Steve Demme: 00:00:00.000
If I was to do the things that I did out of a sense of duty, it would not have flown. And I didn’t do them out of sense of duty. My heart was turned towards my family, and I wanted to be there for my kids. And I wanted to have a family that I didn’t have.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:25.951
[music] Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am so excited to spend the next hour with my very dear friend, Steve Demme. We’re going to talk about the role fathers play in a homeschooling experience, in a life experience, and what it’s like to fully engage with your kids as they journey through life. So Steve, let’s go.

Steve Demme: 00:00:53.725
Wow. Okay. So I read the list of questions that had already been sent in. And if I may, though, I’m going to see if we can go a little deeper because we know that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks and your treasure is identified. So if we can go beyond just what should a father do towards why should a father do what he does? Is that okay?

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:24.438
Absolutely.

Steve Demme: 00:01:25.309
So I’m looking for root things. But let me give you a little overview of my life and journey and show you how I learned these lessons that I’m going to be sharing because I think that’s important as well. When I was in college, I read a book called The Cross and the Switchblade. And I read this book and God worked in my heart. I had heard the gospel before then. I’d responded before then, but I was kind of waffling in my faith. And I read that book, The Cross and the Switchblade, and I put the book down and I said, “Okay, God, here we go.” And so I wanted to follow God fully.

Steve Demme: 00:02:03.044
And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to join a ministry right out of college – I was applying to some – or go to seminary for more training. I never felt called to be a pastor, but I did want to be equipped because I knew when I read that book, something clicked in me and I said, “I want to seek first the kingdom.” And that became my life verse. So I went to seminary and I graduated, and my dear wife and I had met the year before and we got married the day after I graduated. So I not only was seeking first the kingdom, I was seeking first the kingdom quickly.

Steve Demme: 00:02:40.890
And then Isaac joined our family nine months later. See, consistent. And then Ethan two years later and then Joseph a couple of years later and then John. So this was how we got our start. And our first assignment was at a small church in Georgia. And I was the assistant to the pastor and I was called down because they had a lot of youth going to the church, and they needed somebody to do the youth work and things like that. I was already working at a summer camp for young people, which I eventually became the director.

Steve Demme: 00:03:16.967
And while I was at this small church, they said, “We’re still small enough that you could probably get a part-time job.” And so I became a math teacher in the local high school, which then was just very fascinating to me because I never wanted to be a teacher. I’m sorry to say that. Never on my radar, never took an education class. But I had found out that I liked working with young people and I had a gift for it. I really did. So I’m working with all these young people and summer camps, the whole package. And that’s when I learned about something called home education.

Steve Demme: 00:03:54.844
Now, I had studied, when I was in seminary, Christian education, and I’d I had written a paper about Christian education. And my paper, the thesis, and this is way back in the ’70s, the second half of the ’70s, I wrote this paper and I said, “It looks to me from studying scripture like it’s a parent responsibility, not a teacher responsibility.” So even though I was a teacher, I had already had these seeds sown in my mind that if I ever have children, it’s my responsibility to teach my children God’s word. So I want to just put those two thoughts there. It’s parents’ responsibility and it should be based on scripture. And as I read through the Bible and did all these studies, the one passage that stood out among all the rest was Deuteronomy 6:7. Now, hold that thought. I’m going to come back to it. But I was already speaking at Christian School Conventions because I was also teaching at a Christian school a few years after that. And while I was teaching at these conferences, I was mostly doing math workshops, which shouldn’t be a surprise to you. And then I said to the guy I could branch out a little bit if you want. Instead of just doing multiplication and fractions, I could talk about having family worship. Because once God gave us children, I knew it was my responsibility to lead our family to the throne. It was my job to teach my kids the Bible. Yes, Awanas can help. And yes, Sunday schools can help, but it’s not the church’s responsibility. It’s parents responsibility. Homeschoolers, you get this. So I was going to teach my children. And so I started doing workshops. And the first workshop I did was called family worship. And it was pretty much a testimony of what our family was doing. But the second workshop I did, and I’m still doing to this day is called the family that stays together, stays together. Because what I discovered was after being a high school teacher and youth leader and summer camp director and all the rest, you can’t replace mom and dad. I don’t know if you know this, but most most youth leaders do not do it for a long period of time. They just do it for short periods of time. But I had been doing it for a long time. And I started recognizing that even the best programs cannot replace mom and dad. You can’t. And if I can tuck in a little something here, that’s the theme of Mary Poppins. I know I’m going to surprise some of you, but the theme of Mary Poppins is even with a nanny that’s practically perfect in every way, you can’t replace mom and dad. And at the end of the movie, mom and dad get back together with their kids and they’re flying these patched up kites, not very fun, not near as fun as Burt and Mary, but the kids were satisfied because their hearts had been turned towards their parents and their parents hearts towards them. It’s one of my favorite movies. Okay. So and the more I thought about this, I now have my own family, and I realized that the family was the first thing that God designed way back. He created the world in six days. He took a break and then he made man and woman. He made them one flesh and be fruitful and multiply. This is before Israel. This is before the church. And I realized how important the family was as the foundation for our culture. If you want to rebuild churches, rebuild families. You want to rebuild the culture, rebuild families. Family is the fundamental unit in our culture. So being intentional about having a family and doing life together as a family was really uppermost in my thinking. So now back to Deuteronomy 6:7, that validated everything that I was feeling teach your children diligently. When? When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. That’s called 24/7. Oh, that sounds like home education. And so Sandy and I went to our first conference on home education way back in 1984. Isaac was four, Ethan was two, Joseph was in the womb, and we have been committed to this journey ever since. So that’s how I got involved in home education. If you’re interested, a little tuck-in aside here, I was a pastor, I was a teacher. When my fourth son was born with down syndrome, he had multiple surgeries. We burned out. We had to do something different, and so my wife and I thought, “Maybe let’s move to a different state,” and we began to rebuild our family because the family is the top priority. But I also had to feed my family, so I started tutoring children. And as I was tutoring children in math, I started writing materials for the things I was teaching them. I would teach them with blocks one day, leave four worksheets for the next four days when I wasn’t there. And now you know the rest of the story.

Steve Demme: 00:09:14.201
So Math-U-See actually came out of a desire to be pro-family, keep our family together, and keep our family healthy by eating. Okay, so that’s the beginning of Math-U-See. So anyway, I have been living that verse 6, 7 for almost 30 years. That’s what I thought about. Have family worship, teach your children the Bible, and do life together and model the Bible. But it’s parents teaching and modeling in the home. That was my goal. And then one day, somebody asked me, “Why do you always start with the seventh verse? How about the fifth and the sixth verses?” And I went, “I don’t know.” So I looked it up, and turns out that verse 5 says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Verse 6, “And these words which I command you today shall be on your heart.” Now, there’s two words in there that I want to emphasize, and the words are heart. And heart. I need to love God as a parent with all my heart. Now, that’s the exact verse that Jesus quoted in Matthew 22 when he was asked, “What’s the first and great commandment?” He quoted Deuteronomy 6:5. And then God’s Word has to be on my heart. And instead of just zipping through now, I want to take a deep breath and say I wondered, “Do I really love God with all my heart?”

Steve Demme: 00:10:47.786
Because I remembered that church in Revelation chapter 2, the church in Ephesus that had done all these wonderful things. They had been seeking first the kingdom. They’d been running summer conventions. They’d been on boards. I didn’t tell you all the stuff I was doing. I was doing all kinds of stuff for God’s kingdom, but you can do a whole bunch of stuff and lose your first love. And I was pricked in my conscience. And I said, “Lord, help me to love you with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. Help me to love your Word. Help them to be uppermost in my heart.” And if you read Scripture, the heart doesn’t pump blood. The heart is the real you. When everything’s stripped away, it’s our heart. That’s what it is. It’s the real us. When all the charade, you might say, is gone, when everything is stripped away, it’s our heart. And God answered that prayer. Now, I’m not going to go into that right now, but I just wanted to leave that first thought. The first thing that I felt God was teaching me after 30 years of doing the best job I thought I could do was, “Steve, make sure that you never lose your first love. Love me with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second thing is now, I’m a homeschooler, right? At this point, I’m a homeschooler. I’ve been a homeschooler. And I personally do not believe that homeschooling is as much about the school as it is about the home. Before you can have home school, you need to have a home. You need to have a family. And I think personally that Malachi 4 is what’s happening in the home education world. Because Malachi 4 says, this is the last verse before a couple hundred year window before Matthew appears and Jesus appears. He says, “I’m going to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers. I’m going to do a work in your heart.” So the fact that you’re even watching this podcast right now, the fact that you are homeschooling right now, you need to take this in right now, is because God has worked in your heart. And you have had your heart turned towards your family and your family’s heart towards towards you. I, frankly, I speak in lots of different venues, a lot of different places. I’m only asked these questions at homeschool conferences because it’s a heart question. It’s not an education question. It’s a heart question.

Steve Demme: 00:13:33.957
So I’m going to pray now, if you don’t mind, because we can fill up– all I could do podcasts all day, but let’s pray and ask God to do a heartcast. Let’s do some spiritual heart surgery before we go any further.

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:50.112
Sound good.

Steve Demme: 00:13:51.408
I pray that you will turn our hearts towards you first. Help us to love you with all our heart, soul, mind, strength, and help us to love your Word. And then, help us to have our hearts turn towards home in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:09.623
Amen.

Steve Demme: 00:14:10.533
By the way, I know that God will answer that prayer because I know it’s according to His will. And I believe that marriage and family are uppermost on God’s heart. That’s what He created first. And Malachi 4, to me, is a restoring verse. It’s called the Restoration. It’s just getting back to what God designed in the very first place. And so I don’t watch the news, just so you know, I don’t watch CNN, MNCNB, because that’s all what the devil’s doing. I’m watching what God’s doing. And what God’s doing is He’s restoring families. He’s restoring hearts. Okay, now we’re going to get to the topic, but let me just say one more thing here. What is a family? A family starts with one man and one woman made one flesh, right? And then be fruitful, multiply, buy a minivan and homeschool your kids. That’s the rest of Genesis. So here’s the thing. One man, one woman. He made us one flesh. We are a team. And I know we’re supposed to be talking about just dads’ today, but dads. You can’t talk about dads without talking about moms. And you can’t talk about moms and dads without talking about marriage. But the Bible says that two are better than one, right? They are. So we want to be two. But they also says a threefold chord is even better than two. And the third chord is God Himself. So I think that when husbands and wives are in Christ and they’re loving God with all their hearts, soul, mind, and strength, and their hearts have been deeply intertwined, not only with each other, but with God above. Now we’re getting really close to what the ideal looks like. We’re getting close to what the vision for family is. And I had to learn these lessons the hard way. I told you, for 30 years, I was doing everything I knew to be a good husband and father. I was involved, in all caps. I was leading family worship. I was also messing up my wife’s schedule because my wife is the scheduler. And if it was sunny, I’d come home in the afternoon and say, “Come on, let’s go canoeing. Let’s go blow this off. We need to go play. It’s so gorgeous outside.” And my wife would take a deep breath. But I was involved. I was involved in as much as I could be. Obviously, I taught some math. I taught some science to my kids. I did my part as much as I could. I’m not going to talk about that, because what I want to focus on is for 30 years, I was so focused on my family that I wasn’t focused on my relationship with God. I now realize now the best thing I can do for my family as a dad is do what the airlines tell you right before you fly.

Gretchen Roe: 00:17:29.583
I know exactly what you’re going to tell us.

Steve Demme: 00:17:31.794
Here’s what they tell you. They say, “You put your trade tables in the upright and locked position. Make sure your seat belts are blah, blah, blah.” They give you all that garbage. And then they tell you, “In the event of cabin depressurization, these oxygen masks will fall from the overhead compartment.” And then they tell you something which is counterintuitive. They say, “Do not put them on your family’s faces first. Put them on your face first, and then you’ll be able to help those next to you.” And that’s counterintuitive, because the first thing I’m thinking about, these things are falling, I’m thinking about my wife and my son. I am. That’s how I’m wired. That’s how dads are wired. We want to lay our lives down for our family. We were designed and created to do that. But we have to be reminded. If we want to be any good for those around us, we need to take time and love God with all our hearts, soul, mind, and strength and have our hearts turn towards Him first and turn towards our family second. And when we are rooted and grounded in our relationship with God, which I am now in a way I have never been before– I went through a huge crisis in 2012.

Steve Demme: 00:18:48.434
I don’t know how much to go into that. I’ll just say this, because I realized that year that I had been defining myself by what a good husband I was, or what a good dad I was trying to be, or what a good businessman I was trying to be, or what a good speaker I was trying to be. And those things became me. And you know what? Those things were all taken away that year. And I thought I was undone. I felt lost. And you know what I am now? I am not a godly husband, father, businessman. I’m an adopted child of God, and my Heavenly Father thinks I am the best thing since sliced manna. Now, what I just told you in about three sentences took me about two years to get. A lot of work. I’ve written books about this. I’ve made podcasts on this. But right now, I’m in the best place I’ve ever been with my dad and with my wife and with my kids and with my grandkids because they all flow from that. So when I’m rooted and grounded in God and not stuff around me or things that I do but just in who I am, then I’m much easier to be with. And my wife would testify to that. And my sons will tell you that. I’m in a great place with my family now. I was given it my best shot. I was doing all the things that I normally would have talked about. If you asked me, what’s the role of the father? I’d say lead family worship, be involved, take the initiative, blah, blah, blah. I want to try to do something different today. I want to start with the heart. Let our hearts be turned towards God and our families, and then the rest of it will flow much easier. So as the father, I’ve been given authority. I hate to tell you, that’s what the Bible says. But the Bible also says that the authority that we’ve been given as dads is not to lord over but to build up. Paul says this. I have been given authority, but I don’t want to use my authority for tearing you down. I want to use my authority for building you up. And I learned that as a dad, I don’t have to do much to hurt my family. And I don’t. Sometimes, it’s just tone of my voice. I can build them up also with just the tone of my voice. So I want to really work hard on being in a good, safe place with my dad so that I can be a servant leader like Jesus.

Steve Demme: 00:21:27.978
He was a leader. He took initiative. He was there. But he also had a servant heart and people came up to him, even little peanuts. That’s my word for little kids. Peanuts would come up to him and they would try to cast them away. And he says, no, no, come on to me. Bring the little peanuts. I love everybody because I’m safe, because I know who I am. I am God’s Son, and He loves me to pieces. So I want to follow Jesus’ example. I want to use my authority for being safe and for being a builder upper. I want to be able to bear my wife’s burdens. I want to be able to esteem her highly. She doesn’t remember saying this, but when we were going through a really difficult season in 2012, my big turning point year, we did a lot of talking, a lot of communicating, a lot of listening to each other. And one of the things she said was, sometimes I feel like a second-class citizen. I don’t even like saying it now. And I repented and I worked really hard to do what it says in Philippians to esteem one another more highly than ourselves. So I want to esteem my wife well. I want to honor her. I want to lay my life down for her. All the things that Jesus did for His bride I want to do for my bride.

Steve Demme: 00:22:52.012
Okay, now let’s get some more specifics. We also live in a culture where the devil is attacking everything that God designed in the garden. You think about it, the first thing he did was created a man and woman. And now we don’t even know what a man and a woman is. Check. Then, he’s attacking marriage. Obvious. Check. But he’s also attacking men. And we need to recognize that. And one of the things that I’m involved in is men’s ministries at churches. I go to men’s conferences and I heard a guy give a talk one time and he said, the message of most churches to men is, you just bring your family here, give us money, and we’ll do the rest. So your job is to bring the family to church and pay your tithes, but then the wives are going to the wives’ ministry, the kids are going to the kids’ ministry. And we’ve got experts trained in this who are much better than you. They don’t say that, but it’s implied. And when I listened to that, I thought, boy, no wonder guys feel like we’re disenfranchised. And as homeschoolers, though, I think you can see the fallacy of that because we’ve already rejected the idea that experts are the best people to raise our kids because we know that we’re the best people to raise our kids because we have been created and designed to train up our children. That’s a fact. But when I say we, it’s because it’s husbands and wives. It’s parents. So the first thing we need to do is recognize that we don’t want to adopt this disenfranchised mentality. We want to embrace husbands and wives as a team. We are a team. And this is not our idea. This is not a good idea. This is a God idea. God is the one that designed two people from different planets to make one flesh because these people from different planets supply different stuff. And if you have a single-parent family, God bless you and give you grace. But God designed families to have a male component and a female component because that’s how we’re going to reflect God’s image because we were designed in His image. So my bottom line is if I can take care of Steve, and I’m not looking at my wife to do anything, I’m not looking at my kids, I’m just looking to God alone to supply my needs. And when I’m rooted and grounded in His love, now I can have really healthy communication. And I hate to say this, every family has got to work this out themselves. Who’s going to do what and how you’re going to do it and when you’re going to do it? And I’ll mention my first guy who’s, I would call, one of my heroes. His name is George Sarris. Some of you might have heard him speak many years ago. But George and Susan used to get together on Saturday nights and talk about what they just accomplished the first week and what their plan was for the next week. Once a week, they had a planning date. They went out to dinner and they got to talk about what went well, what didn’t go well, how George could interact, what were Susan’s responsibilities. They worked out this thing between the two of them. I never did that. I’m sorry. I’m not as good as George. Second thing is, Sandy and I did go to what we– it was called a wisdom retreat or something like that, where we had to spend all weekend in small groups and working with therapists, counselors. Actually, they were Christian coaches, they’re different. And we had to come up with a mission statement for our home. We designed a mission statement, which my wife would read over and over and over. And when something would come up as some nice activity that we could do or something we could invest in or whatever, she got out the mission statement and she held it right next to it and she goes, “This doesn’t fit our mission statement. We’re not going to do that.” And you’re going to have to– you’re going to find out that there’s a lot of good stuff out there today. I’m almost overwhelmed at the resources that are available for home educators today that were not when we started. My first homeschool conference, no vendors. There weren’t any. There weren’t any co-ops. There’s just nothing. So you had to figure these things out as a couple. But now there’s so much that is good, you have to start paring back so that you hold on to your core. So Sandy and I’s core– I’ll just tell you what ours was. We came up with this. Ultimately, the number one reason why we’re homeschooling is to raise our children to live forever, which means we’re going to do a lot of praying for our family. We’re going to teach them God’s Word. We’re going to be faithful attenders at church. I mean, these were things that were just core to us. But ultimately, it was to raise them to live forever. As far as you might say academics, we wanted to give them a good foundation in language arts, a good foundation in math, and the third one, hold your breath, a love for learning. We wanted to let their love for learning just grow because we both had that pretty much beaten out of us in school. I don’t know how else to say– it wasn’t beaten out of us, but we lost it in all the classes and taking tests and all that kind of stuff. And so we wanted them to love to learn. And so we were basically done. If the kids were good, we were done by noon every day. And then they could read, they could explore, they could go off on studies, they could hang out with their buddies, all kinds of different things. We had a great, great time raising our kids. We didn’t have a television for the first 16 years of our journey because we wanted our kids to learn to read. That was more important to us than be entertained. I have no idea how we would do it today with all these– well, you know what I mean. You live in the culture, you know. So [laughter] I don’t know what we would do.

Steve Demme: 00:29:22.716
And I will say this just to end on a funny note. You know how children kind of brag on their big brothers? By the way, this picture over here was taken a long time ago. But one day we heard that our first grader was bragging to his buddies about his third-grade older brother. He said, “My brother can read a Hardy Boys book in one sitting on the toilet.” [laughter] And he could. And we couldn’t find him. And he couldn’t walk after he was done [laughter] reading the book because his legs were paralyzed. But you know what I’m saying. [laughter] We had a great– we had a great experience. We read so many books aloud as families and we did all kind of stuff because family is something that you have to be intentional. You have to work to preserve it. But when you start getting it right, it’s one of the most delightful experiences that there ever is. All right, I am going to stop talking and answer questions.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:26.797
Okay, Steve, so my first question to you is a hardball question. And that is what you have described is in the very nature of a woman. It’s not in the very nature of a man. So how do we create that environment in a home where that is not the default for most men? Because you’re not the default for most men.

Steve Demme: 00:30:59.621
Okay, so who is default? Okay, nah, sorry, couldn’t resist.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:06.728
[laughter] I should have known that I– I should have been aware after as long as we’ve known each other.

Steve Demme: 00:31:13.215
I really believe that at some point, God divinely worked in my heart. I don’t know how else to say it. Because if I was to do the things that I did out of a sense of duty, it would not have flown. And I didn’t do them out of a sense of duty. My heart was turned towards my family and I wanted to be there for my kids. And can you hardball? Let me go deep. I wanted to have a family that I didn’t have. That was a part of it. I didn’t realize it, but my dad was a traveling salesman, first five years of my life. I never had much of a relationship with him because that’s the years when you can connect with your kids and they can sit on your lap and all this stuff that happens just by being together and by touching each other and eating meals together, all these things I missed.

Steve Demme: 00:32:15.962
And the second thing was, and I hadn’t even thought of this until a Christian coach took me down this trail by asking me really good questions, but we went to see The Sound of Music when I was 12 years old, but we didn’t go to a drive-in theater, which is what we normally did if we even went to a theater because that’s all we could afford. I would call us lower middle class. So a drive-in theater, you throw all the kids in the back of a station wagon, and you make popcorn because we couldn’t afford to buy the food down at the snack bar, but this time, my mom said, “We’re going to go down to the Warner Theater downtown Pittsburgh and we’re going to watch The Sound of Music.” And we walked out of there and we stood on the steps, and I never forgot this, and my mom looked at us and she said, “I wish we had a family like that.”

Steve Demme: 00:33:12.517
So like you say, it’s on the heart of moms, but for some reason, we didn’t– and our family, I would call a pretty typical suburban family, but I wanted something better for my kids, and so I was there from the beginning, and I think some of it was from my own past, and some of it is, I have prayed a lot and asked God to turn my heart towards home because I don’t think it’s natural. I think men are designed to fix things, to build things, and when you get together with a group of men, the first question is, where are you from? What do you do? Because we define ourselves by what we do. It’s part of the nature of a man, and I specifically, intentionally, hardly ever do that anymore. I talk to people and I ask them questions to try to find out who they are, because that’s much more important.

Steve Demme: 00:34:09.916
So yes, I do believe that moms get it differently than men, but we need to get it, and we need to be with other men that get it. As you know, Gretchen and I speak at lots of conferences and most of them together, but we just were in Kansas– what was that? A week and a half ago? Yeah, and there were men there, and I had some really deep talks with men because men, not according to what television tells us, are not meat eating, sports watching, shallow. They aren’t. Once you get to know men, they’ve got something deep in their heart and they want to be a dad and they want to learn how to do it. The desire is there, but I think it’s something that God’s doing in our culture is– that’s what home education is all about. It’s turning families to God, not just wives and kids. It’s got to get the dad. And so how do you get the dad? I don’t know. Hang around with other dads that get it, pray, and [crosstalk] some more.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:18.384
So I know we have a lot of women who are probably going to watch this and then they’re going to encourage their husbands to watch it, but in the interim, what is the position? And I see you have this counsel conversation, so I know that that you’re going to be able to handle the question I’m going to ask. As a woman who’s waiting for her husband to get it, what is the position you would like them to be in? How would you like them to hold their hearts?

Steve Demme: 00:35:56.133
Well, let me see if I can just do it a little differently because I get asked this question a lot when I have my family worship talk. They said, “I’d love love it if my dad–

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:04.546
I know you do. [laughter]

Steve Demme: 00:36:04.599
–well, I would love it if my husband led family worship. So let me just say this. Let’s say that you’re the wife and your husband is not taking a role in teaching the Bible to his kids. I recommend my book because in that book, there’s a whole bunch of testimonies of other dads that didn’t see it at first, but once they started doing it, it changed them. And there’s a family down in Florida and I heard their story and I was amazed. But they heard my talk. They decided husband was going to go home. He was going to have family worship. So he sucked it up and he went upstairs that night. And the girls, all girls, by the way, were in bed. He decides to read the Bible to them while they’re in bed. And guess what he read? Song of Solomon. His wife was horrified. And so she called her good friend who told me this later, and she said, “What do I do? He’s reading the Song of Solomon to my girls.” And this other wise woman said, “He’s reading the Bible. Isn’t that what you wanted? Let it go, it’ll work out fine. You know what? They continue. This is 15 years later. They still have family worship in their home. It changed their life. It changed the man so much that he became involved in the ministry of his church and now leads mission trips. Because this is the thing. If we try to circumvent and say, well, the man, he doesn’t do it right, goodness, why would you read Song of Solomon? But if you just back him up, give him some rope, it’ll work because home education is not just about the kids. It’s about the whole family is going to be transformed.

Steve Demme: 00:37:54.679
Husbands and wives are going to be transformed as they teach the kids. It just is. So if I was a dad, and let’s say I was not doing anything, and my wife would just say, “Is there any way that we could have a talk?” And then you sit down and you say, “God has really put this on my heart that we read the Bible together as a family, not just me and the kids, which we do during school, but we would really like to do this with you. Would you like to be a part of this?” And if he says, “Yes”, then you won and you get started. But here’s what I do. I didn’t check commentaries. I didn’t read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. We just opened the Bible and read a chapter, closed the Bible. We talked about what we read if we had time. We prayed, wrapped it up. Boom, real simple. Anybody can do this. But the other thing is, let’s say that the husband doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t respond. Just ask this question, “Would it be okay if I led family worship then with your blessing? Would that be all right?” I can’t imagine a guy saying no to that. But then leave it open door, “but we would still love you, even if you don’t lead it or can you at least be with us? Because we love you. You’re our husband. You’re our dad. We want to do stuff together with you.” Or and or you could also say, “Maybe we could just discuss Monday nights at the table while we’re having dinner together. Let’s just everybody talk about what we learned that week.” So the kids share their schoolwork, they share their projects, but let the husband share something too. Here’s what I learned this week on the job. Here’s some things that have been challenging for me. And I will say this, I didn’t grow up in a home where we had family worship. It was hard for me to make this a regular part of the warp and wolf of our home. I’m not a scheduled guy. Every day is different in my world. That’s how I live. But–

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:01.923
I’m only giggling because I I know you. Yeah. And yeah, absolutely.

Steve Demme: 00:40:09.197
But my wife is this queen of the schedule. She’s the calendar of the Medes and Persians. She’s got everything laid out, she’s got lesson plans, and she’s got lists for her lists. I’m not making this up. I could go upstairs and show you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:40:24.157
This is why I love her. You know that, right [laughter]?

Steve Demme: 00:40:26.759
But you know what? Every time we had family devotions, when we were done, she’d say thank you, and I remembered those. And that was a huge encouragement because she probably could have done a better job than me, but she let me go ahead. And I will say this too, as– as a dad, having– having appreciative kids and wife is huge. I remember taking my kids one time somewhere. We’re miniature golfing or something like that, and nobody said, thank you. And everybody got in the van, and I said, “Can I– can I have just a minute here?” And everybody said, “Okay,” and they got all quiet. And I said, I love doing stuff for my family, and I– I’m going to keep doing it whether you thank me or not. But I just want to tell you, it’s really important to me, and it means a lot to me when you do thank me. And they heard me, and after that, no matter where we went, we would get in the van and, “Thanks, Pop. Thanks for taking us for ice cream. Hey, thanks, Pop. Thanks.” Amazing how thankful they were. And the more I was thanked, it made it easier. I’m just telling you, because as everybody knows, men are just big boys, and we need to be appreciated and thanked, and it made a big difference.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:47.857
I think what you have hit upon, Steve, is something really important. And I don’t quite want to let it go, because I know that often when we are the keepers of the home as women, we have a vision of what it should be. And sometimes we are so intent on executing that vision that we forget to bring our husbands in as the– the one called to help that vision come to life. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Steve Demme: 00:42:28.199
We were created and designed for this, but I really believe in conspiracies. No question about it. There’s a conspiracy between good and evil, God and the devil, Christ and the Antichrist. We live in a conspiracy world. But right now, men are like in Egypt, because I don’t know if you’ve seen the stats, but we’re being asked to work longer, harder to provide the same level of income as just a few years ago. And this inflation hurts everybody, but it especially hurts the guy that’s the wage earner. And most wage earners of homeschool families – I shouldn’t say most, but there’s a whole bunch of them – are single income. And so these guys are having to work extra hours to provide the same level of income. I liken it to Pharaoh saying, “I want the same number of bricks, but now you don’t get any straw.” And so men are stressed, and they’re stressed more than they’ve ever been. And so I think it’s important once in a while to say, “Thank you. Thanks for going to work for us,” and things like that. But in answer to your question, I think it starts, though, not so much with the family and the dad as it does with the husband and the wife. A lot of these conversations need to happen behind the scenes, not in front of the family, not– not calling out the husband in front of everybody saying, “Hey, why don’t you get off your butt and– and lead the family?” No, no, no, no, no. It starts praying together with your husband. That is the very first thing.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:08.816
So many of the questions started with how? And I think I was leading you to this direction because it’s not how. It’s who. And it’s being in touch with the who creates the how.

Steve Demme: 00:44:29.335
Yes. You said it. That’s perfect. This will be the title of the podcast. Getting in touch with the who– how’d you say the rest of that?

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:39.050
Being in touch with the who creates the how.

Steve Demme: 00:44:42.359
Yes. But it starts with individually and then together as a couple and then family. And I never saw that for 30 years. I mean, my wife and I, we were moving in the same direction. We were on the same page, but I didn’t give hardly any time to my personal relationship with God and let Him search my heart. And now we do something called respite for John. Once a month, Sandy and I take off because we have a son with Down syndrome. He’ll be with us until I kick the bucket. But we still need two-time. So now we have– Wednesday nights are our date nights. And once a month, we get away just the two of us. It all starts with, first, individual and then couples. Yeah. And on those date nights, talk about it. Ask each other, “How did your week go?” Yeah. But when you’re rooted and grounded yourself, it’s easier to talk about things out here. But when you’re all focused on things out here, it’s really hard to talk about yourself, so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:45:49.894
And I think you’ve also said something that’s really important, Steve, and that is let go of should, “You should do this. It should be this way. It should look like this.” And instead recognize, “It is as it is.” And what changes that is your relationship with the Heavenly Father.

Steve Demme: 00:46:13.909
And if you look at Jesus, before He did anything, before any of the house, the first thing his Dad said to him was, “You are my son. I love you to pieces, and you are pleasing,” which I think are the three things that every one of us needs to hear, but we need to hear them from Him. But when he had this going so well, then he was able to do the how. Yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:44.301
Okay. All right, Steve. So now I’m going to ask another hard question.

Steve Demme: 00:46:48.416
You only get three. Make it a good one.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:48.678
So many men have never heard that message. So how do we create that message? So talk to me a little bit now about the wonderful tools you provide to families. And actually, I’m even going to pause there and back up a little bit because you said, at one point, about five minutes ago, “Well, they should read my book.” Steve, there’s a lot of books. Which one?

Steve Demme: 00:47:21.911
Well, if you want to read the raw one, Crisis to Christ is what I went through in 2012 when I came really close to losing my family. And it was my dear wife that sat down with me and said, “Steve, you can’t do enough to please God. And you’re hurting our family.” I was so focused on seeking first the kingdom and doing things for others that I really didn’t do hardly anything in my own relationship. My wife shouldn’t have had to take that courageous step if she hadn’t told me that, I wouldn’t be where I am today. So it was my wife that you might say drew the line in the sand. Okay, so that’s number one. But I also didn’t realize how my stuff, my own baggage was impacting my kids until I learned to communicate and I got in a safe place because it’s really hard for wives or children to confront dads if we’re not safe. I mean, you take your life in your hands because two years after that crisis, I’m in a much better place. And one of my sons sat down with me. We spent three hours together and I learned what it was like growing up in my home. I should have heard those things 30 years before, but nobody wanted to tell me stuff because they knew I would take everything personally. Okay.

Steve Demme: 00:49:01.433
So all that to say, crisis to Christ is my journey of walking through that really hard time. I also had a whole bunch of men in my life. Men need other men. Isolation is the kryptonite of men. Quote, Patrick Morley, who wrote Man in the Mirror. It’s a fact. I have a wealth of men in my life. I meet with a group of men on Tuesday. I meet with Thursday night with men at my church. I have good male friends. And when I was going through the ringer in 2012, I tried to do it myself for about two months until I finally, in desperation, reached out to these men and they gathered around me and began praying for me. So men need men. And so that was another piece. So that’s all in crisis to Christ. Knowing God’s love is similar to that, except it focuses more on just the good news. I’m going to give you one sentence. Jesus said to His disciples, it’s my favorite Bible verse now, John 15:9, “As my dad has loved me, so have I loved you.” And I went, “Are you kidding?

Steve Demme: 00:50:12.617
You mean to tell me you love me as much as your dad loves you? Because I know that the Father loves the Son.” And he said, “Yes, same way that He loves me. That’s how I love you.” And that’s when I got the good news in a much deeper way. And it transformed me. And I love God now like I’ve never loved Him. And I love my wife and kids like I’ve never loved him because something opened up in my life. So that’s in knowing God’s love. But those are two good ones to start with. And those books are available as audiobooks. So you don’t even have to read them. You can just put them in your car and you’re going back and forth to work or when you’re on the road and listen to them. I’m reading them. Sorry, I should have got a better reader.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:54.645
And the website is?

Steve Demme: 00:50:56.571
buildingfaithfamilies.org

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:59.203
Absolutely. So Steve, we have 18 summers with our kids. We have 18 Christmases with our kids. And then they become adults in the world. And sometimes even as you sew all those wonderful things into your children, as they become adults, they don’t always line up with what you thought you sewed. And I know that there’s some mom’s hearts who are out here going, but I didn’t ask you to be that way or I didn’t raise you to behave like that. So now talk to moms and dads about loving their kids anyway.

Steve Demme: 00:51:44.046
Yeah, that’s the thing. Here’s what Jesus says in John 15:9, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” And then He says a couple of words, which I hardly ever remember to add, but it says, “Abide in my love, live in my love.” Okay. And then my thought is, well, how do I do that? And he tells us two verses later, “If you want to abide in my love, love one another as I have loved you.” So that’s different than loving one another as you wish you were loved. It’s loving one another as He has loved us. So if you think about it, Jesus loved us while we were sinners. I’m trying to be real practical here. So when your kids do different things than you think they should be doing or wish they were doing, you have to just stop and say, “Not my job to fix kids.” It’s my job to love kids, even when they’re sinners. And it says he loved us to the end. I can’t even imagine when I’ve heard of people kicking their kids out of their home. I don’t know how you do that. I mean, I’m sure there’s other things that I don’t know about situations like that. But sometimes it’s because of what they’re listening to or their music or their– that is not that big a deal. Love your kids to the end and make them know that they’re loved. And I tell you what, I’ve got four adult sons. They’re now 44 to 36. And I don’t even look at what they do or how they do it. My job is to love them. God’s job is to fix people. And I love them. And I try to love them like Jesus loved me. He loved me all the time. He came not to be served, but to serve. He didn’t come to own the remote. He came to serve his family. And one of the ways I can serve my family is washing dishes at family events because we still get together.

Steve Demme: 00:53:53.708
The next one is Mother’s Day. Coming up in about 10 days. We’re going to have everybody over here at the house. We’re going to have a Mother’s Day celebration. And my wife doesn’t do anything. She does too much anyway. So it’s my job to serve. I thought, “What’s the best way I can serve my wife”? I can wash the dishes at a family event. It’s huge. But see, it could be something different for everybody. But I think that it’s a different focus. If I’m looking at Jesus and how has He loved me versus looking at my kids and how would I wish I was loved if I was them, blah, blah, blah, it’s all horizontal. But if you look vertically, you get all kinds of stuff that you can do. And some of the things I do is I learn to die to Steve. And this is Biggie because this is what he says to do for husbands to wives, lay your life down for your wife. So I sing the Frozen song a lot. You know that movie The Frozen? I don’t like the movie. I don’t like the movie. I don’t even know what it’s about. But I had to watch it with my granddaughters. And I picked up the song, let it go, let it go. And when I watched my adult sons doing stuff that I would never do, I don’t know where they even figured it out. Let it go. Let it go. I sing it in– I sing it quietly. But yeah, I don’t. I used to try to push them even when they were adults saying, “If you cut your grass a little bit more often, it would dah dah dah. And if you could just wash that car a little bit more, blah, blah, blah. You want me to wash your car for you? I was dumb. So now I just be with them, be smiling, happy, build them up, encourage them, tell them I love them to pieces.

Gretchen Roe: 00:55:46.380
And you’ve said something several times through this conversation that I just want to reiterate one more time. And that is build them up and encourage them. Wives, build up your husbands, fathers, build up your children and your wives why is that so important? I just want you to reiterate it one more time because I know what you’re going to say.

Steve Demme: 00:56:10.363
You and I know that there are things that people have said to us in the past that we still remember. And it might be decades and they still hurt.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:22.235
Yes.

Steve Demme: 00:56:23.457
And there’s nobody that can build up our families like parents. There just isn’t. And there’s no one that can hurt them like parents. And when we do hurt them, we need to make quick amends and do the best we can to ask their forgiveness. So.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:42.459
I thank you so much for this hour and I can’t believe it’s almost over. So what would be the closing words you would have for those viewing or listening to the conversation we’ve had?

Steve Demme: 00:56:57.641
God really is alive. And I never knew that he could be so real as he is to me right now. And it makes it easier to pray in all things, to cast my burden upon the Lord, to draw near to him because then he’ll draw near to me. And he’s knowable. And he said, “It’s a really good thing that I’m going to the Father because then I get to send my spirit who will be with each one of you.” Now make friends with the Holy Spirit and lean on Him and ask a whole bunch of questions.

Steve Demme: 00:57:40.869
And when you don’t know what to do about what to do, you just pray and say, “Guide me, teach me, lead me.” Because He’s alive. And He really does love us to pieces. Yeah. I didn’t believe that. I thought He loved me more if I did more stuff, which is why I tried to do so much stuff. And I think that what motivated me to do a lot of the good things that I did was so I would belong, so I would be loved, so I would be pleasing. And I didn’t realize until 2012 that because of Jesus, what He did on the cross, I’m already belong, I’m already pleasing, and I’m already loved. Wish I’d have known that 40 years ago.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:30.047
I would wish that everyone would know that.

Steve Demme: 00:58:33.083
Amen.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:34.108
Amen. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thank all of you for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, subscribe, follow wherever you are hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. Take care, Steve. Thanks for everything.

Steve Demme: 00:58:58.962
Thank you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:59:00.549
Bye.

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