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Dad Tired

Two Mental Paths That Keep Wrecking Your Peace

Dad Tired

Jerrad Lopes

Christianity, Parenting, Kids & Family, Religion & Spirituality

4.91.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2026

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What do you do mentally when something hard hits your life?

In this episode, Jerrad shares a real moment from his day—going from gratitude and joy to panic when his email was hacked and multiple problems hit at once. He reflects on two familiar mental paths many men walk: catastrophizing and numbing.

But healing often means cutting a new path.

Using a powerful backpacking metaphor, Jerrad explores how men can stop defaulting to fear and escape, and instead learn to walk the quieter, harder path of gospel truth.

Practice for today:
Ask yourself: When life gets hard, what are the well-worn paths in my mind—and are they leading me toward healing or away from it?

Because strong families begin with healed men.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Yesterday I just got done dropping my daughter off at preschool and I'm driving home and the car's quiet and I'm just praying.

0:05.5

And I find myself as I'm praying, my eyes are welling up with tears because I'm just feeling so thankful at God's goodness and his kindness to me and my marriage and my family over the last year, year and a half.

0:18.2

And I'm just like, God, you've been so good.

0:19.9

I'm just kind of relishing in the

0:21.5

mercy and the grace and the goodness of God. And I get home and I'm working. I'm sitting here at the

0:28.0

computer. And this isn't, you know, two, three hours after I had just been in the car praying

0:32.9

and thanking God for how good everything was. I was like at peak joy, peak happiness, peak just

0:39.1

like feeling contentment. Two or three hours after that, I'm sitting here at my desk.

0:43.7

And all of a sudden, my emails just start going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, like just

0:47.5

crazy amount of emails. And then my phone just starts blowing up notification after notification.

0:53.0

Turns out my email had been hacked and it was just

0:57.1

sending spam emails to literally everyone I know. And so I'm just getting bombarded with emails

1:03.0

from people are like, dude, is this you? Is this you? What's going on? And so now I'm trying to,

1:07.3

I'm just in full scramble mode. And I just, I'm like in pure panic as everything goes on. And in the middle of that, there are actually a couple other conversations and hard things that happened right in the middle of all my emails being hacked. I felt like Job, you know, like not as dramatic, but when he gets bad news after bad news after bad news like that, that kind of felt like my day day yesterday i'm telling you this because it doesn't

1:27.6

matter how good life seems right now man just always be prepared that life is going to hit you and i know

1:33.1

your email getting hacked and there was a couple other things you know when you put everything in

1:37.3

perspective it's not like the end of the world kind of stuff i know there are much bigger problems

1:41.0

in life than that but just know like life's going to throw stuff at you.

1:45.9

Life will keep lifing. And it's just going to be hard. Oh, just never let your guard down is the first thing.

1:50.8

But here's something I noticed about myself. I used to backpack with my buddy when I was right out of

1:56.1

high school. We would go backpacking in the Sierra Mountains. And one thing we like to do is to try to find places

2:01.5

that didn't have any trails, like places that nobody had ever hiked before. And so we would go through

...

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