Today we're talking about old ladies, spiritual ruts, and how to remember. Welcome back to Dad Tire Daily. This weekend, I ran my very first half marathon. I did it with Caleb, who's my pastor, one of my best friends. You guys know him. He's been on the podcast many times, and he speaks at our Dad Tired Retreat. Anyway, we're probably nine or ten miles into the race. And we're just exhausted.

We're having and puffin. We're trying to figure it out, motivate each other. And all of a sudden,

we hear this voice from behind us, this woman say, look out old woman coming through. And we turn

around. And this lady giving her the benefit of the doubt, dude, she's probably late 60s, early

70s. And she just passes us, bro. Like she just easily strolls by us

without any effort as we are struggling. And Caleb and I look at each other like, dude, what are we

do? Like out of all the hobbies we could have picked. We picked this dumb hobby where we're out

here getting passed by a little old lady on a motorized cart. That's a dumb and dumber joke. We got passed by a little old lady. And it's just in the moment when you're exhausted, when you're literally trying your best and you get passed by an old woman who looks like she's putting in no effort, it is discouraging. We ended up finishing the race and we didn't stop, which was our goal, finished the race and finished without stopping. We did that. So we're like laughing about it on the way home and we're feeling kind of discouraged about it. But then I remembered, I told Caleb, I'm like, dude, think about us three months ago. Like we barely could finish running a mile three months ago. We've come a long way. Even though we're out here getting passed by old women,

at least we're doing it, man. Like we've come a pretty long way in a short amount of time.

I think sometimes for us as men, you can feel like, dude, am I growing? Am I growing as a dad?

Am I growing as a spiritual leader? Am I like actually making progress? And I think it's super important for us to sometimes turn around and be like,

no, actually God has been faithful. He's been good to us. I'm not who I was when I was 18 years old

or 25 years old. The progress may not look great. I may be getting passed by an old woman,

but also I'm further than I was a ways back. I think two things can happen to us as men,

as guys trying to find healing and become spiritual leaders of our home. There are two ruts that we

can potentially fall into. One is that we never actually look back at our past. And I think if

you're like me, you don't want to look back at your past because there's a lot of shame back

there. There's a lot of embarrassment. I would very rarely reminisce about the past because the past

equaled shame, equaled embarrassment about bad decisions. And so I think what happens there is we have

spiritual amnesia. We're forgetting or trying to forget everything in the past. And then on the

other side, the other rut that we can fall into is we

live in the past. Our brain gets stuck on all the old past decisions and stupid mistakes we've

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