Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's always the community exclamation point being from not Cincy. It's a great need to speak with guys who are moving in the same direction. Somebody else said.
What I appreciated was the unrelenting encouragement to lead our families well and follow God, knowing that we are choosing the hard thing.
Run your home and your doe like a biblical boss.
Hey, brothers. Steve Manual here in Cincinnati and Mark Parrott over there in Utah. Welcome back to Abraham's Wallet. If you were at our fall retreat way back In November of 25, you know it was a banger.
If you weren't there, we got a surprise for you today. We are going to recap the juiciest morsels from that gathering and I'm going to review the greatest hits from one of my talks that kind of opened up the weekend. So if you're a family leader saying, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord, and I know you are, this one's for you. Hi, Mark. Was there something you wanted to talk about before we. Well, dove in?
[00:01:07] Speaker B: I mentioned we did our travel episode. We recorded it last time we were together. And I said I was about to travel down to southern Utah for a playoff game.
I will say my oldest daughter, she's a basketball player.
The bad news is we ran into a buzzsaw down there, the center. This is women's basketball, mind you.
Six foot four and about 210 pounds center. And those, those are rare. She had a drop step. This girl wasn't just a big body. She could play the post like a pro. I thought this girl has a future in, you know, who knows, the WNBA maybe. I don't know.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: I always think the zenith of women's basketball would be college. So if she can get herself a scholarship, she's going to be. She's. That's it? That's all you want?
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah, but my daughter broke her leg this year. She's been out and she really never got her spot back. And you and I were talking about kind of basketball before this started.
Well, I wasn't planning to go to this game, but one of the starters was unable to attend and this made the coach none too happy. But I said, you know what, I'm going to come just in case my daughter gets to play a little more.
And the coach, with 30 seconds left in the first quarter pulled my daughter into the game just to pull out her starter and talk to her for a minute. And she said, I was just planning on that being her 32nd little stint.
Steve. She played the rest of the basketball game, because she said, this, this is my shot. She went to the hoop, she put in two quick layups, and then she started defending like, I don't know, a woman possessed.
I was going to go with Gary Payton.
Gary Payton, who was. The Memphis Grizzlies, to me are the ultimate gritty defensive team from the, from back in the day. I don't.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Zach Randolph.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: What was his name? Brooks.
Dylan Brooks, Aaron Brooks.
I don't know. But okay, yeah, the point has been lost. I think the, the.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: She did real good.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: She did great and got to play the whole game pretty much. So that was really, really exciting. And even though we got our butts kicked, she scored more than her fair share of the total points we put on the board. And I got to watch her play a lot. So that was a positive travel experience.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Good. So it made the nine hour drive worth the trouble.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: Wonderful. Okay, everybody, quick scene. Setter. We gathered a crew of 42 fathers, guys from all over, guys from New York to Oregon rubbing shoulders for four days right outside Cincinnati.
I have to say I was very pleased about how many of those guys were repeats from our first retreat, which means that it didn't suck. We did deep dives into spiritual, relational, and financial capitals.
There was group prayer. There was kind of midrash style, scripture chewing.
We did a spiritual history tour of Cincinnati.
There was some pickleball and a little bit of downtime. And it was great being surrounded by men who are all pulling in the same direction at home. We consistently hear from our viewers that your greatest pain point is that you feel isolated and you feel like, I think I'm the only guy in my town that has an Abrahamic vision of family, you do not feel that way when we get together as a group at our retreat. So that is a wonderful thing.
I want to give our listeners a quick dive into what was my opening talk, which I called a call for new Patriarchs. Before I get into that, we actually kind of start giving our listeners the goodies from the retreat. Any first blush, high level thoughts you had, Mark on? Just the retreat itself.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: I think my biggest. If you're thinking about maybe, hey, I would come to one of these sometime. The biggest thing that I walk away with, I can't say I leave happy from these things because sometimes I go, what would it be like to have this kind of amazing crew of dudes around me all the time? And I actually think that's a good thing to get a taste of what it's like, because unless you Live in Cincinnati. A bunch of those guys are from there.
It seems like we've got our little Indiana crew that has kind of yielded these things and they seem to have a solid group. But for the most part, most of us need to taste that so that we have a little bit of a North Star for what we're trying to build when it comes to groups of men. And if you're thinking, well, I'm not going to move, but. And I just don't have context for what it would even feel like to be around like minded fathers. This is a good way to get that. And I always leave going. I want it so much more than what I've got right now. And this is what I'm trying to build. So it was refreshing and overall great. And also I left going, man, that was. I wish I had that, you know, 52 weeks a year instead of just one or two.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: I'll just say about that.
I, I understand that because I also feel maybe to a lesser degree, I get so much energy from guys who are far afield and I think I wish I had regular contact with that guy.
But I leave encouraged.
Meaning, one, my faith is built that I feel like I'm not really alone. I know I can feel alone in a week's time. I'm not really alone. And secondly, there's a weird thing that starts happening in the back of your brain, which is, let's say you're at dinner and there's. The conversation is moving along at dinner. You're on your dinner table, the kids are all talking about something and you think, you know, I could just let it slip tonight. I don't have to read the Bible. Nobody's going to call me out on it. But then you think to yourself, and this is what happens over and over, the script running in the background for me. But what about my bros? What about those guys that I met with? They're. They are paying the price in their homes. I don't want to let any of them down, you know, and I'm just thinking this in the back of my mind, I'm going to get out that Bible. I'm going to do the time because I feel like I'm connected to this larger group of guys who, I know that they're doing it in their homes. It just, it. I feel like it kind of, There's a way that it keeps me more accountable really in every, in every area of my life, including something like lodofeb. Because I think these guys are all over the country and they're they're paying the price. And I want to be. I want to be part of their group, you know? Does that make sense?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: 100%.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Well, I led the retreat with a session called A Call to New Patriarchs. And it seemed to hit a lot of. Hit. Hit a lot of guys, because it cut right to the core of. Of our message, which is that God models father rule, patriarchy, and he calls us to reproduce it in our tiny kingdoms. And I just started with the idea that we should acknowledge. I feel like we need this repeated to us, and we need to be reminded that what God leads, we can think of the Lord's Prayer.
Our Father, who art in heaven, your name is holy, your kingdom come. There's just that idea. He's a father, and he's running a kingdom. And because he's making disciples out of all of us, he wants us to be little fathers with a lowercase f, and we're running little kingdoms with a lowercase K. In our little worlds, we're doing what he does on a lower scale, and he's inviting us to do his things.
So he wants us to be his image bearers and do this father, father rule thing, which is what the word patriarchy means, father rule into this little earthly model. I have to say, I know that Abe's wallet listeners have heard me say this many times. This family thing is the most important subdivision of humans that there is. You cannot get a smaller group and keep God's hierarchy, and you cannot get larger without this foundation.
So we went to Joshua 24, which was Israel's inflection point, and I tried to describe that they were in the land.
They had just come into the land, but they had not done what God commanded them to do, which was to completely cleanse the land of all of the opponents. They were still in the land, and their cultural influence was still there. And Joshua has this very important address that he gives to. Who do you think he gave it to? He gave it to the fathers, to the family leaders. He gathered them up specifically, and he said, look, here, we're surrounded by Canaanites. They have their high places and their Asherah poles and their child sacrifice and their intermarriage and all this stuff. And he calls his people together, and he says these words from Joshua 24. He says, now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in truth, remove the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the Euphrates river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.
If it is unacceptable in your sight. To serve the Lord.
Then you go ahead. That's my. I'm throwing that in there. You go ahead and you choose for this day whom you will serve, whether the gods that your fathers served that were on the other side of the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you're now living.
But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. So I went to some length to just describe that there are three options, which maybe not everybody appreciates that there are three options for things that you can do regarding the spiritual leadership of your home. The first is to simply follow your father's path.
So my father's path was that he loved Jesus, but he lacked multi generational vision. That's just not something that we heard in church world when I grew up. It's an easy default. Whatever your dad did and whatever his foibles were, probably there was passivity present.
It can be a tendency of ours as we will just reproduce what our fathers did. And we're supposed to, according to this passage, oppose every godless method that our fathers have walked down and go, we're not doing that.
We're also supposed to not do what the people around us are doing. We're not supposed to say, now what are the gods of the land that I'm living in? Here we are in America in 2026. What do they value?
Well, then that's what I will value. How do they do family life? Well, then that's what I'll do. We're not, we're supposed to be saying no to, I'm putting this in quotes. The gods of our fathers, they're, they're sinful paths. We're supposed to be saying no to the cultural influence around us. And we're supposed to say this, the third option.
I have to. And I'm. I said this explicitly. The third option is the hard one.
The hard option is throw away your father's gods, reject the surrounding influences and all of their false gods, and worship the Lord. And that means for most of us, forge new traditions. That means we're going to have to do things like, and I use this to kind of set up the weekend, dig a well of intimacy with the Lord. That's what David Sheldon talked about. We're going to have to assess our weaknesses repeatedly.
You walked us through that mark, initiating and presiding in our relationships.
I talked about that with relational capital, rejoicing in our failure of confessing sin, maturing beyond our circle. That's what James was going to be talking about. James Lindhoff see yourself as a humble freedom fighter. That was the thrust of the history tour. And with a hard head, enter the fray on politics and morality. I also give a talk on that. And we're supposed to have a compelling vision that's worth any pain or sacrifice, because we have a vision, an end goal in mind. And that's what Jeremy Pryor and his family talked about. And so finally, the choice that I just put in front of the guys was, well, who's in? Will you throw away the evil in your line? Will you repent and redirect?
And will you reject territorial false gods? And will you reclaim God's ways financially in your home and relationally and spiritually? Will you train your kids to tear down high places? Will you be the weirdo in your zip code who stands for life and truth and marriage and God's word? And will you say, with Joshua, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord?
We got a lot of people that said, yes, they would do that. So I'm happy to report that. But that was the thrust of the original talk. And I wanted to give the general stripes of that talk because guys just reported that it was important to them.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: I just have to react to that because I think that the big light bulb moment for me when you gave that talk was the.
I always thought it's like in American church life that I grew up in, you have a binary choice. It's a yes, no, do I follow Jesus, or no, do I like Christian, not Christian. And the interesting thing about the talk you gave is that it talked about how Joshua said, there's not two choices, there's three, and you will be choosing one.
Like, even if you say, I don't know, I don't really think about that stuff, you're still choosing one.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: And I talked about it on the last episode that aired. I don't know when we recorded it, but, like, we've been going through Deuteronomy. This idea of the gods of the land, the gods of the fathers. It's so important that I think about it all the time now. And so I really liked spending time after your talk going, okay, what are the gods of my fathers?
What are the gods of the people? What are the default gods that I'll worship if I just try to make no decision?
And what does it look like to worship the Lord? So that was a really good talk. I think everybody, based on the survey data, that was maybe the biggest hit of the whole retreat. So congrats.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Yeah, good.
Would you share with Us a couple of nuggets from the talks that you did.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so the first one I did, I think if you want it recapped, you're just gonna have to go find episodes because we have talked ad nauseam here about the five Capitals. And what I did is try to. For some. Some people show up at these retreats and they go.
I was walking around while we were playing pickleball beforehand and meeting people, and I think I introduced myself to somebody and said, oh, I'm Mark. Like, nice to meet you. I hadn't met him. What do you do? Well, I'm a financial planner and I do this podcast. What podcast?
Abraham's Wallet. Oh, I've never heard that one. I'm like, oh, I gotta kick it off. How'd you end up here? And so some people just show up because somebody invited them and they added a ton to the group and it was great. But for those guys, we tried to give a what are the five capitals? And how do you do a quick inventory of where you're at on all five of those? So I took guys who had never been to an Abraham's Wallet event before and walked them through five capitals and gave them a little worksheet to try and self evaluate on all five, along with a few tips.
If you search 5 capitals Abraham's wallet on your podcast engines, you'll find lots of episodes where we give you a very similar rundown of what those are and how to. How to think about them. So we started there with guys who were new.
My favorite thing that I got to take guys through was a financial capital inventory. So this was for the veterans.
And what we did is kind of.
I.
When we do five Capitals inventory in general, we tend to speak more generally. And I wanted to make guys a little bit uncomfortable with specifics on this one. So I took some risks. We could sit here and argue about all of these, but it was things like, what's the money culture in my home?
And we said, you know, things like, my household is cash flow positive. Steven, you and I were talking before we started recording. It doesn't matter how much money you make. If your house is cash flow negative at a modest income, it will be cash flow negative at a high income. Things like, I know my financial order of operations, so I know the order to put the specific financial capital steps in. If you gave me an extra $10,000 and I haven't started saving for retirement, I wouldn't put it into a college fund for my kids, because that would be dumb.
No critique on people. Some people are like, no, I don't have any idea what I would do with the next ten grand. And we wanted to get that out.
You know, we talked about, in this section, we talked about I'm actively training children how to handle wealth.
And so everybody scored themselves. And then we kind of shared some tips on each of these. Then we talked about work income and business things like I earn enough to save 20% of my income. If you have four kids and you earn 60 grand a year, the answer is no.
So there's a real income thing that we need to focus on. But I ask guys to put themselves in the kind of future looking for most of them position and say, is my career path leading somewhere that will be healthy for my family when I'm 50.
So we talked about those types of things. And then lastly, the condition of your flock. This is just about how well does a guy know what his financial scene looks like?
And this goes everything from assets being well maintained. So I said, if you check in on your investment account four times a week, but your house, the siding's falling off your house and needs to be repainted, well, you're not actually maintaining all of your assets. So we wanted to think about that holistically.
Some of it was really straightforward. I have six months of expenses in a very secure place.
I think I made people itchy when I said I'll have at least $3.5 million in productive assets by the time I hit retirement age. People were like, what? And I said some guys thought they wouldn't. But then when we actually started digging in the surface, it was like, actually you are on track. You just don't realize that you're 400,000 in your 401k right now is going to grow.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: It's going to turn into that.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Right.
Other guys were like, why would I ever need that much? This is how much it costs me to live. And I go, yeah, but you're 32 and by the time you retire, 3.5 million ain't going to be what it used to be.
So we talked through some of that stuff and one of my favorites, I'll give this one away for just a self check, is people in my orbit feel financial security because of my family.
And this is one of those things that I go, this is not. You don't have to be a 10 on this right now. I'm not. But I do think we talked about a tragedy that happened in our community not very long ago.
[00:22:04] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: And I'm not in a position Today to go, well, you just move into my guest home and live there for the rest of your lives when we run into a widow. But I can say you're not going hungry because of, I am your friend and I praise God. I have other people in my community that can say the same thing. And so together we're a real force.
And that's my desire as a kind of man of peace type guy.
I want to not only be spiritually a place where people can come for refuge and teaching and all of those good elder traits, but also financially be like, when you're in my orbit, you're not going hungry.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: I love that.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: So that's something I like as a final check on where I'm trying to go as a guy when it comes to financial capital.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: That's great. I love that point.
We had the pleasure of, I invited a couple local guys to come in and talk with us as well. And so James Linhoff is a local leader in the church, a place called Northstar, and he's been a successful business guy. So he came and spoke to us. And I'm open to your input on that, Mark. But to me, the main takeaway, he had two big points that he shared. But for me, the main thing I took away was an idea that I am still using. I just talked to another guy that was at the retreat this week about this.
It was his point that we cannot control our circumstances, but we can control the way that we think and feel and respond to those circumstances. And the arguments that happen in your home and the misunderstandings are not about events or circumstances. They're from the way that we interpret those and the meaning that we assign to them so that we think and feel and speak about them in ways that create conflict and division.
And so if we did better at observing. Well, I assigned meaning to this and I started feeling a certain way. And we talk to our wives, for instance, about those things as opposed to this happened. And then you did this.
Well, I wanted you to do this.
That doesn't actually solve the problem, which is, well, we see this event that happened differently. We interpret it differently.
For me, because James is a finance guy, it was much more touchy feely than I expected him to be. I thought he was going to be very nuts and bolts. But he's a. He's a. He's a big thinker. So he was just thinking, I just know that this is the way the relationships work. He also fed us each this.
You ever seen this before? The emotion wheel that has all these specific Words for emotions, like, no, you weren't just angry.
The fact is that you were aggressive in your anger and you were hostile. And because you felt provoked, why don't we use words that actually describe. They put a little. What he did was. It was almost like a psychologist meeting with telling a bunch of guys who were like, oh, oh, make the money and build the house. And he's like, guys, if you want to be thoughtful and shrewd in the way that you lead your family emotionally and lead them through thought patterns, it would be good to have your head around these ideas. I thought that was great. Super sticky and super interesting.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Ever since he gave that talk, I've used it even in my home, which was exactly what you said. My kids will come and there's been a kerfuffle. And maybe the littlest, like, she made me so angry.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: And I just hear James going, she didn't make you angry. She presented you with a circumstance and you responded to it by choosing anger. Yes. And so I think that's become a part of our lexicon and the parrot home since that time.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: It was a good talk.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: I'm going to just touch very briefly on one other talk that I gave, which was the relational capital talk.
And I stressed to guys, and this is a stress to guys, the importance of presiding in your home.
And that's just top of mind for me because I literally just got off of a zoom call with a guy and this is what we talked about, that there's something you can just look through the scriptures and see who's supposed to, like, lead the Sabbath meal?
Well, who leads the Passover?
Well, then who do you think should be leading when it comes to even something like weddings and funerals?
I can tell you what Joshua's answer to that question would be. It would be the family leaders.
They are the ones who preside.
But when it comes to something like public speaking, we kind of think that that's almost a secret, magical gift set. That if I'm an introvert or I'm not a loudmouth who wants to give his opinion everywhere he goes, like me, then I don't have to preside. And I wanted to put it forward to every family leader. Know it is your job to preside and. And presiding is a skill and it can be developed and it will take a while and you might not feel comfortable the first five years that you're presiding and saying, okay, it's Sabbath, you guys, I'm going to read the Bible now, and I'm going to give some comments on it. But one of the requirements for elder status, and I wish that I could completely debunk that word, and you not think a leader in the local church who's part of the board and helps decide where the church finances will go. That's not what I mean.
When the Bible uses the word elder, it just means trusted leader among God's people.
And if you want to qualify for elder status and you do, then being able to teach is one of those things that repeatedly comes up. I think just to make that practically understood, it would be helpful to tell guys, you have to be able to preside.
So we were coming up on Thanksgiving and I challenged guys, you need to preside at Thanksgiving.
So I got to throw that in.
Last guy I want to review that presented to us was Jeremy Pryor. If you don't know Jeremy Pryor, he's a local guy that's written a couple of books and has a podcast of his own called Family Teams. And he, he coaches guys. And exactly what we're talking about, he did us the favor. I said, I want you to, I want you to present to our guys a little snapshot of what it looks like to be farther down the line and, and, and tell them that it's kind of worth the trouble to show them a vision of where they want to go. Because a lot of guys who are tough tuning into us are 25, 30 year old guys, go like, I've got two babies and I'm trying to do this biblical thing and it's different than what my dad showed me. And when does it get good again? You said I have to be a weirdo. How long do I have to be a weirdo? What's the outcome?
So I wanted Jeremy to come bring that picture. And he did us better than that. What he did was he brought his father, Jerry, who's in his 70s. He brought his son Jackson, who's in his 20s.
And the real fail was that Jackson didn't bring his newborn son also. But we had three generations and those guys together talked to us about multigenerational living. I'm just going to share some of my notes about, like, his greatest hits from that talk.
One was honor your father's vision.
And it's important we said right up at the top that you, as a, as an Abrahamic family leader, you might have to distinguish yourself from your father and say, there are some things that my father led me in that I want to reproduce.
There are a lot of things that I saw that I'm not going to reproduce. I'm going to go a different way and I'm going to think intentionally about this multi generational vision.
But Jeremy stressed that his father wasn't the first one to kind of get it. Jeremy was the first one to kind of get it.
But he said that didn't change the fact that I did have to honor my father. So it wasn't like, I'm running the show now, dad, take a back seat. It was that he had to be kind of creative and sensitive to what are the things that are on dad's heart that, that I can still push forward.
And as he described it, and Jerry talked as well, there brought such life and meaning and cohesion to their team, to the team of Jerry and Jeremy leading their family together because he was honoring his father. And he made the point that Levites led from age 20 to 50. I think Jerry made this point. And at 50, they then handed off these sort of the practical leadership. What happens with the money? When do we do the new addition to the house? Which business are we starting up? Once you hit age 50, you go, well, you decide that, young man. And I'll just be here to give you wisdom and help you along.
Next thing, creatively integrating kids into work. Jeremy talked about this and said, you must integrate your children into the productive work of the home. It will slow production, but it will build identity.
Then he said, love children.
Just make that a family value that we just love children, have them early and often.
He made the point, there's no such thing as an entitled mom with five little kids that we just want to be celebrating children. We want to be doing everything we can to resource our wives as they are juggling a young family. When there's another. If you're getting older, my family's getting older. My kids are in high school. When there's children around and babies, we go, oh, babies, get them over here. Let's get them in our kids arms. Let's take care of them. We champion children at all times.
He gave this idea, which I know was interesting to you, Mark, about the family bank.
He said that there is a family bank where if the kids want money for education or for starting a business or for having children, that the bank is open for those things and for other things, the family bank will give a matching grant or a 0% loan.
Am I getting that right? Were there other details about that? I'm just reading my notes.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it was like anything that would prevent you from having a kid, so.
Oh, we would. We have three kids and if we had one more, we'd have to buy a bigger suv. Well, the family bank is interested in helping to fund that or we need, you know, mom's run, run just as far as she can go. And if we have another kid, they would need to hire some, some assistants around the house to clean and do some. Well, the family bank is interested in that investment.
The other one, like you said, was pretty straightforward. School and then starting a business. Those were kind of the three things that they said they were interested in helping to fund.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Gotcha. I'm just going to share one other very interesting thing that Jeremy said, which was he said a grandmother is a wife who loves her life.
And he was speaking not about his mother, but he was speaking about his wife April, who's my age. And I've known Jeremy and April for 20 years or something.
And so it's funny to think of her, I've always known her as a mother. She's still got a high schooler that lives with her. But he's describing the impact that it's had on his wife April to now have grandchildren. So I believe they have three grandchildren now.
And he just said, he made this point God's intention.
If we compact the generations down to if we think that 20 to 25, if we kind of think of those as those are the key baby making years, well then when you're in your 50s, like I am and like the, if they're not in their 50s, they're quickly approaching, I think they might be in their 50s.
April Prior, the American model is she's done now. So all she needs to do is plan a Disney vacation every other year with her grandchildren and maybe send them a Valentine's candy and she'll be good.
But April's experience is that her daughters and her daughter in law, they are all within like a mile of her front door.
And so she constantly has babies in her arms. And he's like, God wants babies in grandmother's arms. There's something that produces life for April.
He's just like he said, my observation is that my wife is more alive and happy and feels more important even in a way as a grandmother than she did as a mother. She's like, when I, if you consider that Proverbs 31 is about a grandmother, which we think that it is, we think that it's, it's a picture of Sarah at like age 65, then it makes a lot of sense that there's this fullness and boy, she's operating, she's not only running her household and she's got the family servants, but she's helping, giving wisdom. As Titus 2 says, she's giving wisdom to her daughters about how to be a great mom and be a great wife, and she's just running on all cylinders. That is such a different. That just impacted me for having describe grandmothering for a while and thinking, boy, that is the vision that I want for my own wife. I don't want her to be thinking, boy, I'm just holding on until we get the kids out of the house and then we can travel or whatever the vanity fantasy is. I want her to think, boy, I'm raising.
I'm raising my.
Something I always say to my kids, I'm raising my grandchildren's parents.
And so I'm looking through them to the next generation, and I can't wait till I'm holding those babies. So, anyways, that's what I want to throw in about what Jeremy and the prior crew said. Anything else bubble to mind?
[00:37:32] Speaker B: No. I mean, that just goes back to the very first thing I said. It is nice to be around a group of guys.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:37:39] Speaker B: Where I'm 43, and I can look at guys even 10 years younger than me in that group. And we're all like.
We're talking. We're thinking now about grandparenthood. That's, like, what we're aiming for. And when I just say things like that in random groups of my peers, people look at you like you're insane, or, like, what are you, like, trying to be an old man or what? It's like, no, this is what we're building.
And I.
I think Jeremy was right when he talked about just if the natural order of things happens, you know, absent birth control and health stuff and all that many people, not everybody will be having kids. And then suddenly they'll be like, you know, I haven't held a baby in a few years of my own. And then they'll go, oh, here's a grand baby. That's just kind of how historically family worked, is that.
[00:38:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:37] Speaker B: You always had these kids somewhere in the household orbit. And it's certainly not the way that normal culture works in the United States right now, which is much more like you said, like, let's work ourselves to the bone. Probably just by ourselves, just mom and dad grinding it out.
We get to see Grandpa and Grandma at Christmas, Thanksgiving, and then we're so exhausted from all the labor that by the time those two kids probably turn 18, we're like, let's go find ourselves A nice retirement community. And I think it's not just not optimal way of living. I think it's kind of a disgusting vision for life.
And so I like hanging out with guys who are going, let's encourage our kids to start having kids as soon as possible. Cause we're trying to get this show started. What if we could. What if we could meet our great grandchildren? Wouldn't that be cool?
And that's some of what we got fired up for when we were hanging out with the multi generations of priors.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Yes, I lied by saying that the priors would be the last person that I would highlight because I see in my notes I wanted to give a couple of moments to David Sheldon's talk.
I mentioned it earlier, but David Sheldon hammered home that we must dig a well of intimacy with the Lord in private, starting now.
And he made the point that you will draw from that well in the pinch points of your life. When life is demanding.
It's the picture from scripture of the virgins who had oil in their lamps. And they were ready that when there was the long night, they had oil in their lamps to make it through the night.
So if you wait till the dire straits of your life happen to try to gin up some intimacy with the Lord, you'll be like Saul at faking spirituality without having the roots in place. And it doesn't. It didn't go well for him. So we must, we must, privately and individually and with brothers. That's one of the great things that we did, having a midrash together is we can dig the well of intimacy with the Lord with brothers. It doesn't have to only be a solo endeavor, but that. That has to happen for every family leader. It's a must.
I'd like to transition quickly to sharing some survey feedback with everybody. I feel like there's a lot of people that listen to the podcast that support us and they're our partners. You're like, a real reason that this podcast happens at all is because of your support. So I would like to kind of like give a report to our supporters, which include listeners. If you're listening, you're one of the reasons that we're still going because you're listening. So I want to kind of give a report to our people so that you feel. Feel like, well, what I'm giving to is valid and is making a difference. The feedback that we received from these dudes was pretty electric. It was our average.
We gave them a scale of 1 to 10 for grading stuff, and our average was a 9.4 on everything.
And guys called it the most equipping men's retreat they've ever attended.
[00:42:10] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: And community, as you have stressed, Mark, was a massive win for so many guys. Here's some quotes directly from our feedback survey. It's always the community exclamation point being from not Scentsy. Look, we don't. It's not important how syntax works and I'm not grading the way syntax somebody writes a sentence. Being from not Scentsy, it's a great need to speak with guys who are moving in the same direction.
Somebody else said what I appreciated was the unrelenting encouragement to lead our families well and follow God, knowing that we are choosing the hard thing.
Somebody else said it was being surrounded by men of all ages who are moving in the same direction. And someone else said it's rubbing shoulders with like minded guys and getting time to pick brains on specific family topics.
Our speakers and our sessions and the prayer and the fun that we had together all got huge love.
So it was great. I would like to now just pivot as we close up shop to say this, guys. Oh, I wanted to say one more thing. When I'm talking about survey results, Mark and I did precious little to make this retreat happen.
The number one guy that made this happen was Vijay Tunkle, who volunteered a lot of his time.
And then behind them would be Jeff Reed.
Daniel Reed volunteered planning time.
Christopher Heater of volunteered time.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: Can I just add, Vijay was indispensable.
He's already hard at work on the next one and he's kind of quickly becoming our go to retreat man.
Also, just to make maybe could I
[00:44:05] Speaker A: say fomo, I wanted to shout out Mike Meyer. Sorry, Mike Meyer was the other guy
[00:44:08] Speaker B: I was thinking of, but I want to foment the FOMO a little bit and say good. The swag that we got for this retreat was top notch. It was almost.
Not quite, but almost to the level of the famous Abraham's wallet hoodie, which is the best garment that's ever been designed.
The future ancestor T shirts, the abe's wallet hats. There were books that everybody got. So even if you hated the whole thing, you went home with some awesome stuff.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was nice.
[00:44:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: That was all Jeff Reed's work. The printing of that stuff.
[00:44:51] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: I'm calling that out because not only to. Just to thank those guys, but just to tell every listener, wherever you are in the country, if you want to help things move forward for us and for our community, this is the kind of thing you could do is you could join er. That's kind of our place where we all just kind of talk and then we kind of pled with er. Would anybody help us make this retreat happen? And the people that raised hands, man, they were so helpful.
I just don't think it would have happened otherwise. I just want to say we love volunteers, people who want to give of their time. I just met this past week. I happened to be going through Nashville and I met up with a dude who emailed me out of nowhere. He was just a random listener and said, next time you're in Nashville, let's get together. Well, I did get together with him and it was a wonderful meeting. Loved him and his name's Dane. And Dane said at the meeting, hey, if there's anything I can ever do to help Abe's wallet with anything, I just believe in what you guys doing. I was like, well, Dane, that's real easy. We can put you to work no problem. But he just wasn't in our radar. He wasn't on our radar otherwise. So we need folks like that because that retreat proved that, that if you want to be a new patriarch and you want to raise a family that is shunning the culture around you, changing up some of what your father did, being together and having a place of learning and equipping encouragement, well, it's pretty. Sharpening is pretty helpful.
So if this stirs you and you want more sharpening and vision casting and real equipping, we want you to come to the next one. It's details are a little sketchy right now. We don't know much, but we do want to be taking names for these spots. So you could go to abrahamswallet.com retreat and you could just give us your name to say, I'm interested, you don't have to give money. It's really going to be great. We think you should bring a brother and we think that we should build legacies with this time. So I hope that those lessons were nutritious for you. I certainly liked reviewing some of those learnings. Until next week. Bless you all to run your home and your dough like a biblical boss.
