Marriage, Mentorship, and Parenting in a Digital Age w/ ###

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Parenting today comes with challenges unlike any other generation. From the pull of technology to rising anxiety levels among youth, many parents are left wondering: How do I prepare my kids for adulthood and keep my marriage strong in the process?

Jay Holland—husband, father of four, pastor, and host of the Let’s Parent on Purpose podcast—onto the show. Jay’s 25+ years in student and family ministry have given him a front-row seat to the struggles and victories of raising the next generation.

Rites of Passage and Identity in Christ​

Jay and I talked about the power of rites of passage—intentional moments that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. In a culture where adolescence often seems to stretch well into the twenties, these biblical milestones can help anchor our sons and daughters in their identity.

Jay shared how his church hosts a senior-year ceremony where mentors publicly affirm a young person’s godly qualities, pray over them, and welcome them into adulthood within the church.

Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

Technology, Anxiety, and Real-World Bravery​

Technology also plays a large role in shaping today’s youth. Jay referenced research showing the link between early smartphone use and rising anxiety. His advice?

• Give kids more freedom in the physical world—let them take real risks and develop courage.
• Limit their access to the digital world, especially before mid-high school, to protect their mental and spiritual health.

Philippians 4:6–7 reminds us to bring our anxieties to God, and part of our role as parents is to help our children do just that.

Modeling Humility and Repentance​

Jay emphasized that dad should be the first repenter in the house. Kids learn far more from watching us apologize sincerely than from a thousand lectures. This means humbling ourselves—without excuses—when we’ve been wrong, whether with our spouse or our children.

Keeping Marriage a Priority​

Even with the busyness of parenting, marriage should remain a priority. Jay and his wife model this with regular date nights, creative at-home connection, and letting their kids see that they genuinely enjoy each other. A strong marriage not only blesses your spouse but also gives your children a living example of Christ’s love for the Church.

Key Takeaways for Parents and Couples:​

• Establish rites of passage to affirm your child’s identity in Christ.
• Limit digital distractions; encourage real-world experiences.
• Surround your kids with godly mentors and community.
• Model humility by being quick to repent.
• Let your marriage be a joyful example for your children.

Raising kids in this generation is challenging—but it’s also an incredible opportunity to disciple them into maturity in Christ. As Jay reminds us, our ultimate goal is not just to launch “good kids” into the world, but to raise Christ-centered adults who will live courageously for God’s glory.

READ TRANSCRIPT​

Aaron Smith (00:42)

Hey Jay, welcome to the Marriage After God podcast. It was awesome to be on your podcast a handful of months back and when we were done talking we were like, hey, let’s get you on our show and here we are. Welcome to the Marriage After God podcast.

Jay Holland (00:58)
It’s an honor to be here. Yeah, it was a lot of fun having you and it’s fun being on this side. I don’t do a lot of these. So it’s it’s really an enjoyment when I when I get to be I do a lot of podcasts. I just don’t get to be on this side. So enjoying it.

Aaron Smith (01:11)
Well, you’re good communicator, so I feel like it’s going to be a great conversation. I loved how you did your podcast, very conversational. It’s how I like to do mine. So I hope we just have fun with this. my ultimate prayer as always is that our listeners are just blessed by this, encouraged by this, challenged by this. And as you prayed before we started, convicted by some of this maybe. So why don’t we start off with who you are, how long you’ve been married, what you do so my audience can get to know you better.

Jay Holland (01:38)
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m a follower of Jesus. I’m approaching 50 at this point. I’m in my late 40s now. I think at 48 you’re officially in your late 40s. It’s no longer mid. ⁓

Aaron Smith (01:49)
And if you’re only listening

to this, by the way, and not watching on YouTube, he does not look 49. I don’t know how old you are, you look like you’re in your early 40s or late 30s.

Jay Holland (01:55)
Yeah. ⁓

Hey, I’ll

take that. Yeah. Well, to be fair, like I couldn’t legitimately grow anything like a beard until about 30. So I’m physically behind the power curve like that, but it’s all working out at this point in my life. Yeah. So I’m, I’m a father of four, been married to Emily for like 17. So I think we celebrated our 18th anniversary this January. I do have one older daughter from a previous marriage. My wife went to be with Jesus.

When my daughter was three years old, I think I was about 28 years old. So I was married six and a half years. and then now I’ve been married 18 years. so we’ve been raising a blended family from day one. so Emily adopted my oldest daughter, Brooklyn, then we have two boys together and, then we adopted a little girl out of foster care. So there’s currently three in the house, all teenagers. and then I’m a full time family and student pastor in South Florida.

So I run our youth ministry, oversee other stuff, and then kind of got into the podcast world. Probably seven, eight years ago, really, the first intention was to minister to the moms and dads in our church, because I realized, like, I’m a lot better youth pastor if there’s a spiritually engaged mom and dad. and podcasting was just a way to get into their ears and kind of help with marriage and parenting stuff. So that’s kind of broad picture for fun.

Aaron Smith (03:10)
Yeah.

Jay Holland (03:18)
I like playing basketball. make pins. So I already have my old man hobby. I make pins on a wood lathe. Yeah.

Aaron Smith (03:22)
Yeah,

I saw that on your website. So like pens like you write with. Do you have one you could show me? I was actually curious. I was like, I’ve never seen someone’s bio that says I make pens.

Jay Holland (03:28)
Yeah, yeah, so hold on.

Aaron Smith (03:34)
So for those of you that are watching on YouTube, you’ll get to see this, but if you’re listening.

Jay Holland (03:34)
Yeah, OK. All right, yeah, so that’s

that’s like out of a hybrid. That’s that’s actually a wooden blank that has been dyed with ink, like injected with ink. And then I turn it down from a block and then assemble it. And then this is like a really cool one. It’s like a burled piece of wood. And it’s a OK. Yeah, I forgot. And then it’s it’s actually a fountain pen. So yeah, no, no. Most are just ink pens. I have a few pencils.

Aaron Smith (03:51)
Can you bring it up higher? It seems a little low.

⁓ are they all fountain bin?

Jay Holland (04:02)
that I make. This is like a full promo advertisement here. Basically, I, I, there’s an old guy in our, yeah, it’s really fun. It’s therapeutic. So like at this point I have all of the equipment in my garage and from start to finish hour and a half, something like that. I can go from all like pieces to turning and assembling and finishing a really nice pin. And so

Aaron Smith (04:05)
I was just curious, what does it look like to make pens?

Jay Holland (04:25)
you know, when you’re in the middle of raising kids and have a ministry job, it’s nice to have something that gets done. And yeah, these get done. And then I end up giving most of them away as gifts. But this past year, I realized, gosh, this starting to feel like fishing where like my hobby is going to make me broke. So like I threw up a little Etsy store and I try to like, if I can sell one pin for every two or three I give away.

Aaron Smith (04:33)
yeah.

Yeah.

Jay Holland (04:52)
my wife will stay happy and quiet. And so that’s the deal.

Aaron Smith (04:56)
Well, I’m not going to promise I won’t be asking for one as a gift. They look really cool. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve done some woodworking in the past and I really love working with wood. And there is something really spiritually and mentally therapeutic about finishing a project because with writing books and you may get to the end of like writing a book, so you get a product, you get the book in hand, but then we got to sell it. And that’s like a never ending, you know, circle of

Jay Holland (04:59)
Sure, all right.

Yes.

Right, yeah.

Aaron Smith (05:22)
just trying to figure out marketing and then everything like raising kids doesn’t ever end, marriage doesn’t ever end. Like there’s always, it’s always a work in progress. And so that’s cool that you have that little project that.

Jay Holland (05:31)
Yeah.

Man, I recommend turning pins to anybody that wants something finished in their life.

Aaron Smith (05:37)
It’s ruining pants.

Yeah, I’ve had friends

that, you know, make some handmade knives. ⁓ Yeah, just there’s something, there’s probably something to be said about it, you know, just as men wanting to work with our hands, wanting to build something, create something that there’s art involved, there’s technique and all of the things that are involved in creating a product that works. That’s pretty cool thing. And those pens are beautiful. Good job. I love wood.

Jay Holland (05:45)
Yeah, that’d be cool too.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you.

Aaron Smith (06:10)
So I love working with Wood. Thanks for sharing that. So what’s your, do you have like a, what’s your Etsy called? Might as well.

Jay Holland (06:15)
I don’t know,

turnings and burnings, I think, or something like that. Yeah, so yeah, I bought, it’s actually pretty neat. So in our youth ministry, with our seniors each year, our graduating seniors, we do this rite of passage family fellowship where, so the seniors who are willing to do it, we have a big kind of church dinner dessert thing, they each ask an adult mentor to speak into their life. And we’ve spent years.

Aaron Smith (06:17)
turnings and burnings and you make and turn and.

Jay Holland (06:38)
teaching them on identity, manhood and womanhood. And so we have this night where they come up and each of them has an adult mentor that spends like five to seven minutes speaking into their life of these are the qualities of manhood or womanhood I see in you. This is my charge for you going forward. And then we bring them all down and lay hands on them and pray over them and say, we are now looking at you as adult members of our church. Like no longer are you kids. Welcome to the adult club. There are absolutely no privileges. It’s just responsibility.

but you’re one of us now. And so in that, I’ll write a personal letter to each of them. But this year kind of as a neat fun aside, I made them all pins about this size, but they were like a solid wood and I bought a laser engraver and put each of their names on each. So that’s the burnings part, because now I can engrave names. Yeah.

Aaron Smith (07:26)
laser engraving.

You brought up rite of passage or passage to adulthood. Let’s talk about that for a second because that is something that we, I’ve seen it done in various ways over the last handful of years from very, cause like I’m not there yet. I’m getting very close. My oldest is 12. He’s turning 13 this year. The first teenager in our house is happening this year, which blows my mind.

Jay Holland (07:33)
Mm Sure.

Okay.

Aaron Smith (07:51)
But I have some other friends that have, they’re a couple years ahead of me and they’ve had kids that they’ve done their own various versions of rites of passage or introduction to manhood type thing. it’s something we don’t have really in our culture now. even worse so, what are they considering?

Jay Holland (07:57)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

No, no.

Aaron Smith (08:15)
Like adulthood is not, it’s no longer like 18 anymore. It’s like, you’re not really ready to launch until you’re in your mid twenties, you know, even, you know, early thirties and it’s most men, most are mostly boys. They’re not growing up. So what, what is our responsibility in the church? Like you, you, not every church has this. What you just talked about of inviting these young men at what are the, what are their ages? Is it

Jay Holland (08:19)
No, it’s so delayed. Yeah. Right.

No.

So

we kind of do it, their senior year. So they’re 17, 18 years old. And I have tried to open it up to like, look, if you weren’t ready this year and you want to do it next year, I would happily do somebody who’s 19 or 20 or 21 years old, because I think it’s so important. You just have to have the first one willing to break the mold and say, hey, I miss this and I still want to do it. But it kind of started, I was at a church in Nashville that did something like this. And then it’s just evolved from there.

Aaron Smith (08:46)
Senior year, so 17, 18, gotcha.

Jay Holland (09:11)
I’ve been down here in South Florida at Covenant Fellowship Baptist Church for 17 years. We started here, my son, when my wife was pregnant with my son. And just in researching, Aaron, realizing that most cultures historically had some point where they, first off, adolescence did not exist. So like the teenage years, like adolescence was invented

Aaron Smith (09:33)
Yeah, this gap.

Jay Holland (09:37)
basically, you know, after World War I or World War II to sell things to a new group of people. But there was always in just about every culture that you can find around the world, a time where they stopped looking at you as a child and started looking at you as an adult member of the tribe, whatever the tribe meant. And so this is one of the things every year we spend some time teaching in student ministry.

and about what is a real man, what is a real woman. And I’ll a lot of times use some of these references and they’re pretty wild, like everything from like the Hamar cow jumping, I think in Ethiopia, where it’s like you have to jump over five cows. And, you know, once you hit the other side, you’re good. There’s this one in South America that’s like horrendous. It’s these bullet ants, which supposedly have the most venomous bite of any insect in the world. And they make gloves and they stitch

Aaron Smith (10:26)
⁓

Jay Holland (10:29)
the ants into the gloves where their biting side is like on the interior of their glove. You have to put your hands in and then like wear the gloves for 15 minutes or 30 minutes as these ants are stinging you and you’re hallucinating and passing out. And then I think you have to do that like five times. But once you do, you are now a man in their culture and you kind of know you have what it takes because you just endured this. So you have this all over the world.

Aaron Smith (10:54)
Hmm.

Jay Holland (10:56)
And then you have in the United States, what you get your driver’s license or you have a sweet 16 party or okay, you’re 18. Congratulations. You can buy lottery tickets and tobacco or you’re 21. Now you can buy beer. This makes you a man or this makes you a woman. Um, and so we thought, okay, if culture’s not doing it, then how can we do it? Because we are a culture. We’re a city within a city. And so, uh, kind of our methodology is, um,

like for my what what we encourage parents to do and some do some don’t like what I did is when my son hit about 12 years old I had another group of dads and we took them away on a fishing trip we I think we had four or five boys and we just had an awesome time fishing and in the evening we would sit and just talk about the biblical qualities of manhood and so I use Robert Lewis’s from Men’s Fraternity a real man R-E-A-L

A real man rejects passivity, expects God’s greater reward, accepts responsibility, and leads courageously. And then we made up within the women who were leaders in our youth group. I couldn’t find a corresponding female one, so we made it up. And so a real woman rejects worldly identity, expects God’s greater reward, acts with strength and wisdom, and loves others boldly. And so every year,

We’ll take a time in youth ministry and we’ll teach first off identity from Genesis 1-27 that like we are made in the image of God and that’s our core identity. But then identity as a man and a woman are not based on like how macho you are or how big you are or something like that. The godly characteristics of identity are the things that we just mentioned. And we talk about how like it’s important for ladies to be able to identify this.

in men because you want to run from boys and you want to ultimately end up with a man and the same thing for men that you you want to run from some girl who’s getting all of her identity by her body or by her you know job position or something like that exactly yeah and so the on the guy side the four like i started with my boys when they were like three and i had a friend who said this and i just picked it up you’re a man that means god made you strong to take care of other people

Aaron Smith (12:56)
from who she’s dating.

Jay Holland (13:11)
And it’s like, is everything in the world that like, I want to teach about manhood. First off, you are a man. Like I want to affirm that in you now. You might be a really little one, but you are a man. You know, if you don’t, if you don’t think you are, check your drawers. It’ll, it’ll help approve that you are. and being a man that means that God made you strong for a reason. It’s not for yourself. It’s for others. And so a real man uses their strength to take care of other people. And a boy uses their strength for themselves to get things from other people.

And so, you I use this as kind of like a disciplinary conversation, not a spanking conversation, but with my boys as they were growing up. Hey, are you using your strength to take care of your brother or your sister? And so that all comes to a head their senior year when we do this right of so over the course of their senior year, we try to have every one of our seniors who are going to participate take part by having one of our youth.

where they give their full testimony. So like 15 to 20 minutes written out and then kids get asked questions for 15 to 20 minutes. And I have them give it to me beforehand so I make it PG and we don’t go. And it’s also like try to help them. This is the story of Jesus in you. This is not all of the bad things that you’ve done in your life. And so they have to do that public sharing of who they are in Christ. And then we have this ceremony that we do together.

Aaron Smith (14:20)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Holland (14:36)
And I encourage moms and dads to also add in a couple of other pieces. One is kind of an extended family and friend dinner that’s more than just a grad party. It’s kind of a dinner where everybody there speaks some kind of word of encouragement into that young man or young woman. And then if you can get some kind of memento to give them, like, you know, for instance, if you could make a pen or a knife or something, not like an iPhone, not something that’s disposable, but something that marks the occasion.

Aaron Smith (14:58)
Yeah.

toward.

Jay Holland (15:05)
And what’s really neat is I’ve had so many of the kids who’ve walked through this who said like I just really didn’t understand it until we did it but that was one of the most special nights of my life of like when do you get the church laying hands on you and praying for you? When do you get this group of adults saying I believe in you? And so that’s kind of, I don’t know how we got on that subject but it’s a great subject and that’s kind of the big picture of how we do it.

Aaron Smith (15:15)
Yep.

Yeah, well, you brought up the pens and the rite of passage. It’s a good conversation to have. think parents, all parents, Christian parents specifically, are constantly wondering like, well, what does this look like? And like you said, we have these really, you know, meaningless, you know, points in time, like, oh, you’re, you’re, you’re 16, you’re 18, you’re 21, you know, and we’re looking forward to those dates for very fleshly reasons, not, um,

Jay Holland (15:32)
⁓ yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right, yeah.

Aaron Smith (15:58)
I’m being incorporated into the community. I’m not, you know, I’m not now being looked at as a man that has a responsibility in the church, in my home, in this world, in my city. And it’s something that is, I feel like it’s definitely designed. I don’t want to say there’s like one person that had this plan, but like, think the enemy has definitely influenced this design of removing these

these points. You you look in the Old Testament and the fathers would lay the hands on their sons and give blessings to them. And that was like, hey, now I’m passing on the responsibility to you. Like you are now seen as, you know, in our home, a patriarch. You are now a man in our family. And we don’t have that. We don’t have that. And so my question is, you gave some tips on how you kind of incorporated that as a father in your own home, but as

Jay Holland (16:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (16:54)
as a father myself and my wife as a mother in our home, how can we build that in now showing them like you give that example of like, you God made you a man and he made you strong to protect. That’s something that I bring up with one of my sons that kind of uses his strength sometimes in a wrong way. And I talked to him and I said, hey, you know, God made you strong so you could protect people, not so you can hurt them. You your strength is meant to help people not harm them. But that’s just one

Jay Holland (17:17)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (17:22)
piece of the puzzle. are some ways that you incorporate that in your home? I mean, you have some adults that you’ve already launched off and you have some that are about to launched off. What can we be doing? Our listeners are probably like, yeah, how do I help my son realize that he’s going to be a man one day? ⁓

Jay Holland (17:30)
Right.

Yeah, I wish I could, right.

I wish I could bullet it out perfectly, but I just think of things. I’ll just tell you things that I feel like have been impactful. Not even if I necessarily set out to do these, but as I look back, one has really been my collection of friends having other men who are spiritually aligned like me, but don’t look like me and act like me.

so that my boys get different examples of what a godly man looks like. Like, I really hope that they look at me and see that I’m a godly man and a good husband. But, you know, wiring, my two boys aren’t exactly like me. You know, they have traits of mine, but they’re not exactly like me. And I want them to see guys that just kind of are wired completely different than me, but love Jesus. And so I do think that one of them is that.

Another is I feel this conviction that dad needs to be the first repenter in the house. And so I need to model humbling myself and apologizing to my wife, to my kids and not making excuses when I do not be like, well, you did this and I blew my top. So I’m sorry for blowing my top. Just I blew my top and I was wrong. I didn’t handle it right. Please forgive me. Like asking forgiveness from them, I think more than anything I could

teach, you know, I could like I teach lessons on forgiveness, but they don’t remember. I don’t even remember what I say when I teach. Yeah, I remember when people apologize to me like that means something. And so it’s going to mean something when somebody of power and authority humbles themselves to apologize. I do think, Aaron, it was really formative about the age that your son is that.

Aaron Smith (18:53)
Mm-hmm.

But they remember seeing… yeah.

Jay Holland (19:20)
12, 13 year old age to kind of start that manhood, official manhood journey process and to make it fun. know, we, so we did that. And then I did a separate like passport to purity trip with each of my boys. One of them loved every part of it except the sex talk part. And then the other was kind of like, you know, cool with all of it and had questions and everything. But one of them like buried their head in a pillow.

And just did not want to look at me or talk to me. And we had it like on a CD. So like we’re driving to go watch a football game or something, you know, loved every part of it except the whole kind of point of the weekend. ⁓ But I think that like early teenage preteen somewhere around in there where like you get on the front end of introducing some of this sex and sexuality talk to them. But we did the manhood manhood getaway separate than any kind of.

Aaron Smith (19:58)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Holland (20:14)
sex talk. And it was really cool to do it with a couple other people.

Aaron Smith (20:15)
Yeah, I feel like nowadays the

sex talk, it has to happen earlier and earlier. I’m stressing about it because I’m like all of the things I need to bring up. I’m like, oh, I hate it. I’m like, I don’t want to talk about this stuff.

Jay Holland (20:26)
It’s violating. Yeah. There is a pretty incredible resource.

Yeah, there’s a pretty incredible resource. I think it’s put out by Proven Ministries called The Sex Talk, and it’s actually kind of a subscription based thing. We subscribe to it for our church, our members to access. And it’s actually from preschool through they’re engaged to be married, coaching you on how to have the conversations of like,

okay, at this agent stage, what are the different conversations that need to be had? So it’s really well done. there’s some of it’s in like YouTube teaching, there’s I think a podcast that goes with each one. But that’s.

Aaron Smith (21:04)
I’m looking at it

right now. feel like I’ve seen this before. I feel like maybe they reached out to me. Maybe. I’m looking at it right now. You can keep going.

Jay Holland (21:13)
Yeah, but it’s

been good. But yeah, you’re right. It’s not like one talk’s gonna master it. And the funniest thing in the world is like, just talk to your 12 year old and you can get them to commit to be pure until the day they’re married because that stuff sounds so abhorrent to them. But then realizing like the futility of 12 year old commitments once those hormones start raging and they’re, know, two years later, three years later.

Aaron Smith (21:29)
I know.

So you brought up the men you have around you. So your relationships, your community, your fellowship, which is, I mean, it’s biblical where the Bible tells us, know, bad company, corrupts good morals. Like when you have the wrong people around you, you’re going to have the wrong influence. Having the right people, having other men that our children can look up to, other women also on the flip side of that, that our daughters can look up to on what it looks like to be a godly woman, godly man.

Jay Holland (21:46)
Mm hmm. Yep. Mm hmm. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (22:09)
And this is this is actually a big one for Probably many of the men that listen to my show I just know men have a hard time keeping close relationships being open being transparent and how necessary it is that we cannot Trust that our own example is good enough Because it’s not going to be now we are the most influential person in our son’s but having other believers like how can we

Jay Holland (22:18)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Aaron Smith (22:34)
And how can we expect our sons to grow up and have good people around them and walk with other men if we don’t know how to do it ourselves, if we can’t open up and be honest and transparent and have men in our lives that speak into our lives and tell us when we’re being dummies. And then I love that you also – that second part of showing an example to your kids of being the first repenter, knowing how to apologize. That’s something that’s very difficult.

Jay Holland (22:42)
Yeah.

Right.

Aaron Smith (23:03)
very difficult to help yourself and do that in front of your kids. But there’s been so many times I’ve had to go to my kids and apologize to them. I’m like, I wasn’t very nice. And I snapped at you and you didn’t deserve that. All you were doing was asking or so many times having to do that. And then also having to repent to them about when me and my wife aren’t aligned, when we didn’t communicate well with each other. We were bad examples and having to, we both usually like we get in the car and we’re driving somewhere and we’ll be like, Hey,

Jay Holland (23:04)
It is.

Aaron Smith (23:30)
Earlier this happened, we’re so sorry. We shouldn’t have done that. This isn’t right. We love each other.

Jay Holland (23:33)
That’s good. Yeah.

And by the way, I also think the importance of pursuing your wife as formation of manhood and womanhood of the other kids in your home. Like we have a we say we have a date night every week and that’s our aspirational goal. And we get somewhat near. It’s a little bit easier right now than it is once school starts and the sports season starts.

Aaron Smith (23:43)
Yeah.

Dear.

Jay Holland (23:59)
It’s also easier when you’re not paying for babysitting and then going out to pay for something to do. And it’s like, I need a mortgage just to go on a date. But you got to get creative on those things. Like, you know, you can swap out with other friends. There’s a lot of things. But I mean, our our kids know that dad and mom are going on a date like that. That’s happening. Like, yeah, yeah. Like I want them I want them to think that like, you know, marriage is fun.

Aaron Smith (24:09)
Yeah.

We like each other.

Jay Holland (24:26)
and that like marriage is enjoyable and then it’s not some drudgery or chore. So again, and then every once in while, like, you you vocalize what you’re trying to do and just be like, Hey, I want you guys to see like dad makes it a priority to date mom. And one day you’re going to be a husband. And it’s, I expect that you’re going to make that a priority too.

Aaron Smith (24:27)
Bye.

Yeah.

Well, I think that just to add to what you’re saying, the creativity part is, you know, because things are expensive and having to pay a babysitter and it’s why my wife and I haven’t had, we haven’t had a consistent date night in a long time because we’ve been in the heavy lifting season of six little littles and yeah, but there’s things that we do. Like there’s times when, you know, we have a hot tub and like, hey, you me and mommy, we’re going to go and we’re going to go spend some time in the hot tub and they’re like, oh, we want to go. like, no, it’s just us.

Jay Holland (24:59)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. my six.

Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.

Aaron Smith (25:15)
And they’re like, okay. And so they get the whole separate thing and they see that we’re wanting to be alone, wanting to enjoy each other’s company, wanting time apart. So they see that and so that’s a free thing.

Jay Holland (25:19)
Right.

Yeah, and I think that’s

really like it’s helpful to bring up like dating is not some biblical mandate. I can’t look in the Bible and look at all the times that like Abraham took Sarah out on a date or something like that or that Paul commanded it. ⁓ It’s a it’s a cultural thing. It’s a way to show love. But I think it’s that intentional pursuit of time. And if you have the ability and the means to get out, great. But if not, like you use the lock on your door, you you you block out.

Aaron Smith (25:39)
Yeah.

Jay Holland (25:52)
that time and we were in a season like that. know, when we had three littles, we didn’t have six, but we had three littles in the house and there’s been a couple other major times where I have a son who had leukemia and so he got diagnosed with leukemia at five years old. We went through three and a half years of treatment, had some good years and then he relapsed as an eighth grader and so then we went through another year, year and a half.

Aaron Smith (26:08)
again.

Jay Holland (26:15)
And by God’s grace, he’s doing amazing. His brother was a perfect sibling match. So once the relapse hips happen, we got a bone marrow transplant and he’s been perfect ever since. But with all of that, I mean, there were times where it’s like, you know, we can’t go out or we go out and he spikes a fever and now I’m in the hospital and now I have PTSD about going out because, you know, the last time I went out, I ended up separated from my family for five days.

Aaron Smith (26:26)
Mm.

Yeah.

That happened,

Jay Holland (26:43)
But it’s like, okay, so you make time in your neighborhood, you make time, you just, you intentionally make time for your spouse and you make sure your kids know. Like it’s not hidden time. It’s, it’s everybody knows that mom and dad get time together. Yes. Yeah.

Aaron Smith (26:58)
And we like each other and we want that time.

Another little thing that we do is, so my wife loves to garden. And one of her favorite things is just to go look at the garden. And so I’ll be like, hey, you want to go look at the garden? And she’ll be like, yes. And so we tell the kids like, hey, we’re going to be out back, you know, walk. And we just, walking around, just us, or we’re watering them together. So there’s lots of little things that we get to do that the kids see that we’re just want to be with each other, going, you know, doing something really small, but probably big to them, think.

Jay Holland (27:05)
Mm-hmm.

Sweet. How big a

garden do you have?

Aaron Smith (27:30)
she, we have a, so in the backyard, she’s just got a bunch of flowers and plants and little trees. I love gardening too. love, like landscaping. So I’ve been, we have an acre, that we’ve been landscaping over the last handful of years. So yeah, I just got, what’s it called? Decompose granite that we’re to be making a little pathway. I’m going to do it myself. And so, if you came and saw it’s hard to describe, but like just the grass and the plants and all the things we love all of that.

Jay Holland (27:42)
Have fun.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (27:55)
So we’ll

just go walk around the backyard. Although mosquitoes have been super bad this year. So we go out there and it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, you’re just getting attacked. And it’s like, it’s never been like this before and it’s making it miserable. yeah, so yeah, we both love gardening and it is a fun little thing that we get to do almost every day just to go out and walk around with each other and do some watering or talk about what we want to do next. So that’s a fun little thing.

Jay Holland (28:04)
Crazy. Huh. Interesting.

sweet.

Aaron Smith (28:22)
Yeah. So I just, I want to keep talking about this, this man thing. This is in women and actually it’s in, I think it’s a, it’s a detriment to our society. People getting married much later or not getting married at all, staying with their parents longer and longer. I just was reminded, I forgot that the government did this years ago, that you were able to stay on your parents’ insurance until you’re 26. And that, that,

Jay Holland (28:35)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Smith (28:49)
just boggles my mind. It boggles my mind. And so there’s some younger couples that we had in our church and they were just talking about how they were on their parents’ insurance until they were 26. I just forgot about that. And I was like, I mean, because I’m 41. So it’s been a while since I’ve been on someone else’s insurance. And I was like, my gosh, I cannot believe that’s a real thing. But how emasculating is that? Not just that, but almost every aspect of society just

Jay Holland (29:04)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (29:16)
making you never feel like an adult, never making you feel like you have agency and responsibility, especially just in the criminal justice system with all the laws and how everything is working. Everything is going against, you’re not capable. You’re not good enough. You’re not a man. You’re not a woman. And so live like it. Have games. Something I recently heard is that the toy market just in general is like

higher than it ever has been in history, just sales on toys. And the highest demographic that buys toys is adults. Not adults getting it for their kids, adults getting it for themselves.

Jay Holland (29:50)
Yeah, right. Yeah, well there’s whole Lego

lines for adults now. And Legos are fun, like I dream, I love building them with my kids and now I don’t really want to build Legos anymore. But.

Aaron Smith (29:58)
My kid’s lovely.

My wife has a

little minifigure, like I said, mean, a collection because she loves collecting things. But it just shows that there’s this lack of, and I don’t think it’s a lack of desire. Maybe it turns into that, there’s been this lack of men raising up men, fathers pushing their children. Like I just think about the bird scenario and the nest. They push their young out to get them to go fly.

Jay Holland (30:05)
huh. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (30:30)
And we’re all afraid to do that. We’re all afraid to tell our kids that, no, you can no longer act like a child anymore. You’re a man now. You’re a woman now. Let’s behave that way.

Jay Holland (30:40)
Yeah.

Yeah. So let me throw something in there that’s not a yeah, but it’s a, it’s an observation. so I’ve done quite a bit of mission trip stuff now to, central Asia, South Asia. and you know, one of the things over there is you have the norm as a multi-generational home where it’s, it’s three, sometimes even four generations.

Aaron Smith (31:00)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Holland (31:05)
living in the same home. so, you know, on one hand, that means grandparents, like parents are expected that they’re going to be taking care of their parents whenever, you know, they’re in their older age. They’re not all going to retirement homes. But it also means that quite often, you know, you have your children and you raise your children. But when you get married, you know, ⁓ son brings his new bride in and they just have a room in the house.

Aaron Smith (31:25)
Mm.

Jay Holland (31:30)
And it was really like paradigm shifting for me growing up in just kind of the Western nuclear family mindset of like where I would consider that absolute failure, like, my gosh, if I was like married and still living at home, that would be failure. But it’s a lot of because of the way that we’ve constructed our whole culture and society and we’re just more affluent, right? So we have more money, we have more ability to spread out, we have a lot of space.

But what I noticed in those multi-generational households is that they’re tended to always be a man available in the house because even if dad, you know, middle generation was out working, there was a grandpa around to just be physically present for the kids. And just because son moves in and is married doesn’t mean they’re like, they’re not, they’re freeloading.

Like they’re working, they’re working like crazy, but they’ve got built in people to help watch their kids and they’re not sending their kids off to childcare and everything. But, but there’s an expectation kind of all the way through that like we are a household for generations and we exist for the generations. Like I’m not just raising you up to launch you out and be an independent person. You are a part of the family.

Aaron Smith (32:36)
next

Jay Holland (32:47)
And like, it’s not that one day you’re gonna have a family, like you are a part of a family and you’re gonna get married and that’s just gonna be a bigger part of the family. But it’s like, that’s actually a much more biblical, like when we read the Bible, that’s how they were living largely. And it, I don’t know, it just made, I don’t have conclusions with it, Aaron, but it made me think, what is, you know, when you swim in a water, you don’t realize that the water tastes a certain way or is polluted or whatever. And it made me think, okay, what?

Aaron Smith (33:03)
Yeah.

Jay Holland (33:13)
What are some broken manhood, womanhood things in my culture just from the way that households are set up? And I do think that there is that real absence of the older generations in a lot. You know, we go away to see grandparents and, like my kids, one of their grandparents lives in town and then one set of grandparents used to live next door, but they live in West Virginia and they come stay with us for a bit. But it’s just really interesting, like how much

of that long-term responsibility is not a natural part of our Western household that has kind of been the way of things. And then I think that does help break down society. I think it ultimately goes to some of the stuff that you’re talking about where people are children way into adulthood. They don’t take responsibility. They don’t know they have what it takes. But it’s…

Because for a lot of them, it’s like your ultimate goal in life is to take care of yourself. And it’s like, that’s not a biblical goal. You know, my ultimate goal in life is that I am a competent human being, not only able to take care of myself, but be a blessing to many other people. And I think that self-centered goal just really makes that fall short.

Aaron Smith (34:13)
Hmm.

Yeah, I feel like in many ways there’s parts of society, parts of our culture that are rebelling against what we’ve seen over the last handful of 40, 50, 60 years from the results of this perpetual boyhood. There’s families that are now building multi-generational homes. This is a new level of quote unquote success. Success isn’t having your mansion.

Jay Holland (34:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (34:51)
it’s having a homestead and having your family, your children and their children all have homes nearby. so I see that there’s a desire in culture, there’s a desire in people to get back to more of how things used to be. The cost of things, the way we’ve been told to raise our, like you said, we need to be for ourselves and we need to

Jay Holland (34:53)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (35:17)
have a career and our life needs to look a certain way. But it all is void of service. It’s void of what is a Christian man, a godly man, how do they see the world? How do they perceive their family? Not that our family should be the ultimate goal is the only thing that we focus on. I think that’s a detriment on another level of all you focus on is the generations. All you focus on is your own core

Jay Holland (35:34)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (35:42)
group and then you don’t have any outward focus of you know if the fellowship with the brethren you know the other believers in your life and having a care for them but

Jay Holland (35:46)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, Aaron, I think that’s

one of the other, like, subtle teaching things is, and this takes some real intentionality, even as a believer who knows I’m supposed to be involved in ministry.

that it’s not a bunch of, like, we’re a bunch of people in a house that have our own silo ministries. Like, Dad’s involved in youth ministry and Mom’s involved in women’s ministry and the kids go to kids ministry. But a really cool exercise to doing your house is to figure out, what are we about? Like, what are the unique characteristics of our house and how can we serve Jesus together? And, you know, depending on the different stages of life you’re in, like when you’ve got a bunch of littles, that’s gonna look one way.

Aaron Smith (36:06)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jay Holland (36:26)
how it’s looking in our house right now is actually pretty cool. We’re serving the Lord together through my kids having their friends over. Like my son plays on a sports team and we’re the house that they want to spend the night at. We’re the house and what do we do? We have dinner, we sit around the table, we pray, we ask them, what were your highs and lows? What did you fail at this week? And what was…

Aaron Smith (36:39)
Yeah.

Jay Holland (36:54)
And we want to like even in that normalize like failures a part of life and you fail because you’re trying right? You know, if you’re not failing you probably didn’t try anything hard enough but you know, we’ve my daughter’s got a friend who Being in our house is really special to her like there’s something that she gets out of being in our house But we also when those friends are not there we try to have some conversations about that and and just help our kids see hey do you see that like your kid your friends like

they’re getting something when they’re here. How many of them have moms and dads that are praying before they eat or are even having meals around the table or are even married? And so I think that we are a team on ministry with Jesus together. You always want to have some element of that and you also realize it’s going to look different at every season of life that you’re in.

Aaron Smith (37:41)
Yeah, I love that the idea of showing them the fruit of what they’re doing, like, hey, which gives them then purpose and value of like, we’re not just having friends over, we’re not just hanging out. Like we are being examples and representatives, whether we’re having our friends over or going to this game or in the car with a friend, you know, we represent something and it is actually having an effect. So you made me think of something, my daughter loves to

Jay Holland (37:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Aaron Smith (38:09)
write letters and, you know, draw pictures and she’s just very outward focused. She’s very, was extroverted. gets, think she gets that from me, but she’s even more so she was like my mom. My mom is like Uber extroverted. And, so my daughter’s like, want to, you know, she made, we made some flower pots because we have all these gardens and we we went and sent a letter. this was a handful of months ago. We did it to a few neighbors, but we, we gave like a little vase of flowers.

Jay Holland (38:16)
Mm

Aaron Smith (38:34)
and a little letter and we gave that to a neighbor down the street. And we just saw the neighbor walking down and her, was the husband. And we’re like, Hey, how’s it going? And he’s like, I’m doing okay. And, and then we just said, Hey, how’s your wife? And he was quiet. And he’s like, you know, she, passed away a couple of months ago. And we’re like, what? She, the, the, the wife that we gave the card to, we happened to give it to her on her birthday. We didn’t know it was her birthday.

Jay Holland (38:51)
well.

Aaron Smith (39:00)
And she was so touched by it and she passed away like a few weeks after we gave it to her. Yeah. And just, told that to our daughter and she was, we were just so thankful that we were able to bless her. We had no idea. We’re just doing this one that she’s like, I just want to make some flowers and give to our neighbors. And you just never know the influence that you’re going to have in someone’s life just by doing what you do.

Jay Holland (39:06)
Wow.

Mm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Aaron Smith (39:26)
You know when you love God and you use the gifts that God’s given you Like we we didn’t smell like we’re like hey, she’s gonna pass away soon. Let’s bring her some flowers We just randomly did it. She was so surprised so taken aback and Thanked us for him and it was her birthday. We didn’t know that and then she passed away a couple weeks later and Her husband was really touched by that and so we don’t know what kind of effect that had on him but he was really emotional about it and thankful also, but

It’s a cool thing to be able to invite your children into what do we do? Like you were just talking about, what do we do as a family to show people the love of Christ in our homes, outside of our homes and our neighborhoods? I think that’s a really powerful thing that each one of us, all of you listening right now, just to consider that, what does your family do? How do you represent Christ in your neighbors’ lives, in the community around you? It’s good question to ask.

Jay Holland (39:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s typically not like I have to invent this whole new thing in my life. It’s like these things are already a present in my life. I just need to be intentional about them.

Aaron Smith (40:26)
Yeah.

And that’s really all it is. That’s what a marriage after God is. It’s what a just a life after God is. What has God given me and how can I be a good steward of it? So I love that. think we, there’s tons of stuff we can keep talking about with this idea of rites of passage and manhood. But I’d love to know what are some other issues you’ve been seeing? You’re in youth ministry. ⁓ Is it mainly high school, it sounds like?

Jay Holland (40:51)
Mm-hmm. No,

no middle school, high school, probably 50-50 and then I oversee our children’s ministry but don’t have direct hands on with that.

Aaron Smith (41:02)
I could probably guess, but what are some of the prevailing issues you’re seeing right now in the young people in our culture?

Jay Holland (41:12)
Yeah, I would say, huge is identity. You know, we’ve talked a lot about that manhood and womanhood, but it goes more core than that. But I think that’s huge. The other is anxiety. And so, you know, when we were little, if you if things were like really bad, you’d be like, I’m going to like, I’m going to run away from home. That was kind of like you’re, you know, thrown down that like

Aaron Smith (41:23)
Bye.

I’m

Jay Holland (41:35)
Joker card or whatever of like, this

Aaron Smith (41:37)
here. I’m here.

Jay Holland (41:37)
is my wild card. Things are beyond my control or I can’t stand this anymore. We are in a generation now where their version of I’m going to run away from home is I’m going to kill myself. And and they typically don’t mean it, but, you know, sometimes they do. But even like verbalizing that, I went through plenty of loneliness and sadness and hard times growing up. But that idea of I’m going to kill myself was

Aaron Smith (41:46)
Mm.

Jay Holland (42:02)
very foreign. And so in some ways that’s been normalized, but it’s just a, you know, it’s a symptom of this prevalent, super high anxiety that, our kids are living in and they are not living in the same world that you and I grew up in. the, and there’s actually a fantastic book. It’s not a Christian book, but, highly recommend to any parent reading called anxious generation. And it’s walking through

the astronomical rise in anxiety and anxiety-based mental disorders that are happening in our young adults. And they are absolutely correlated with the invention of the iPhone, then with the invention of social media, and then the invention of the like button on the social media things. And that was kind of the real steep marker because now all of a sudden I have instantaneous feedback all of the time.

on what people think about me. So this anxiety, you know, when we were young, if people got together for something, maybe you heard about it, maybe you didn’t. Now you see every intimate detail of it. If somebody said something bad about you, then those, you know, a few limited people heard it. Now it’s broadcast for everybody. If something bad happened on the other side of the world,

Maybe you saw it in the newspaper the next day, or maybe you happen to be home for the 630 evening world news, but probably not, right? Because you know, what kid sits and reads the newspaper. Now you hear about every bat, like all of our kids know that there’s a war in Russia and Ukraine. All of our kids know that there’s this conflict in Israel and Gaza. They know about the floods that just happened in Texas. They know about

Aaron Smith (43:23)
Yeah, maybe.

Jay Holland (43:44)
every major conflict happening in the world and they can’t do anything about it. And so there’s this baseline level of anxiety of just living in our culture. And that’s on top of, know, if you don’t go to college, then, you know, you’re going to be a destitute bum, except college costs four times what it did for your mom and dad. ⁓ Yes. Yeah. Right. Right. So there are like I.

Aaron Smith (44:04)
And then you’ll never be able to pay it off and you’ll never be to get a job and you’ll never be to buy a house. ⁓

Jay Holland (44:12)
When this kind of initially started I just used to think well, maybe they’re weak, know, maybe we just have a weak generation, but I’m actually really impressed with this generation. I Gen alpha is is I really admire them And I see a lot of go-getters. I see a lot of very creative inventive kids You know one of the cool things about YouTube is they can learn anything and I have kids that are Masters of things that I would have never even dreamed how to get into a lot more entrepreneurs

but then a lot more very stuck kids afraid of taking risks. And so, you know, one of the anxious generation prescriptions was that parents need to be far less restrictive of their kids in the physical world and far more restrictive in the digital world because that like, that was a direct correlation to anxiety and being stuck.

Like we need to let our kids learn to be brave in the real world and we need to not give them such quick access to the whole world through their phones. But that’s a major, major trend.

Aaron Smith (45:10)
Hmm.

That’s it makes sense. So I was you were talking about anxiety and being able to Someone you make a mistake and it could have been a one-time thing You could have said it out of whatever and then all of a sudden someone recorded it and posted it and then you’re branded You know by this video that goes viral randomly I I get these notifications on my phone Have your next door. It’s an app for like your your neighbor. Okay, it’s pretty neat

Jay Holland (45:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, It’s the neighborhood

spy app.

Aaron Smith (45:41)
Yeah,

it’s it’s a pretty neat thing because it’s it’s so local. It’s literally it is your neighbors all together and Like you I post like I’m looking for someone to plumbing and you get five people like I use this guy use this guy and the guy looked around the corner. So it’s hugely valuable, but then It’s it’s used for another thing someone snaps a photo of someone driving too fast on our road and posts and says this you know jerk is going too fast and and all the first thing I think is like

Jay Holland (45:45)
huh, right. Yeah.

Right. That’s great.

Aaron Smith (46:09)
You can’t tell how fast he’s going in the photo. And then every comment is like, yeah, we hate it when people go and you see this person’s truck, you know exactly what you know, you’re going to see it and they know that they live in the area. And so every time I get a notification, I’m like, great. Did someone take a picture of me driving a little too fast? it’s never my car, thank God. But one of these days is going to be, and I have this anxiety constantly of like, it doesn’t overwhelm me, but when I see it, I’m like, I wonder if they just posted about me.

Jay Holland (46:11)
Right. Yeah.

No.

funny.

Aaron Smith (46:36)
because

they’re in my neighborhood and they know I live here. But that is a major issue. And on top of that, think it was Sam Altman, one of the founders of OpenAI. I think he was on a podcast and he said that he was the inventor of the infinite scroll or he knew the person that invented infinite scroll.

Jay Holland (46:51)
OpenAI, yeah.

man,

bad guy.

Aaron Smith (47:03)
I might be wrong on this. If someone is going to fact check me, that’s fine. But I’m pretty sure he either said he was the one who did or someone that was with him did. But they said that they regretted inventing it because what it does is that the reason that social media is so addictive is because of that dopamine hit. It’s not just the like button. The like button was a huge like what you just said. You get that like and every time it ticks up, your dopamine kicks off and you’re like, am going to get another one? Am I going to get another one?

Jay Holland (47:15)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (47:32)
the same thing with the infinite scroll, you’re like, what’s next? there’s gonna be something else. there’s gonna be something else. And it never fulfills anything, ever.

Jay Holland (47:36)
Right.

And the other thing it’s

doing, another way that this directly correlates to rises in anxiety is sleep deprivation. Because your body restores while you sleep. I mean, I’m guilty of this. I’m I’m awake at least 30 minutes longer each night because my iPad. But with kids, if there’s no regulation on it, they’re just going to be on it, you know, until they fall off like a zombie.

Aaron Smith (47:47)
yeah.

because of

Yeah, so you get this tactile feedbacks. You slide your finger and like it’s moving. Then you get a visual cue. You see these new things and then you get like an audible and there’s like there’s audio involved. And then you have the blue light involved, which is like the worst kind of light you can be just filtering it through your brain. And so you have all that you have this issue with dopamine. And then when that dopamine drops, cause you don’t actually get to the like the dopamine when it’s released, it’s, it’s a preparation.

Jay Holland (48:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (48:28)
It’s like it’s telling you that you’re about to get a reward. It’s not the reward, but you never get the reward. And so then when that domain drops, then anxieties and other things come out because you never got to that reward that you were anticipating chemically. It’s something that I’ve struggled with with social media is just that addiction to social media. And I’m actively trying to…

Jay Holland (48:31)
Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (48:53)
distance myself and removing the apps from my phone. And it’s a very difficult thing. I myself wanting to go back to it, find myself logging in, in my computer. And I grew up when these things all were just now becoming a thing. I didn’t grow up in it.

Jay Holland (49:05)
Right, yeah, our kids are intuitively

wired for it. Like their brains are already, those neural pathways are, they’re in their formation years, yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Smith (49:11)
Yeah, you go to McDonald’s and you order on an iPad. You go to

the grocery store and you use the keypad. go to like in school, they’re giving computers and iPads. So everything’s like, this is how we do things now is through these technologies.

Jay Holland (49:28)
So I wanted to mention one other teenage trend that I’m seeing, because I think this is encouraging, profound and encouraging. There is an, I am seeing an increased interest in spiritual things. And I also think that is translating to an increased interest in legitimate Christianity. ⁓ In our area here in South Florida, which is certainly not the Bible Belt, we’re not Miami, we’re not like

Aaron Smith (49:46)
Yeah.

Jay Holland (49:53)
You know, you get to send Miami West Palm Fort Lauderdale. That’s a one of the most unchurched places in the United States We’re not quite that but we’re not Bible Belt whatsoever, but every Every youth minister that I associate with around here that’s been at the church for more than a year or two is seeing like some of the highest numbers of kids coming that they’ve seen in years and so

In some of it, think it’s because there’s not as much middle ground. So, you know, I grew up in a cultural Christianity kind of environment, and now there’s no cultural advantage for kids to be Christian. so, you know, like, if they are, they are. They love their church, their church is their hub for getting to be with believers, and they’re willing to put more

Aaron Smith (50:39)
Yeah, they’re choosing it.

Jay Holland (50:43)
into their faith in there. So we’re seeing it’s really encouraging in multiple public schools, some of our highest numbers of kids in Christian clubs in our youth group, we’re running far more than what we should given the size church that we have. And it’s not just our church. I’m seeing this in others around there. So that’s a really encouraging trend. But that increase in spirituality is not just Christianity. ⁓ It’s a

Aaron Smith (51:06)
Yeah, they’re looking everywhere.

Jay Holland (51:08)
openness for everything. And so that’s why like we need to be equipped and prepared and ready to invite them in.

Aaron Smith (51:14)
You know, I did a quick AI search. AI is another whole animal in preparing for this conversation. And some of the topics that it came up with is, you know, why does God allow suffering and injustice, which is I think this has always been a question, is a big one now. How can we be sure Christianity is true when there are so many religions? What does the Bible say about controversial issues like sexuality, morality? Who is God and how do I know I exist or how he exists?

Jay Holland (51:18)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (51:44)
And then what’s my purpose and how does faith shape my identity? Which you nailed a bunch of these just in the handful of things that you brought up. With everything that we’re seeing, I don’t think we were ever created to be able to handle all of the input. And if you go back to the Garden of Eden, I mean, it’s perfect. It’s literally how God designed it. Like don’t eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Not that God wanted them to be ignorant, but

Jay Holland (51:51)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (52:14)
He wanted them to be, he wanted them to get their truth and information from him, not from, you know, their fleshly desires. And we have this, we have this world now that we live in that we have access to more information than ever in history. We can, like you said, a hundred years ago, you didn’t know what was happening on the other side of the world until someone came over and wrote about it a week or two later, maybe, you know, or you never heard about it.

Jay Holland (52:19)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (52:41)
And, we now have access to everything. And I think it’s, it’s just, it’s overwhelming and it’s defeating. And like you said, there’s really nothing we can do about it. Like you can’t stop the flooding. so we start blaming things. We start trying to find like it’s the government’s fault or it’s, ⁓ you know, Israel’s fault, or it’s, this war’s fault, or it’s a God’s fault, or it’s my parents’ fault. We’re trying to find something to, to blame for everything that’s going on. and I think that’s another reason why.

Jay Holland (52:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (53:09)
What you’re saying is so true is there’s a big resurgence of people searching out spiritual things, trying to find answers to all these things, because there is no answer in the world. You’re not going to fix what’s going on. That’s a heavy weight for our kids. And it makes me really sad, actually.

Jay Holland (53:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it is. But you can it’s kind of like I don’t I had a counselor tell me one time that, you know, when I we’re talking about these questions of like the more you hear about all these mass terrible things happening and you’re asking God, God, how can you how can you stand this? Like, how can you be good and allow all these things to happen? And she.

She mentioned, you know, one of the things is we were designed to carry our troubles, not the troubles of the whole world. And when you start like God is designed and he’s not designed like God is capable of carrying the troubles of the whole world. I am not. And when I began to do that, I’m kind of inserting myself into the place of God and I can’t handle it.

Aaron Smith (54:03)
troubles you know.

Jay Holland (54:11)
And it also tends to do damage to my relationship with God because I can’t fathom how he could handle it. so because, if I was God, I would fix all of these things. And, you know, that’s an unending rabbit hole. It’s like, OK, would you fix them to the level where everybody’s a robotic automaton? It’s like, no, I would just fix the things that have hurt me and hurt the people around me. So but yeah, that so if you, you know, if you can get more local, life can still be really joyful.

Aaron Smith (54:31)
Yeah.

Mm.

Jay Holland (54:38)
And that’s

kind of the really funny thing is like if my son, my son Micah is 15 and I think sometime last year, we don’t watch the evening news a lot, except when my parents are in town and then Fox News is on 24 seven and it’s like, but I, I happen to come home and turn on the evening news, like the six 30 world news. And Michael was coming through the kitchen and he stopped and he was just kind of transfixed for like 12, 13 minutes. And he was like, dad, everything is so sad.

Aaron Smith (54:51)
you

Jay Holland (55:06)
And it’s like, yeah, it is. When you watch the news, everything is so sad. But if I didn’t watch the news, my life is actually pretty happy. There are people hurting. There’s, you know, people going through terrible stuff, but it’s manageable and there’s a lot of joy. you know, media, media makes their money on fear and anger. And honestly, social media does as well. So the more you can limit those inputs in your life and in your kids’ lives, probably the more joyful your life’s going to be.

Aaron Smith (55:07)
Good night.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can’t help but think of that scripture. think Jesus says that like in this parable of the wheat’s growing with the tares and they come and they say who planted the tares because we planted good wheat and the landowner is like it was my enemy. He must have planted these tares. They’re like, do you want us to go remove him? He says, don’t don’t do that. He says that because if you do that, you’ll probably you might tear up the good wheat. He says instead, let them grow up together. And when it comes harvest time.

Jay Holland (55:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it’s really interesting, isn’t it?

Aaron Smith (56:02)
we’ll separate it at harvest time. based off of what you were just saying, if God’s capable of handling it all, he knows the wheats and the tares. He knows the good and the bad. We’re not good at that. We’re not good at discerning the wheats from the tares all the time. Not like he is. We’re not capable of even separating it. So there’s something that we can see and be like, that’s a great evil. And it may not be. We could be wrong in the way we’re seeing

Jay Holland (56:07)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Aaron Smith (56:28)
the scenario just because of the way it’s affected us. And I’ve had conversations with people in the past of, you know, like, you know, how’s God letting all this stuff happen? You know, why doesn’t he just stop? And if you were to actually go down to the variables of what it means to stop the bad thing, OK, even if it’s like one person like, OK, do you to stop that one bad thing, do you go back to before that person who did the bad thing was born and stop it? Do you go back to

Jay Holland (56:47)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (56:57)
before his mother was born? At what point do you stop in the line of how do you make sure this bad thing never happened? Again, I’m not God. God knows and I love that the Bible tells us that he is omniscient, omnipotent, he’s all powerful, all-knowing. And he’s also, he’s very capable of knowing the truth. He knows he has a perfect record.

Jay Holland (56:58)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Aaron Smith (57:22)
And he knows who are his. And the thing that leads us to repentance is his patience and kindness. We’re not often very patient and very kind.

Jay Holland (57:34)
There’s this old theologian,

Jay Verna McGee, that had a quote of something like, this is God’s universe and he has a plan. You may have a plan, but you don’t have a universe. It’s like that. Yeah, that’s I just need to get me a universe. I’ll be better. No.

Aaron Smith (57:37)
Love him. Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, I don’t want one. That’s the thing is that the

older I get, I realize like I have too much. My universe is too big. I want less land, less things. Like there’s too many things to deal with. Too many bank accounts, too many bills, too many, you know, all the variables of life is exhausting. So, well, Jay, do you have anything else you’d want to end with? an encouragement. I know this was a little bit dreary at the end, but there’s, I love that you ended with your excitement for this Gen Alpha in there.

Jay Holland (57:53)
Mm-hmm.

sorry.

Aaron Smith (58:16)
their desire for God. And I do see that. see that that is often the fruit of despair. When there’s when like when there’s so much at hand and there’s no answers, we go, we often run to the one who has answers. And so that’s a, that is really great.

Jay Holland (58:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think

my ultimate encouragement is like, man, Jesus is coming back. He is he’s closer now than he’s ever been. And every, you know, every dark thing that happens is just a reminder that this darkness is going to end and he is going to make all things new. ⁓ And so, I mean, we’ve we’ve walked through some hard family things over the last couple of years, even beyond the cancer stuff and never been more ready.

Aaron Smith (58:48)
Mm-hmm.

Jay Holland (58:57)
for Jesus to come back. So, yeah, hey, I do want to mention just because I, you know, I do that Let’s Parenthood on Purpose podcast, but also this past year, I started a daily devotional podcast for teens and young adults. It’s called Guided by Faith. It’s about six minutes a day, Monday through Friday. And basically what I did was, you know, looked at the kids in my youth group and it’s like, what encouragement do they need each day? And so, you know, it’s it’s

Aaron Smith (58:59)
Yeah.

Jay Holland (59:23)
intentionally short so that teenagers will listen to it. But and it’s also marketed, you know, teens and young adults. But legitimately, the content is for any any believer. But if I say it’s for anybody, teenagers won’t listen. If I say it’s for guided by faith and it’s also a part of the Christian Parenting Podcast Network. But yeah, I’m about a year into it. So kind of crazy over 200 episodes.

Aaron Smith (59:40)
What’s it called?

Jay Holland (59:52)
already, but it’s been fun to do. a lot of it is, yeah, well, I’ll, if we’re in the school year, I’ll kind of piece down what I’m teaching on youth and put it into like five little segments. But like in July, we spent the whole month just walking through Proverbs, couple of, you know, each whatever day of the month was, we picked that chapter and did a couple of verses from it. But yeah, that’s just for it’s again, it’s a short one. Probably anywhere you’re driving, you could fit it in.

Aaron Smith (59:53)
Wow. Yeah, I’m gonna check that out.

Jay Holland (1:00:19)
in that short drive and it’s meant to be just kind of a daily dose of encouragement.

Aaron Smith (1:00:23)
Awesome. Jay, I really appreciate your time. I do hope this was encouraging. It was encouraging for me. The world seems crazy, but God is good and he knows what’s going on and he’s not surprised by anything. And yeah, I just pray that all my listeners would see the mandate in their life to show their children who they are in Christ so that they have no doubts on their identity because that’s a big thing. And also, I think the big takeaway also is we need to

Jay Holland (1:00:31)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Smith (1:00:48)
What was that – say that quote again from the book. It’s limit their access to technology and

Jay Holland (1:00:54)
Yeah,

yeah. So parents need to give their children more freedom in the physical world because there’s probably not a bad guy at the park ready to kidnap them. So give them more freedom to take risks and be brave in the physical world and then limit their access to the digital world, especially ⁓ before they hit mid high school. That’s a lot of formative brain time in that elementary and middle school time.

Aaron Smith (1:01:14)
Thank

Awesome. Jay, I appreciate it. people can find you at Let’s Pair Non-Purpose Podcast and

Jay Holland (1:01:25)
Yeah, let’sparenoampurpose.com.

Actually, kind of a neat way to connect. do a weekly, kind of every other weekly newsletter called Things for Thursday, and I got a lot of resources that we’ve just made to give away. So if somebody wants that, they can just text the word THINGS, T-H-I-N-G-S, to 66866. That’s THINGS to 66866. And it also tells them about the different podcast ministries that I have and stuff like

Aaron Smith (1:01:49)
Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that brother. And I just pray that you keep blessing those, those young men and women.

Jay Holland (1:01:51)
sure thing.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.



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