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This is the Truth Network. Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina, Masculine Journey After Hours, a time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now.
Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours. If you're just joining us from the radio show, you know that we just talked about the bad dads of the Bible. We got through a total of one dad. I think we spent most of our time talking about David. And you know, the whole topic, if you didn't get to listen to the other show, please go back and listen to it because it may sound worse than what it really is. But when you think back in scripture, there really wasn't great examples of father figures other than God, right?
When you really dig into the scripture, they kind of fell short, at least the ones that we can read. Yeah, they all kind of did. And so Rob, you had an idea for the after hours that's similar, if you want to go ahead and throw that out there. Yeah, bad dads of the Masculine Journey.
Which we all resemble in one way or another. Yeah, because you know, it's the same kind of thing as we share our struggles. You know, we were kind of letting you know, you're not alone. And at the same point, hopefully, that will kick off an idea in your own mind of, of maybe how you can pray for God to, you know, come into your story. And there's even situations in our life, we've walked together, you know, long enough that we can have a heart to be a good dad, which I hope everybody has, but not know, have any clue what to do. Because life situations come at you with no answers.
Right? And there isn't a big rule book that you can pick up. I mean, yes, there's the Bible, and you can look at that.
And obviously, if God is the ultimate reference, but there's nothing that you can go read up on your exact situation in most cases. Struggles. Struggles. Well, I want to go ahead and start us out with a clip. Okay. And this is from Jim Graham's favorite show.
He's not at a mic. So I can go ahead and say it is everybody loves Raymond. It's actually one of his least favorite shows, but it's one of my favorite shows. And you have a lot of, oh, gosh, a lot of things back and forth in this family.
You know, a lot of stuff back and forth. And Ray and Robert are the two sons, and they've decided they want to get back at their dad, Frank, is always picking on him. He's always got something sarcastic to say to him. He's always picking on him. And they want to get back at him. So they decide they're going to get back at him. And they're going to hide in his closet in his bedroom while he's in the bathroom getting ready for bed. And they're going to jump out and surprise him.
But Frank has another thing in mind when he figures out what's going on. And so let's just listen to how this plays out. Or not. Or not.
There's no payback time. Yeah. So how should we do it? We'll just, we'll just jump out and scream. Yeah. Yeah.
Like we're going to get you a winded blood or I got a hammer. No, no, no, no, no. We just just scream like, yeah. Yeah. Good. Yeah.
No. This is so fun. We got to do this more often. Yeah. We should do this a lot. Maybe the more we do it to him, the less that we'll be scared.
It's like therapy. Yeah. Something like that.
Something like that. Next time we should get him in the shower. There he is. Okay. When do we go?
We just wait, wait, wait until he gets into bed. Yeah. Good. Get comfortable there. Oh man.
Nice. Nice and relaxed. Come on.
What's with that face? They're going to be fine. Oh no, mom. Oh, I don't want to scare her. Let's just walk out right now.
No, no, no, no. We'll wait. We'll wait until they fall asleep.
Then we'll sneak out. Hey, you know what we haven't done in a while? What?
What haven't they done? Oh no. Don't, don't, don't, don't go over there. My don't go, don't go, don't go.
Oh yeah. Scared you, huh? You're a sick man. What's wrong with you? I'll tell you. I'll tell you what's wrong with him. He's a sick man.
You're a sick man. You tried to scare me, huh? Well, you mess with the bull. You get the horn.
When they step out, Frank's out there by himself in his bathroom. You know, it's hard to kind of set that up without telling you what's going on, but uh, yeah, there's definitely some dysfunction going along in that family. Yeah. Yeah. And ironically, this kind of reminds me honestly of my bad dad moments. A couple of them.
Not exactly. You know, um, one, I always used to tell my kids mess with the bull. You get the horns, because that's something my dad always told me when, you know, he had a point to make. And so that would kind of hit home. But you know, I'm a very sarcastic person, but I don't mean it in a mean spirit.
It's just joking. You know, and Frank does that. Frank does that throughout the whole show. And until you get into the later seasons, the boys think that's kind of who he is.
Right. But later on, when they learn there's more to his story and how their dad has really been a much better dad to them than he ever had. Then the full rest of it comes around and they realize how much he does really love them. You know, and there's little glimpses of that. And you know, for me, I, being someone who likes to joke around a lot, I have to be very intentional about giving even more accolades or even more loving times because you never know when those are going to be misheard or as disappointment, you know, or as another thing than what you intend them to be. You know, that joking around absence of love is just going to be hurt. You know, and I think I probably did that with my, my oldest daughter a little bit, you know, because she always felt a lot of times I remember her saying, I'm just a disappointment, you know, and I never saw her that way.
I still don't see her that way. You know, but that's, I think, somehow I gave her that impression, you know, and with each of my kids, I could peel back and say, I'm a bad dad in this area. I'm a bad dad in this area. And later on, maybe in the show, if there's time, I'll share about with Eli because God's actually helped reduce the helped redeem that one for me, you know, but I'm waiting on opportunities to redeem some of the stuff with the other kids. You know, I keep asking God, okay, God, how can I enter into their world? And he's allowed me to do that in lots of ways.
You know, I need to redeem some things that I wasn't in a place to give them then. You know, part of that for me anyway, was I'm a much different man than I was when Rachel was little. I'm a much different man when Eli was little, you know, my youngest. And that's the thing is we evolve, we talked about on the show, our kids get different dads, even though it's the same person.
Darrell Bock Yeah, second generation dad. I know, actually, I'm trying to figure out which of the many, many, many bad dad stories I could share. So I'll go with the one that really is the biggest struggle almost to this day, was that, you know, frankly, my wife and I had completely different ideas of what was bad behavior. And yet, because in her life, you know, her father died when she was eight, she didn't have a father, mother was very harsh. And so she expected strong discipline. Anytime anything was outside of what she thought was a proper behavior. And that had to come from me because she didn't want to be the bad guy.
It is similar to what we talked about with King David, where she didn't have this dad that reached out to her in a she didn't want to be the mom that didn't reach out to her kids. And so I was the one that would feel the pressure from her like, you got to do something about this. And she would be very, very, very upset. And then sometimes some of my children, I won't call them by name, but all three of them, somehow or another, they read you, you know what I'm saying? Like they know how to really get you angry.
And what's going to take it up a notch and to test to see where that's going. And so I would already, they did not know this be completely inside churning over the struggle between my wife and I. And then when they got into the mix, all hell broke loose. I don't know how to put it other than hell broke loose. And sometimes that led to spankings and verbal things that were way above the tone of in love and seriously bad dadmanship. I don't know how do you put it other than that? And so to this day, I struggle with how do I redeem that God?
Where do I go? And how do I enter into those conversations with my children, which he's given me lots of opportunities because I do have good relationships with all of them and chances to actually try to see some of the agreements they might've made in that, try to describe to them what I've struggled with in order to get them to that agreement, to help them break the agreement, or in some cases just speak into them how I'm not a disappointed in them, how much I do love them, how much, you know, I see their glory in the way that they reflect God and different things that I learned along the lines with masculine journey. But where it really kind of came, you know, one neat story was the idea of a promise ring for tests. And I'd heard it actually from Morgan Snyder that he was going to give his younger daughter this promise ring. The promise ring wasn't that she wasn't going to do anything outside of marriage.
The promise was that he was going to love her, that she was the apple of his eye, blah, blah, blah, and that he would be able to do that. So God gave me this as a way to relate to my daughter and be able to give her that ring. I've talked about it before, but the part I want to mention here is what that did was it opened up a dialogue between Tess and I that really went deeper and gave her a chance to share with me some things that were really still bothering her, which is as late as this summer she shared, and we had a chance to go there. And so, yeah, we got a long way to go, and I'm all messed up. But, you know, I got all kinds of hope that if I keep pushing in and I know how much I love my kids, that God will, and I keep praying, I keep praying that God will give me opportunities to, you know, let him fix it. Yeah, one of the things I wanted to, thank you, Robby, I wanted to share, I know how my daughter got to feel like she was a disappointment, and I shared it on another show before, but it was in the midst of my company going through, and I was pretty high up in my company and responsible for lots of things, and a lot of that was finding root cause, root cause analysis. You know, I was doing that all the time in many different ways, and they sent us to all these different classes, Six Sigma and all these different things on how to get to root cause. And so, you know, being what I thought a good dad would do, we're going to bring that root cause analysis to my relationships at home, right? And so everything had to come down to somebody's fault, right?
Well, when it has to be somebody's fault, and that's what you focus on, and not the grace, not the redemption, not any of that, you focus on fault, then obviously somebody's going to feel like a disappointment. Yeah. And if you don't do that anymore, it won't be your fault. Right.
Exactly. You know, and, and, and thinking back on how I treated her heart, especially when she was young, not out of a bad place, not intentionally, but it really did a bad number on her, you know, and, and, and again, with all the kids, I've made my mistakes in different ways, but with her, that's really what contributed to her feeling that way a lot, you know, is how her dad handled her heart, which was me. Yeah, I have so many stories to mention. And I have, you know, basically three children. And again, different, different dad and all three of those kids. Carson's actually in the studio. So maybe we could just put him on the mic and he could share with you my bad dad tricks.
We don't have enough time. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. Because, you know, he's got some stories and, but there's so many, I could talk about with my daughter, but I'm going to go a different way.
I have my daughter's, my oldest child, and then my son is two years younger than him. And, and I remember being the bad little league dad, you know, the, the dad that's living vicariously through his kid that sort of thing. And I, and I never wanted to be that guy. And I tried not to be that guy.
Oh my goodness. But it's so hard. And even in the midst of that, you end up becoming that guy or I did anyway, not necessarily everybody. There are a few guys that I know that handled it really well and gracefully. And, and I admire those guys to this day.
However, it's so hard when your kid, you feel like your kid's getting mistreated, your kid's getting taken advantage of or whatever, or, you know, that sort of thing. And, and I, you know, I can remember so many stupid things at ball games, you know, getting, I just, when Derek was, I think in the, goodness, he was probably six or seven years old and playing, I think coach pitch, or maybe it was his first year of regular pitch ball. And the league that he was in, we had an umpire that was not an umpire. He literally wasn't, he was like this guy that they wanted to bless him, I guess, and give him a little extra money. And he was extremely overweight and couldn't move. And it was just him. And there was nobody else calling the bases or anything like that.
And he literally, he hung one hand on the backstop constantly to stay stood up. Right. Well, you know, I'm actually a preacher at this time. I should be having some grace for the guy, you know, but, but in the midst of that, he made several horrible calls and it wasn't like balls and strike calls. It was like, you know, a kid's in a pickle and it was taking too long. Well, they're seven year olds.
It's going to take a while. And he would just go, nope, you know, you go back to that base, you go back to that because he was tired of being the ref, I guess, I don't know. And, and I would lose my mind over things like that.
And it was much like the Tom Hanks, there's no crying in baseball type of moments. And I can remember literally being thrown out of games, you know, just because my sense of right and wrong really overpowered my sense of grace. And, you know, no, what's right is right.
And that's what we must live by. And, you know, I go back and I look at things like that and I think, oh my goodness, I'm, I hope that my kids live long enough to outgrow, you know, the stupid dad tricks of things like that. But what that did was it, it showed to my kids something of value to those events that really there's not that much value in those events and you you turn it into something that's way bigger in life than it than it is. Loving people is what's big in life.
And so having the opportunity to love someone well, even when they're a putz was the opportunity I failed miserably. And there are so many stories like that. And just, you know, and those aren't directly relatable to my kids.
But those are things my kids had to watch their father do right. And feel however they felt through that. Are you saying they might've been embarrassed or felt ashamed?
I'm not assigning any value to it. I'm just stating they had a feeling of one way or another. So you as my friend would have been ashamed. I would have said, Darren, it'll be okay. Take your medicine.
I was a more quiet version of that dad at football games, but I was that dad. Okay. Yeah.
So yeah, I understand. Any of you have anything you want to share? Are you just gonna sit there looking pretty? Before he does that, I have to admit, I was Oh my gosh, I was famous for getting kicked out of basketball games. And sometimes, you know, they just kicked me out because they thought it was me that yelled. Well, two questions.
One a statement, you're taller than everybody else. And the question where you were in banana pants. Because that may have been why they kicked you out.
I showed up in the crowd. Yeah, you did. I Danny, I was just giving you a hard time, but I didn't know if there's anything you want to share on the topic.
Yeah. I was thinking about having come out of addictions and stuff like that. You know, when my wife and I got married, the we were trying to put a family together. I had a daughter, she had a son. And so we wanted to do a little church family and that kind of thing. And I was a do's and don'ts kind of guy. You know, had to be here, you know, attendance. And I'm sure they were keeping a record and that kind of thing. So my children, I think what happened was, because they went to their alternative parents every weekend, and my son shared this with me later on that he was just kind of sharing it was that, you know, he was kind of the outed kid in the youth group, because he wasn't there all the time.
He got kind of thinking it hurt his heart, because nobody else saw that and didn't represent that too well. But God's redemption is that had a pastor who believed in on Father's Day, you blessed your family. And if even if they weren't there, wrote letters to them. So I'm now famous for the letters. When my son got married, he told, I gave him and his wife letter, I did it to my daughter and her husband. My son looks at his wife and goes, you're gonna cry.
You're gonna cry. But you know, that's the thing is, you know, there is redemption behind it, I think. But you know, yeah, there's story after story, but I don't have permission to tell many of them.
No, I understand. I, the one I'll share was one and I shared it on the air a bit in the past. But boot camp after boot camp, for a series, I did the wound talk. And a part of the wound talk is you pay play a clip from the movie The Kid. And then the kid in this clip, the dad is very aggressive, very inappropriate with his son's heart. And it always tore me up. I mean, to the point of tears every time I'd watch it, because I was that dad with my youngest son, Eli. You know, now this is a father that's matured through three other kids, I should be past that at that point.
But you know, each kid is different. And Eli is a great kid. I love him. He's a young man.
Love him dearly. But he can be very set in his ways. And he could be very set in his ways at age two. You know, and part of my role when I would come home at night, is Heidi was tired of dealing with the kids throughout the day. And it's like, okay, I need a break, I need you to step in and take care of this disciplinary issue. Right?
Eli has been acting up today. And so dad's been gone all day, and dad comes home. And the only thing that I get to do most nights is come in and be disciplinarian. It doesn't result in a very good relationship. And as that relationship was fractured, and me not having any wisdom to see it, as a relationship was fractured, he would amp up a little bit. I mean, he would match my aggression with stubbornness. And to the point where, you know, I know I spanked him at times, well beyond what was needed.
You know, well beyond love. It was just anger or frustration or mad that I had to deal with the situation after a long day of work. I wanted to come home and love on my son. I didn't want to come home and have to make him stay in his room all night, you know, or whatever the case was. I didn't want to have to be there. And I was mad at other situations. But it came out of him.
You know, and so every time I would do that talk, and I would see that dad, I would just think, oh my gosh, that's me. You know, and I mentioned it from the stage a few times. And Eli's been at boot camps. And the last boot camp in the spring that we had, or maybe it was the fall.
No, it was the spring. Before we had one this summer, the last spring when we had, you know, Eli came up after that talk. And he said, I've heard you talk about that a lot.
And can we talk? You know, and we sat down, and we had a heart to heart during a free time, about three hours, where he just kind of shared his heart, which was brutal, on having to feel accountable to that, but also very grateful for God redeeming that. Because we were able to have some conversations as a 16 year old at that time, he wouldn't have understood before that. You know, and actually what the, I know the enemy would have meant to divide apart, God joined us even closer together. You know, and we seldom have issues, you know, for the last several years now, but we seldom have issues, because we have a way we can communicate through them, because we know each other better.
If that makes sense. And so, you know, very grateful for God's intervention and me struggling with it so many times at boot camps and him seeing me struggle with it. Because then I think it gave him the permission to say, Dad, can we talk about this? Because I remember some of this. Yeah.
And I mean, that's the the ugly stuff that you remember. But the truth of the matter is, if you weren't the dad that you are, he would have never felt like there was a safe place to confront you as a as a brother and a son and to do it in respect. And that's the beauty of it is that you are a phenomenal dad. And that you've been that for your boys.
I've watched it personally with your boys, and to some extent with Sydney. But seeing that with Eli, and now seeing the man that he is the young man that he is, that strength that he has to confront you comes from you. You know, so that's the that's the powerful part of it is God still used Sam to confront Sam. Thank you. Thank you. So we got a lot of bad dad stories, you know, and I think we get down to about three minutes left in this segment, we get down to, okay, what do you do with it?
You know, what if you're not at a place of redemption? Right? What if you're at a fractured place in your relationship with your kids? Right? Or the kids don't want to talk to you, or whatever the situation may be?
What do you do with that? That's, you know, the one story I didn't tell, was actually, you know, really, really heartbreaking from me when one of my children was in the hospital, and refusing to let dad come. And they were in the hospital based on some of their own choices. And it totally broke my heart that they just would not allow dad there. And I prayed a lot. And God reminded me of something that that child had asked for a Bible that I had that was really special. And that child had also had also, you know, indicated that they wanted it when I died. And so as I began to say, Well, how do I do this, God? He said, Well, write a letter.
So I begin to write this letter, a Danny letter. And as I was writing it, I realized that I was completely guilty of the same sin that they had committed. And actually, based on my situation, had I been successful in that I would have actually murdered three of my two because they never would have come into peeing. And I never even had thought through my own sin and the fact that this was now being played out in my family. And it was really amazing how he redeemed that, and how the child responded as a result of the letter, which not only turned around their relationship with me, it turned around their relationship with God. And it's one of the most redeeming things I've ever seen happen. But to me, it was just totally God to the rescue.
Because I went to my knees. Yeah, I have situations come up from time to time with kids. You know, I like to say, I've never been a dad of a 33 year old daughter. You know, next year, I've never been a dad of a 34 year old daughter, you know, which brings its own challenges or a 23 year old son or whatever that may be. And I find myself having to say, God, I don't know what to do here. I don't know how to handle this. I don't know how to be the dad I need to be here.
And I need you to show me I need you to father me through it. Right? Because that's the only way we're going to get through. And maybe there's a Danny letter, which we'll always call them Danny letters from now on. Maybe there's a Danny letter, right?
Or it's something else. But God knows what needs to speak to their heart. And he knows how you need to share it. You know, so it always begins with going to him and dropping to your knees and saying, Father, I need you here because I don't know how to do this.
Right? I think I might know, but you definitely know and I need you to guide me through it. We'd love for you to join us at the next boot camp. You have great opportunities to go to God on that and many other things. We go to masculine journey.org to register for the upcoming boot camp November 12th through 15th, masculine journey.org. This is the Truth Network.
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