Kearney Kids Parenting Show
First Baptist Church Kearney’s very own Minister of Children, Abraham Leonard, interviews pastors and authors on the subject of parenting, seeking to learn from their insights. We hope and pray that this resource is transformative for your parenting!
Kearney Kids Parenting Show
Parenting: Jeremy Jessen
First Baptist Kearney's very own Minister of Children, Abraham Leonard, interviews Pastor Jeremy Jessen about parenting. Jeremy shares about his shaping experiences and gives helpful insights to the world.
Hello, welcome to the Kearney Kids Parenting Show. I am your host, Abraham Leonard, Minister of Children at First Baptist Church Kearney. I am so glad that you have joined us. Well, welcome to the show today, Pastor Jeremy Jessen. He's with us today all the way from Kentucky, right? That's right. Yeah. Would you tell us a little bit about your family, your ministry, and just how you're doing?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. Well, I appreciate you asking me to do this with you. I have just a little bit of background. I'm I've known you a long time since I was there when you were born. It's a crazy thing to see how all of these, how our lives kind of intersect with. So I've known your parents for, golly, 25 years, longer than that. You're showing
SPEAKER_01:your age.
SPEAKER_00:I know, it's bad. It's bad. But I'm I am deeply grateful for those kinds of friendships that will end up in something like this. But I, there are, I don't have English language words to use for how grateful I am for the relationship that I have with your dad. I've known him for a long time and he and your mom are very special people to my wife and I. So we, my wife and I, we have been married for 22 years. It'll be 20, actually 20, 23 years. We live in Louisville, Kentucky, where I'm a pastor of Lakewood Baptist Church, where I've been pastoring for 10 years. Just this past May was 10 years. We have three kids, Isabel, who is 19, and she just finished her freshman year at Boyce College. here in town in Louisville. Then my son Grant is 17. He's getting ready to be a junior slash senior in high school. We homeschool, so we make up the grades. Then my son Hadden is 14, and he's getting ready to be a freshman in high school. So that's our family. Again, I've been in ministry for uh, total for over 20 years, but have just have been here, uh, 10 years and so I pastor Lakewood and I work some for Southern Seminary when needed and I also teach and facilitate online stuff at North Greenville University and I'm a faculty mentor at Redemption Seminary as well it's an online seminary so I work with those organizations as needed and I'm just blessed to be involved in whatever way I can be so yeah it's kind of a That's a lot, but that's where we are.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's awesome. To start off, I want to start off with something kind of light. Do you have any good parenting memories? What are some good parenting memories that you have?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think two things when it comes to parenting memories for me stand out. When I was a kid, rolling around with my dad in in the car, those times were always significant. So we would sing together and listen to music together and he would introduce me to all of his favorite music and then he would tolerate my introducing him to my favorite music. But riding around in the car was always a blast. So that's something that I've kind of carried on with my kids. So if you ask my kids what are their favorite times in with me, most likely car rides will come up. We just have a blast listening to music and driving around in the car together. I love doing that with them. I think good memories of the bedtime routine with them when they were little, reading Bible story books with them or reading the scriptures with them, spending time in prayer with them. Now that they're teenagers, I still... there are some nights that I don't, but most nights I still am praying with them before they go to bed at night. Um, and the, the conversations then my wife and I always have, have this running joke that like our teenagers aren't ready to open up until it's nine o'clock or 10 o'clock or whatever. They're ready to, that's when they're ready to talk. And in those moments, uh, I love it. I'll frequently, uh, be getting ready for bed and telling my wife, like, These moments are so special and so good. So just the conversations that we were able to get into in the evenings are great. So I wouldn't trade that time for anything in the car or at bedtime. But those are some of my favorite memories, I think.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's awesome. I remember some good memories being in the car with my dad. He'd always save the hard conversations for when I was in the car because I couldn't run away. That's
SPEAKER_00:it, man. You can't leave. Yeah. Yeah, that's so smart. That's so good. I love that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, a lot of good conversations though. What are maybe some hard times that you've had as a parent and how have you overcame those hard times?
SPEAKER_00:Well, in terms of hard times as a parent, I think dealing with sin to any degree is going to be difficult. So when your children are disobedient and you've got to deal with uh, like lying or you've got to deal with, um, just some bad attitudes or, um, not wanting to obey at all, or just fighting you on different issues, whatever it is. Um, disobedience is always hard to deal with. And no matter what it is, sometimes because you see yourself in it, you see your own, like, Oh, you learned how to be angry for me. Like, that's not good. Um, or one of the other things I think it's difficult, just not from a, from a spiritual standpoint, but just from a logistic standpoint, when you have more than one toddler in the house, that experience is rough because they take a lot of physical energy and they take a lot of, there's a lot of emotional and mental energy as well, because there's a lot of like, no, don't touch that. No, don't go there. No, don't like, and having to like always the couch and handle it, always having to address whatever you've got to address that. Just, it just never, ends, and I was telling a friend the other day, and then you get everybody to sleep, everybody's in bed, and you're all good, and then you sit down at night, and you're just talking to your wife, and you kind of go, dude, they're going to do all of this again tomorrow. They're all going to wake up, and they're all going to go back at it tomorrow. We're going to do this again. There is an energy-stapping reality to having toddlers, and I think that's something that Al Mohler said one time, when you have toddlers, there's a moment when you look at your wife and you go, I guess I'll just see you on the other side of this. Because it's such a busy time and those moments are hard, but I think what got us through it, honestly, what got us through toddlers really was being around your mom and dad. Having other people that were doing the same thing that we were doing, literally doing the same thing that we were doing. So we live next door to you all in the apartments that you and your brothers don't remember. But that's fine. We remember them because they were awesome. Your parents would come over. They would lock their door at the apartment next door to us. And then they would have their baby monitor with them and come over. And then we would watch a movie or eat ice cream together. Or one time we played Wii Boxing. One of the funniest moments ever. We laughed until I thought I was going to vomit. It was wonderful. We had so much fun. But those kinds of things, I think part of what parents... need in those moments of difficulty when you're dealing with sin like how did you deal with this when your kids disobeyed in this way or when you're dealing with just like it is just the physical busyness of of toddlers one of the things that gets you through it is having other people around you that can encourage you that can walk with you and can empathize like hey we're doing the same thing too and you're gonna make it and so like that's one of the things that got us through um and then the other thing. So I think you have to have people around you that will encourage you and, and help you walk through it. But another thing I think is like a husband and wife need to be on the same page about it and be able to help each other through those moments and help each other parent when things are hard. So I think if you and your wife are on the same page and, and as, as a, as a man, if you're, if you're like leading the family spiritually in, in that sense, you should be the first one up off the couch to handle a discipline situation. You should be the first one to, um, explain and deal with bad attitudes and different things like that. And you also need to be the first one to help clean up and get things figured out so that your wife isn't shouldering that whole load. If you're doing that together, you'll make it. But those things, I think you have to have both of those things together in your home for it to make it through. And those things were certainly true for us.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's really good stuff there. If you were going to go back in time, back to when you were a new parent and you were going to give yourself parenting advice now, what would it be?
SPEAKER_00:My wife, I actually asked my wife this question this morning because I said, I'm doing this podcast with Abraham and I know what I'm going to say, but what would you say? And she said, I'll give you her answer first and then I'll give you my answer. Her answer to this question was, your kids don't need you to get it right 100% of the time. Hmm. They need you to do your best to get it right half of the time. And when you mess it up the rest of the time to ask for forgiveness and to be honest about your shortcomings. When you ask your kids for forgiveness, not only are they going to give it to you, but your kids would much rather see a parent that struggles but is willing to go, I'm struggling here. Or a parent when they sin to ask for forgiveness, like I shouldn't have gotten angry with you about that. I should not have raised my voice to you in that situation. In that situation, whatever, because it'd be much more understanding and much more forgiving. And they're also going to like respect you so much more for being a real person. Yeah. Not holding up a standard that you yourself can't even meet. So, um, that would be the first thing that my wife said. I think that's a really good point. Um, the second thing that I would say is don't be so uptight. I mean, that could be the title of my parenting autobiography. I shouldn't have been so uptight. Because I think when you're a new parent, especially if you're in an evangelical situation, meaning when you're in a church situation or you're in a Bible college slash seminary situation, everything is a big deal. And everything is... a freak out about level deal. And so you feel like you have to get it right a hundred percent of the time, like my wife was saying, but you also feel like, um, every moment is a make or break moment when it's not necessarily. So don't be so uptight, like about, you know, about things that you can't control about things that are like, you need to learn the difference between somebody between a child being disobedient and And a child being a child. A child being rebellious or a child just being... I mean, you grew up with two brothers, right? So there's some stuff where you guys were being mean to each other. And then there's other times when you guys were just slugging it out because you're boys in the same house. It's not always wickedness. Sometimes it's just siblings bumping into each other and playing around and tearing stuff up. That's okay. I think there's a part of that where... I just needed to loosen up a little bit. And I think if I, if I, if I could tell myself one thing back then, that's what I would have told myself. Like, you need to calm down, but it'll be all right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's really good. I want to kind of end on a, on a much lighter note. Okay. Do you have any, like, what's your favorite funny parenting story, man?
SPEAKER_00:There's so many like I can't like moments in the past 24 hours that were great with our teenagers. But one of my favorite moments when I was when the kids were really young was Grant. That kid never wanted to go to bed ever. He was the first one up. Isabel will sleep all day if we let her. Hadden too. Hadden will sleep all day if you let him. unless there's something exciting on the calendar the next day. Like if baseball's involved anywhere the next day, he won't sleep in. Otherwise, he'd sleep. Grant is the first one up, period. His whole life, he's been the first one up. So I get up really early and spend time reading and everything, and then I would come downstairs, and the second I'm down there, if he hears noise in the kitchen, bam, that kid was down there. But he hated going to bed because there were people awake while he was asleep, and he just didn't see... no, no, no. Like if there's a party going on, if people are awake, if something fun is happening and I'm not a part of it, this is an injustice. So like he could not, he hated going to bed. So when one of our favorite family stories is, um, I'm putting him to bed one night. Um, and he's really little, I think he's like three, something like this. And, um, you know, like he's still kind of, some of his words aren't coming together exactly. Right. And so, um, um, he wants to talk about something is what he would say. Let's talk about what he would say. Talk about, let's talk about your dad. I have something I need to talk about. And I was like, Oh, okay. Like we're going to bed. And like, I've already like, we have read the stories. We have sung the songs. We have prayed our prayers. He is tucked in. It is time fans on lights out. Let's go. He's ready. And he says, I have something that I need to, to talk about. And he's looks very serious. And then he gets this little grin on his face. When I said, what do you want to talk about, buddy? And he goes, let's talk about Jesus. And he says it with this like sly sound in his, in his voice. And I start like, Oh, okay. I'm like, he hooked me, you know, I was, Oh, Oh yeah. Okay. Cause he, he knows like, If I mention that dude's name, you'll go for 20 minutes. I get an extra 20 minutes of just being awake and I don't have to go to sleep. And halfway through, I realized this kid just wanted to talk about Jesus because he knew that he could get extra awake time from this. This is not a gospel conversation. This is a, I don't want to go to sleep conversation. And so that's a family joke that like, And I'm like, okay, you guys need to go to bed. And Grant from somewhere will go, I don't know, let's talk about Jesus. I'm like, no, that's not fair. Don't do that. So that's one of my favorite memories of him just working every angle he can, even the Jesus angle, to keep from going to bed. So great. I love it.
SPEAKER_01:That's funny. That's a really good note to end on. On behalf of all the listeners and myself, I want to thank you for being on the show today.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely, man. Anytime. I appreciate it so much.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for joining me. I hope this was an encouragement to you. Please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with the people around you.