rereading Genesis. Genesis is amazing. I'm writing a whole book going through Genesis from this perspective because it just had an incredibly deep impact on me. Obviously getting to Avram, exalted father, that's what his name means, and just like really understanding. And I spent years midrash-ing
• 15:23
  It's sort of like an intense discussion with other fathers through the book of Genesis over and over again. And that was so helpful to me. Like I started to really see this role. And instead of it being like, you know, some kind of checklist, you know, the Bible is written so well. I don't think we understand.
• 15:41
  You know, this is sometimes modern Christians really struggle with the idea that the Bible is hyper-symbolic. And so when we start to look at Abraham as a, and again, the words themselves, and I studied Hebrew. So some of these, you know, when you start to see at least the definitions of the names, it's really, really helpful. And Adam means humanity or mankind, right? Yeah.
• 16:08
  And Abraham means father of many nations. There's a certain way that Abraham approached fatherhood that made him capable of fully not only being a father for himself, but having such a generational, multi-generational impact that literally nations were coming from his fathering. And it literally happened.
• 16:28
  I mean, you can look at our nations and huge ethnic groups in this world today that will chart their ethnicity back to Father Abraham. That's crazy. You know, to me, it's one of the greatest apologetics for the truth of the Bible. And so we have here the canonical, the truly God-inspired, God-breathed.
• 16:48
  articulation of the nature of fatherhood. And so sometimes when we read these stories as history, we're not learning properly from them. We're only looking at that one layer, but it goes, it's much, much deeper than that. And I needed that. I needed that. I need to be discipled in the way of fatherhood directly from Abraham. I don't think Abraham was a perfect father or the model father. He is the canonical and perfect description of the way that God interacts with fatherhood.
• 17:15
  That's what I mean by symbolic. He needed to fail because part of what I need to know as a father is how does God interact with a father who's failing? How does God interact with a father who's faithful? How does God interact with a father who's had a son or been really stupid in his relationship with his wife? All the stories are so helpful. And then how does God interact with a multi-generational father who has children who's failing?
• 17:37
  who then has grandchildren and great-grandchildren. You see the entire thing played out in Genesis. But because Abraham was so culturally removed from a modern person, you really have to see the symbols. You have to understand how they work and interact, and that gives you a really good understanding of the blueprint of fatherhood and family.
• 18:03
  Have you ever considered starting a family business so you can spend more time working as a family team? We've started a year-long coaching program called Family Inc. where you get weekly coaching with Jeremy, access to our video training for launching family businesses, and lots of ideas for businesses to start that are working for other family teams. Head over to familyteams.com and click Family Inc. to learn more or to set up a strategy call with Jeremy to see if this might be a good fit for you.
• 18:34
  Yeah, that's powerful. I haven't heard you talk about Abrahamic fatherhood in that way before, but I love that. I love the idea of these stories in scripture being a symbol or kind of this callback that we can grab onto of what it looks like to be a father who's failed and how the father approaches us in those moments. That's so good. I love that.
• 19:04
  So in that, you talk about as you look at the story of Abraham, as you look at that blueprint for fatherhood, you talk about embracing that role, kind of discovering that part of your heart that loves fatherhood. And again, I think as you look at the landscape of fatherhood today, there's a resistance to it because God.
• 19:23
  It is because children and the role of a father becomes a hindrance to the ultimate freedom. Right. And I don't think it has to be that extreme. Again, I referenced back in 2020 when my wife and I really started pressing into these, this kind of family team's vision was we were doing really good things. We were, we were leaders within our church. We were spending a lot of time investing in other people, pouring out into other people, trying to raise up other leaders. Yeah.
• 19:53
  But what we found was that we were feeling very burnt out in that because our kids were almost a hindrance to it. There was a tremendous lack of integration in our life where our kids were getting kind of the scraps that were left over after we had invested as leaders in all of these other people.
• 20:14
  And one of that big shift, I think, that really helped us start to live a life of integration, a life of wholeheartedness as a mother and as a father was really being able to see, really embrace our role to see that like the adventure that is motherhood, fatherhood, raising a family, being a multi-generational team on mission. And so.
• 20:39
  When I think about what that looked like for us, there was this need for us to assess our life in a new way. And going back to some of the Ignatian language, he talks about using the things that help us to our end and to become indifferent to the things that hinder us from reaching our end.
• 21:01
  So as you think about that in your life, as you're starting to make this transition into following kind of this new blueprint, as you and April are assessing your life, what did that process look like for you to really make a determination as to say, hey, these are the things that we feel like are...
• 21:19
  helping us reach the end for which we believe our family was created. These are the things we think are hindering us. How do you start moving away from those and move more towards the things that are getting you where you want to go, if that makes sense? Yeah, totally. Well, I think the ultimate cheat code for fatherhood is to understand or live your life as...
• 21:41
  fatherhood is your primary identity and you nest everything underneath it. Like that, that for me changed everything. And I saw that that's what Abraham was doing. That's really where I got it. I'm like this guy, he was father Abraham. Jesus even calls him that. Like he, he just, when he went to work, he wasn't a worker. He was a father. When he hung out with his friends, he was a father. He was just, he was just a father.
• 22:01
  And again, like this is a huge threat to our individuality. And we've spent the last, you know, 30 or 40 years saying to mothers, like, this is so terrible. Like you're losing who you are. If you, you know, think of yourself as a mother, you got to have other identities. And I go the other direction. I'm saying, no, you know, basically what I think the feminist answer to that was is that women should become more like men.
• 22:25
  and find their individual identities outside the home. And I go the other direction. I think that fathers need to become more like mothers in this way. They need to find their identity more in the home. And so I saw that Abraham was doing that. It didn't stop him from being an incredible provider. He was a very wealthy man. I would say it was a massive help for our process of asset building. I mean, I faced many choices where I would sit there from a work perspective, and I would say, okay, okay.
• 22:53
  I really feel like this role that, you know, for fits me better as an individual. It's going to like, I'm going to enjoy going to work every day. If I play this role, it pays reasonably well, but over here is an opportunity that would allow me to build assets for my family and would allow me to integrate in the future, my children. One feels more like me individually. One feels like a better fatherhood move. I just kept making the fatherhood move.
• 23:19
  over and over again. And that was a huge transition to say, okay, I'm going to do the fatherhood thing. I'm going to build assets so that I can. And so, and so because I saw fatherhood as this overarching identity through which I was living, you know, my regular life, then integrating my kids into everything made tons of sense. And it was very weird for the people around us who were watching us
• 23:41
  you know, just integrate our kids and bring my, you know, my son to a board meeting or, you know, just like having, you know, designing, you know, assets around maximally integrating my wife and kids and encouraging our employees to do the same thing, encouraging our partners to do the same thing. And sometimes it worked out. It's great. Sometimes it, you know, it was rough and, you know, we needed to make adjustments. But in general, what I was attempting to do is, you know, when you have a child with you at work.
• 24:09
  To me, the number one value of that, you know, there's so many values you could talk about how you're spending more time with your kids, how your kids are getting educated or whatever. But man, I'll tell you the thing that I experienced that blew me away was it made sure that I stayed a father, you know, all eight hours of that workday.
• 24:25
  I saw everything through that lens because all I had to do was look up and there was my five-year-old, you know? Yeah. You know, doing their homework right next to their dad. And I just, it caused me to stay in that mode all day long. And so I was immersed in that role. Again, because...
• 24:43
  I really resisted. It was hard for me. It was a hard transition for me. Again, as an individual, I wanted to think about how am I built just uniquely? Like what's so unique about me? And how can I go and experience that total uniqueness? And the way our economy works, because we have such a high specialization, and I was specially educated in certain areas to do very specific things.
• 25:07
  And, and those were the things that, you know, I would have, I would have been the most obvious career path for me, but that, that I never would have been able to integrate my children into that. And I would have, I would have just inflated that identity. And I, this is, this is, this was the sort of the first battle we were fighting as a family. I don't care. Like that, that's not that important to me anymore. Yeah.
• 25:29
  I really want to, I really want to be a father. And I had to choose that value over individuality, over those specializations that, so yeah, I, I mean, I would have, there's a part of me that would have loved to have been a professor, you know, I mean, I have kind of the absent-minded professor personality and I just know I'm built for that individually, but absent-minded professors don't make great fathers.
• 25:51
  I was around many of them in lots of schools and I just, they didn't, you know, they have all kinds of issues with integration, just having their head in the clouds all the time. How do you really, I mean, there's, I could go on, but this is a problem with the specialized economy. I get, and some people have to do it. Sometimes you have to go and do the, you know, take, take the position or take the role in the machine to provide it, to provide an income.
• 26:12
  And find other avenues through which to ensure that your identities aren't getting completely lopsided. But I feel like, man, we live in the perfect time to make this transition towards fatherhood. There are so many opportunities.
• 26:28
  I mean, I'm watching guys that get a hold of this, make the transition to asset building and complete fatherhood identity life, a lifestyle of that fatherhood overarching identity. I'm seeing guys make this transition really rapidly and because we have an economy that is really perfectly designed for this.
• 26:47
  So that's a whole world. And obviously I go into lots of detail and family ink and try to convince people of what's happening and why. Yeah, there's there's just we're continuing to shove people down this other hyper individual, hyper specialized route. And and there was a time in history where that that it was really hard to make a really good living for a family in a different way. That that time is long past. And so we're in a much better position.
• 27:12
  now. But yeah, I would say that more than the financial opportunity, we really have to become the people that God's made us to be and fully embrace what that really means. And once you have children, your life in one sense as an individual is over. And mothers sometimes have a little bit more obvious route to that because the child takes over their body.
• 27:38
  in some sense, and then also is so dependent on them, you know? And so there's just, there's all of this like bonding and connection and just visceral, physical things that are happening to a mother and between a mother and an infant or a young child. And that as fathers, we are given, I think, a distance from that so that we can look to the future and start to build things for that family. But what we do as men oftentimes is we take advantage of,
• 28:05
  of that distance to build an individual life in a way that leaves our kids and our wives in the dust. And that's, you know, that's certainly something I've been on a war path about because that's not why we have the ability to create that distance. We have that ability because there are long-term things that need to be done for the sake of the family. And so I think that is exploiting women and children. When fathers decide to
• 28:28
  to say, hey, I'm not attached, so I'm just going to go and build my individual identity. Well, of course, now you're forcing your wife to think that way. You're forcing your children to think that way because a child can only really experience their sonship or daughterhood to the extent that their father's embracing his fatherhood. You have to find that place in your heart and be extending that. And so we're putting our wives and our children in an impossible situation. Now, I think that we're doing it inadvertently often because we're we think we're doing what we're supposed to do. Isn't that what we're supposed to do? Isn't that
• 28:57
  Isn't that how you found an identity is through work and through going out and, you know, developing some specialization. And, you know, the answer to the scriptures is no, that's not how you found an identity. You know, our identity is found, founded in our faith, first and foremost, in our relationship with God. And then there are these, these epic roles that we're given. And when you choose to stand in front of your family and friends and make a covenant, you're given this incredible identity of husband.
• 29:22
  And then when you have a child, you're given this identity as father. And then of course, in the future, grandfather, and it just keeps getting more and more important and critical. And we have just done everything we can through music, through stories to just denigrate those, those identities, those family-based identities to the extent now that.
• 29:42
  that people don't even understand why it's important to protect gender. They don't get it. They don't get the debt. The whole reason is because of these family identities. Like you destroy gender. It's not just like, oh, you know, this person has been locked in this, the shackles of this preexisting identity that we have to somehow free them from. Because of course, freedom and individuality are such incredibly important values. That, that, that is such a misunderstanding of the nature of reality.
• 30:09
  Like meaning is so much more important than freedom and individuality. And you're going to destroy the pathway to meaning for millions of people. When you take away something like gender and its connection to you being a son or daughter or husband or wife or father or mother, you're destroying their ability to do that. Now, we've already denigrated those values so much in those identities that we think that that's reasonable and that's actually doing people a favor.
• 30:34
  So I think that, you know, there's obviously a lot happening there and it's very upsetting to me, but I think that we, when you talk about like in our early stage, when I look a lot of, you know, young families and when I think back at when April and I were in that stage having kids, I just thank God that.
• 30:50
  There was a grounding in scripture. We just marinated in these symbolic truths that are there in the Bible. And we, as the culture was getting completely untethered from reality, we were going deeper and deeper and deeper into God's truth. And man, did that pay off? Because to your point about kind of the Ignatius, it's like you have to live according to the way these things are designed. Right.
• 31:14
  And freedom is not infinite. Freedom exists to create things and freedom exists to deliver the purpose from which things are made. You need enough freedom to be able to ensure that you can fully live out the purpose for these things. But their purpose is far more important. So that's what I'm saying. Meaning and purpose are more important values than freedom, equality, and individuality. But that inversion is what's destroying our culture. Right.
• 31:43
  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.
• 32:03
  Yeah. And I think so often about how, like you were saying, how there is this primal longing, this, this ancient longing for a father to provide, to go out and kind of claim the future, bring it into reality for his family.
• 32:23
  But like so many other things, because of the brokenness of the world, that longing comes out broken or perverted, right? And what was designed for good ends up becoming, to use your language, what was designed for meaning and purpose for the entire family becomes an individual pursuit of freedom for a father. And when I talk to dads about some of the biggest struggles that they have, I'm
• 32:49
  You know, one of the things that I hear very often is how difficult it is to to make that shift from what they'll call like work mode to dad mode. Right. Or dad's having a really hard time even just being present with their kids because they feel anxious about work.
• 33:07
  about the emails that are going unanswered. And so they sneak away from the dinner table to take a call or to respond to an email. And it's, again, I think going back to the language I used earlier from Ignatian, becoming indifferent doesn't mean not caring at all about those things, but it's almost removing yourself from over-caring about certain things to focus on, to give your time, your attention, your energy to the things that matter most. Yeah.
• 33:36
  And so as you think about what that's looked like for you as a dad over the years, as your kids have gotten older, I think about things I've heard you share about decisions you've made about extracurriculars, sports, even the physical layout of your home, how it's built, who lives there, how you can host people, different things like that. How would you say you've gone about making sure that you are...
• 34:00
  paying attention to the right things, caring about the right things to keep that meaning and purpose a focal point for your family. Yeah.
• 34:10
  So yeah, we, we really, our approach was to look at our week and then to really understand the different chunks of the week and really work through how these things related to our calling as a family. So obviously you start with this giant chunk, which is work. And like I described, I think that one of the things that I was really interested in with that huge chunk of time.
• 34:31
  was how do I stay in fatherhood mode or how do I kind of enter fatherhood mode for more and more of my work day? And so, so that I don't have to go back and forth. There are times where I have to, but, and I think the times where you have to go back and forth, we would have these family meetings and I would always picture myself, and I'd say this often, especially if I was going to go off on a work trip or,
• 34:49
  or ask the family to take a big hit for, for my work. And so I would picture myself saying to my, my kids and my wife during that meeting, look guys, I'm doing this for the family. I need your support. This is not for me. This is for you. Now, as I'm hearing myself say that, is that true? Like, do I really have to do this? Is this really for the family?
• 35:09
  And so that was actually became a real litmus test for me as to whether or not I wanted to make that investment. So if I'm, if I'm going to say, look, I'm going to go off on this thing. How do I make sure this is a blessing to my, to my family? Or am I actually just asking, am I building the, building my individual identity on the backs of my children and, and neglecting them or my wife, like.
• 35:29
  So I had to face that and had to be really honest about it. So, and so often I would have to tell the full story. Okay, I'm going to go off on this trip because we're building this asset. And in six months, I think we're going to get to a place where this is really going to pay off so that there's going to be a lot more time for us and that we'll be able to, you know, do.
• 35:45
  begin to spend more time together as a family. And then imagine like, because we own this, if you guys want to be a part of this more and more, like I want to introduce you to people, I want you to see what we're building. And so I would start to, to really count the blessings that it was actually given to my family. And then if I started to see that, no, this is really about me. This is really just an individual thing I'm indulging in. Again, I was like, then I had to face a really tough trade-off. Like, do I really want to be doing this to my family?
• 36:11
  No, like my, my job as a father, my provision for my family is nested underneath my identity as a father. This is not, this is not about, because if you imagine if you're not doing that, then essentially you take all that work time and your work week, and you're saying all of that goes under this other bucket called me as an individual.
• 36:30
  And man, if you're putting 40, 50, 60 hours a week of investment as a father and as a husband underneath a, you know, 60 hours a week, I mean, that's, why would you do that to your family? Like that's, do you want your family to do that? And so I don't. And so this part of me was, I was calling my children and my wife to be also responsible.
• 36:50
  thinking this way as well. Like we're a team and we're living our life together primarily. And, and this goes on. And of course this roots all the way back to Genesis one and whether or not we're building a family that is designed to launch the chickies out a nest, or are we building a team? And so I, I, I was beginning to, you know, really try to adopt this idea of building a team. So it
• 37:14
  Yeah. We started looking at all the smaller chunks as well. So this, this really started implicating how we thought about hobbies and sports. And so how we handle mornings and evenings and weekends, what's a Saturday, what's a Sunday, like what, what are all of these, how are we stewarding this week and how are we stewarding all of our opportunity to maximize the design that God's made our family. And so, yeah, there, it started having this ripple effect. So when you decide, look, my kids are going off, my three kids are gone for three different sports. Yeah.
• 37:43
  Well, man, you just look at that week and it's important for you to tally up the investment that you're making in those hobbies and that those hobbies are really for your children now nested underneath their individual identities as opposed to their family identities. And so we started asking this question about everything. Like, how do we do media in a way that's more of a family thing? How do we do sports in a way that's more of how do we do a rest in more of a family way? And it's not all family, by the way.
• 38:06
  we do actually invest in our children's individual identities. Like my kids have things during the week that are totally for them and totally for the way they're wired. It's just like happens once or twice a week, you know, maximum. And it's designed around these giant chunks of family relationships.
• 38:22
  And now, of course, inside of those family things, it's not like my kids and me and my wife are completely losing and just being miserable all the time doing things we would hate to do otherwise. No, we enjoy all of it. And it's all deeply impacting us as an individual as well. It's just a win-win when it's a family thing and it's benefiting.
• 38:41
  But I'm really cautious of the win-lose scenarios where the family loses and the individual wins. The family loses and the individual wins. And so, yeah, when we went out for tennis and pickleball and taekwondo for three years, it was because we saw it as a win-win. We saw that the family was going to win, but the individuals were going to win as well.
• 38:59
  But when a lot of things we were doing, you know, even so the way we do media, the kids have to watch shows if they're into a show or whatever, it's certain nights of the week or certain, you know, certain very specific time plots. And they have to do that with a sibling, you know, or with another family member. Yeah.
• 39:14
  So something they're sharing together, right? We do video games the same way. You know, there's one slot in the week they can play video games. And the one rule is you have to do it together. Like, you know, and so our kids have epic experiences of like watching shows and playing video games and doing sports. And all these things are, they have their place. They're just, the problem is that they've all been cranked up on that individual thing. Like it's...
• 39:37
  It's all designed around your very, very minute preferences, right? We have the wealth in the West to design everything around them, the tiniest little preferences. Then we create an entire subculture of people that are completely disconnected from, you know, their communities, their families, even their locations and bring them together to have a hyper individual experience. Yeah.
• 39:57
  man, I get why we do that. It's a very, it's, it's really great way to make money, but it is, it just sucks for the family and for the location and for, for anything that's, that's local. And so, and so we want to basically take all that back and say, I want to, I want the best, you know, things that we can experience, but I want to do that together. Like, how do we do that together? Well, because everything is designed around the individual that requires a lot of intentionality, right? And this is,
• 40:24
  This is what I would say too, is, was a little overwhelming for me in April to like, oh my gosh, do we really have to reinvent everything? Like we have to like figure out screens and figure out sports and refigure out education and refigure out, you know, worship. And I mean, it was like unbelievably challenging.
• 40:40
  And so if you start listing all those things, it would drive you nuts. And so what we started doing was we basically held ourselves accountable to sort of a system building system. So we had a, we had a meeting once a week and the rule was we can fix one thing a week.
• 40:55
  You know, so we're going to fix how we, you know, how we, how we clean up the dishes. We're going to fix how we think about movies. We're going to think about, okay, this week we are going to, we're going to tackle like how we, how we're going to do phones or we're going to tackle. So we just, and there were hundreds of things to tackle and rethink about how do we, how do we think about worship? Okay. Let's try this. Okay. That didn't work. Like, let's think about that again. But, you know, it was sort of becoming a fun process because, you know, I would say like one out of three of our solutions really stuck.
• 41:21
  You might say, well, that sucks because, you know, there's two things you tried that didn't work. But it was like, but imagine if you do 50 meetings like this a year and you fix 15 things a year that are things that repeat within your seven day rhythm. So after four or five years, you're fixing like 50, 60 elements. Now you can, you can face all of that overwhelm. You can rethink education, rethink worship, rethink sports, rethink, you know, instruments or whatever. Like having all these things, you can do it.
• 41:51
  But you have to just take it one little step at a time. And it was funny because it's been so slow and so progressive the way we've like tried to rethink everything. You know, my oldest daughter, Kelsey, grew up in quite a bit of a different home than my youngest daughter, Kyra. You know, Kelsey's 24 and Kyra's 15. And so it's like, you know, we fixed a lot more things. Now, Kelsey was an amazing little guinea pig. And so she was the recipient of many of those experiments that didn't work. And we were very open and we talked and we laugh about it.
• 42:18
  You know, a lot of things that we tried. And, you know, one time I tried to reinvent transportation. So I imported from Denmark a seven person bike. I was like, this is going to be awesome. We're just going to bike everywhere. We live so local as a family and it's so green as it fits every, you know, checks every box. And, you know, I got my whole family like up on this, this seven person bike. It's called a quattro cycle.
• 42:40
  And we started driving that thing around town to restaurants or whatever. And, and I had no idea the spectacle we were creating for my, I mean, my kids were like, you know, like they had to live in this town. And nobody ever in the whole history of this like year long saga, we had this, this bike.
• 42:57
  Did anybody ever honk at us once? They were so shocked. They would all like take out. It was like, it was like, we were like paparazzi. There was a people with their phones or filming us. And eventually it just got too much. I was like, guys, I, I'm not interested in this much of a spectacle. I'm just trying to rethink how to do things as a family. And you know, this is like, this is not working. This is, this is ridiculous. So anyway, just to give you an example, what I had to put my kids through during those seasons.
• 43:21
  Oh my gosh, I love that. I hope you have pictures somewhere of the prior family riding the Quattro cycle that you can share at some point. So no, I really appreciate the insight, Jeremy. And I think it's such a good perspective to have how you talked about
• 43:36
  As you're assessing your life, kind of telling the full story, right? So tying back to, you know, the story of Abraham, being able to see kind of where you, your family are in that story. And I think even being able to assess, like, is the way that we're living now going to result in the story ending that we're aiming for?
• 43:57
  And if not, what small shifts can we make? I think you nailed it there talking about one small change per week. And over time, the compound effect of those types of changes and even experimenting with the ones that don't work like a seven person bike are going to you're going to learn just as much from those. And it's going to shape. It's going to create this new lens through which you view your life, your work, your family.
• 44:25
  And it's really beautiful to see how that played out. I know that that has resulted in you and April being able to encourage and invest in a lot of people to help them recover that blueprint as y'all are living it out. So thank you for me. And I'm venturing to guess from most people listening for the ways that you've shared that.
• 44:45
  And so I know we're coming up on time here. So to close out, maybe just ask this one question. You know, if a dad is listening to this and he's thinking, man, all this sounds really great, maybe he's feeling lost or overwhelmed by kind of the current cultural picture of fatherhood. What would you say is like the one place to get started, the one small change they could make to take that first step towards this blueprint for fatherhood?
• 45:12
  Yeah, I would say give your best time to your family. Find a way to think about what is happening during your week in the date night you have with your wife and the bonding moments you have with your children. There's basically three very intentional frames where on a weekly basis we're connecting together.
• 45:36
  So once is Saturday night, April and I do date night and it's because we Shabbat on Saturday. It's my most relationally, I would say the highest peak of my relational energy. Then we do one-on-ones and oftentimes we do this on Sunday when I have like not a lot going on and
• 45:53
  And then we do Friday night, we do our Shabbat dinners. And it's just timeless. Like I don't have anything better to go. So it's not just that we have those three time periods. It's that they're designed in a weekly rhythm to be the places where I am maximally available. I'm most awake. I'm least distracted. Yeah, I love that. So I just like, because I just inhabit your house as a father.
• 46:21
  And enjoy that. If you want inspiration, my inspiration is Psalm 128. I believe that Psalm 128 describes what we all should be aiming at, like with this good life, right? He says, you know, this man who fears the Lord, may you live to see your children's children. May your children be like olive shoots around your table. May your wife be like a vine. I mean, it's like, it's giving this picture of a man in a house.
• 46:45
  who's just like so overwhelmed with the beauty and abundance of his family. And this is like, this is so awesome. Like don't like, that shouldn't be the one experience you have on a, you know, maybe a Thanksgiving when you're 83, that that should happen every single week. And I am experiencing that, you know, most weeks and it is amazing, but yeah,
• 47:04
  you know, at the early stages when you have little kids, it's rough. I mean, it's like, you're like, wait, is this epic? No, just hold on dad. Like keep going. Like believe this does this, this goes to a really awesome place. And again, you know, come in full circle. This is the design. This is what you were designed for. You can do this. That's good. And so this is what your family was designed for. This is what your sons were designed for your daughters, your wife, the mother of your children, like you as a father, you know? And so, yeah, I, I think I,
• 47:32
  I am overwhelmed by the beauty of God's design for the family. And I think that we live in a time where people see the family as ugly because they're not using it according to his design. And I agree with them. If you take something that it was designed for something else and you completely change the, the place, the way you're using it to violate that design in every way, it's going to look ugly. It's going to feel weird. It's, you know, but man,
• 47:59
  If you do this according to the blueprint that we're given in scripture, it's a beautiful thing that God wants all of us to experience, you know, at some level. So, yeah, keep going and enjoy it. That's great, Jeremy. But thank you so much for blessing me and everybody listening with your wisdom.
• 48:18
  I'll give a plug to the seven day family course on family teams for anybody who wants to dig deeper into this. Such a good practical tool for anybody who's looking about looking for a way to really craft their week to focus on what's important was life changing for my wife and I. And definitely a great place to dig deeper if you're feeling inspired after this conversation here. Awesome. Thanks, Tyler. Awesome. Thanks, Jeremy.
• 48:44
  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.