194 | Brokenness, Fatherlessness, Reconciliation & The Path Forward (Tim Olson PART 1)
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Tim Olson
Tim Olson is an author, teacher, Principal. Pastor, and life coach with forays into audio publishing, radio hosting, and home remodeling. His understanding of father-child relationships was fostered through years of observation and application in education, coaching clients around the world, and working with the National Fathering Ministry in Minnesota and Ukraine.As a business life coach, it was through coaching family business owners that the significant connections between a father and his children (or with his own father) finally gelled into observable patterns that helped form the basis for his coaching and for his book, The Legacy of Absence. Through it all, he's found his way to helping others to discover who they are meant to be and to become that person.He and his wife, Kay, have been married for 54 years and are blessed with three children, six grandchildren, four bonus grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. They make their home in New Hope, MN.
Show Notes:
4:55 - National Fathering Ministry - https://www.dadsfirst.org/
6:03 - "Dr. Richard Green, a former superintendent of Minneapolis schools. And he said to us, if the kids come to us for kindergarten and do not have an involved father or an involved grandfather, they are already lost to us" - This conversation was the purpose for working with black urban fathers of preschool children.
6:46 - Working with fathers in Ukraine - starting a fatherhood ministry that has impacted the nation
8:06 - Ukrainian college women drawing where dad sits in the family circle
9:22 - "The father for a time was even taken out of the Russian dictionary. And and if you go back in history and I covered some of this in my book about how that worked with communism and and Marxism, ... they did their best to eliminate the father from the family and the the government was supposed to be the ones who essentially raised the children by way of the mothers...the government was in charge."
12:26 - Malachi 4:5-6
12:46 - Gordon Dalby is a great spokesperson about fathering, and he [share that].... the brokenness in this world between children and fathers reflects the brokenness between humanity and God."
14:16 - "We have to try to find the right path or we become complicit in crimes against it."
19:28 - "One of the things that I heard them say often was, 'you know, my grandfather was like this, my dad was like this, I'm like this, and my kids will be like this, and there's nothing I can do about it. It's just the cards we were dealt.' And I would say to him, You know what? That is a lie right out of the pit of hell, yes, you can change. You may not be able to change how tall you are and the color of your skin or anything like that, but you can change your personality, you can change your character quality, you can change the things you want and don't want to pass on to your kids. You can do that."
20:56 - Story of reconciliation with his own son and not wanting to pass on generational sins
31:30 - "Christ's example shows us as leaders in our areas of strength as dads to come underneath our children and our wives to lift and encourage and to praise and to pray for and to make them who God intended them to be. But you know, the moms, their wives have their areas of strength just as strong and in their job then is in their areas of strength is to come under us as fathers and to pray for us and lift us and encourage us and support us to be the best dads we can be. And so there's this mutual coming under, this mutual submissiveness, and it's the strongest, not the weakest, that submits."
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2:18 - Images from the book: present father, the involved father, the passive father and the absent father
2:49 - "You can be present physically and not present emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. And you know, that's actually even worse." Sharing statistics on risk of pathological behavior in children.
6:05 - Story from Ukraine of two fathers that work out of the home - one is absent, and one is still intentional even though not physically close - and the stark difference in the success of the kids
9:06 - Working with inmates,what do they wish they had from their dads?
10:48 - "We've realized that death is not as bad for kids as being abandoned and just just a dad who's overworking is abandonment. We all abandoned our kids. And every kid, every person has been abandoned to some extent, some so little you don't even recognize it. And we don't realize that that's what it is. We just remember the not being chosen part."
11:34 - Describing the reconciliation process
14:21 - "[Dad's role is] to prepare us to face the world on our own. And so he does that primarily by teaching us four things and developing them in us. And those four things are: self-esteem, confidence, maturity and identity. And identity is perhaps the most important because that describes who we are and whose we are.... These are perhaps the most important words that a father can say, I believe: 'You are mine. You belong to me. I love you.' That's identity."
17:17 - "How we deal with the hurt and wounds of our own father's failures, determines our ability to be good fathers and mothers, you know, to our own children.
17:38 - Quoting Richard Rohr - "If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it."
17:56 - In Louis Meade's book, he says to forgive is to set the prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner was me."
26:27 - 4 Things he shared with his kids:
26:32 - "I know that things happened in our relationship that hurt you. I said things and did things that hurt you. Even now, I didn't even know it. And I want you to know that I would never do anything like that on purpose intentionally, but I know it happened. And so I want to ask you to please forgive me for those things."
27:35 - "I am no longer your parent and you are no longer my child. Well, that sounds pretty offensive at first. I said instead, from now on, I am just your father and you are just my son."
29:27 - "It would please me more than anything to continue to be able to speak into your life."
30:15 - "No matter what you do, with your decisions and with your life, good or bad, it will never change how much I love you. That will never change."
33:01 - Quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter."
Episode Links:
Tim's book - The Legacy Of Absence
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Conversation Transcript
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