What Happens When You Ignore The Family's Design

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, 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 yeah, he's been processing.

So Tyler, why don't you describe a little bit about what you had in mind? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on Jeremy and for, 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, 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.

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 that's what I'd love to dive into today if you're game.

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, That have, that are, that are really hitting the family.

And freedom is also another value that if you're, 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.

And I definitely growing up in the West coast, man, I was like, 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, trying to say. Has God created a family? Is there a design or husbands and wives, sons and daughters in a family that are, that's more role specific or is equality essentially equalizing everyone and saying that we're all, we all have identical roles in the family.

I was, um, in my twenties and early thirties, 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. From, from ideas that I had really adopted from the culture and the way that I was trying to recover was studying scripture.

That's where I was. And I think that's where most people were. And man, and that's why, you know, that's, I would say is the heart of our ministry is like, man, let's talk about that stuff because. That's that if you're, if you're not, if you're not functioning from a a proper blueprint, then obviously things are going to go sideways quick.

And I think about what that process looked like for us to. Go through those paradigm shifts and the kind of the slow, almost painful work of undoing some of the systems that we had put in place previously, kind of 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.

do I humble yourself underneath a preexisting blueprint? So, 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, I don't like the idea of, of being imposed upon me some vision of fatherhood and doesn't, it's not all encompassing.

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, 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 that I didn't come up with. Some elements feel very like, like I'm, I'm, I'm actually properly Living into something I feel like was designed for me.

And I don't, I'm a father, I'm a mother. Like it feels like, you know, I'm putting it so, and it is, it's true. And I think that I, I faced that and resisted it for a while. And then, and then I, as I was, I'm looking at my children, I'm like, man, I, they need a father. They don't just, you know, there's gonna, they're gonna have a lot of friends in their life.

However badly. And I think I, 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. 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.

Mode of performance that kind of that version of fatherhood of, you know, visionless, but just kind of going with the, the rising and the falling of kind of the cultural tide. How would you say it, 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?

Because I realized that what was happening was I, I was rejecting a place in my heart that I, 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 that is beyond anything that you've ever experienced.

And so then you have to really purify that understanding. And this is why I find scripture so helpful because this where I spent time just really meditating on fatherhood is just reading and rereading Genesis. Genesis is amazing. I'm writing, you know, whole book going through Genesis from this perspective because I, I, it had, It just had incredibly deep impact on me, obviously getting to Avram, exalted father.

I don't think we understand, you know, the clue this is sometimes a modern modern Christians really struggle with the idea that. The Bible is hyper symbolic. And so, and so when we start to look at Abraham as a, and again, the, the, the words themselves, and I studied Hebrew. So some of these you know, when you start to see at least the, the, the definitions of, of the names, it's really, really helpful.

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.

And so, but because, you know, Abraham was so culturally removed from a modern person, you have to, you really have to see the symbols. You have to understand how they work and interact. And that gives you a a really good understanding of kind of the blueprint of fatherhood and family.

I haven't heard, 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 a kind of this, this callback that we can grab onto of what it looks like to be a father who's failed and how, how the father approaches us in those moments.

But what we found was that we were, we were feeling very burnt out in that because. Our kids were almost a hindrance to it. There was, there was a tremendous lack of integration in our life where. We were, our kids were getting kind of the scraps that were left over after we'd invested as leaders and all of these other people.

And so when I think about what that looked like for us, there was this need for us to assess our life in a new way. Going back to some of the Ignatian language he talks about using the things that help us to, to our end and to become indifferent to the things that hinder us from reaching our end.

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. And again, like, this is a huge threat to our individuality.

I mean, I, I faced many choices where I would sit there from a work perspective and I would say, okay, I really feel like this role, you know, for fits me better as an individual, it's gonna 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.

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, when you have a child with you at work, 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, it made sure that I stayed a father, you know, all eight hours of that work day.

It was hard for me. It was a hard transition for me. I, as again, as an individual, I wanted to Think about how am I built just uniquely? Like what's so unique about me? And I, how can I go and experience that total uniqueness? And, and the way our economy works, because we have such a, you know, a high specialization.

How do you really, I mean, there's, I could go on, but this is a problem with a specialized economy I get, and some people have to do it. Sometimes you have to go. Yeah. and do the you know, take, take the position or take the role in the giant machine to provide it, to provide an income and find other avenues through which to ensure that your, you know, your identities aren't getting completely lopsided.

I'm seeing guys make this transition really rapidly. And because we have an economy that, that is really perfectly designed for this. So that's a whole world. And obviously I go into lots of detail and family Inc and try to convince people of, 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 that as fathers, we are given, I think, a a distance from that so that we can, 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 that distance to build an individual life in a way that leaves our kids and our wives in the dust.

And so we've, we're putting our, our wives and our children in an impossible situation. Now I think that we were doing it inadvertently often because we're, we think we're doing what we're supposed to do. Isn't that we're supposed to do? Isn't that, isn't that how you find it? Found an identity is through work and through going out and, you know, developing some specialization.

That people don't even understand why it's important to protect gender. They don't get it. They don't get that. That 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.

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 Ignatius, it's like you have to live according to the way these things are designed.

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And when I talked to dads about some of the biggest struggles that they have. You know, one of the things that I hear very often is how difficult it is to, to make that shift from, you know, 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 about the emails that are going unanswered.

How would you say you've gone about making sure that you are paying attention to the right things, caring about the right things to keep that meaning and purpose a focal point for your family? Yeah. 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.

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? And so that was actually became a real litmus test for me as to whether or not I wanted to make that investment.

And then imagine like, because we own this, if you guys wanna be a part of this more and more, like, I wanna introduce you to people. I want you to see what we're building. And so I, 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.

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.

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 and more of a family way? And it's not all family, by the way. We do actually invest in our children's individual identities.

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. 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.

It's well. Man, I get why we do that. It's a very, it's, 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?

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 are, we're going to do phones or we're going to talk. And so we And there were hundreds of things to tackle and rethink about. How do we, how do we think about worship?

Yeah, but you have to just take it one little step at a time. And it was funny because, because we've, because it's been so slow and so progressive the way we've like tried to rethink everything. You know, my oldest daughter, Kelsey is grew up in a quite a bit of different home than my youngest daughter, Kyra, you know, Kelsey's 24 and Kyra's 15.

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, did anybody ever honk at us once they were so shocked.

And if not, what small shifts can we make? I think you, you nailed it. They're 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.

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, the one small change they could make to, to take that first step towards this blueprint for fatherhood. Yeah, I would say give your best time to your family.

So once is Saturday night, April, I do date night and it's because we Shabbat on Saturday, it's, 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 those on Sunday when we I have like not a lot going on and and then we do Friday Night, we do our Shabbat dinners And it's just timeless like I don't have anything better to anywhere better to go So it's not just that we have those three time periods It's that they're designed in a in a in a weekly rhythm to be the places where I am Maximally available.

And I, I am experiencing that, you know, most weeks and it is amazing. But 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.

Yeah. It's going to look ugly. It's going to feel weird. It's, you know, but man, if you do this according to the blueprint that we're, 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. Yeah. Keep going. And, and, gosh. Enjoy it. That's great, Jeremy, but thank you so much for blessing me and everybody listening with your wisdom. Awesome. Thanks, Tyler. Awesome. Thanks, Jeremy.