Real Stuff My Dad Says – Stubbed Toe Principle

A Christian Podcast Central Classic Podcast

Jefferson Drexler:
Hello, and welcome back to Real Stuff My Dad Says the podcast. This is a podcast full of real stuff that my dad says, actual real things my dad has told me over the years. This has nothing to do with the Twitter feed or the sitcom that starred Will Shatner, that was really funny, but really, honestly, didn’t give much life to anybody, but these are things that my dad has told me over the years, my brother, other people that my dad’s come in contact with that has really proven to be pearls of wisdom. My name’s Jefferson Drexler, and I’m here with my dad, Rod, how you doing today, Dad?

Rod Drexler:
I’m doing pretty good.

Jefferson Drexler:
And Dad, as we’re recording this, we are in the throes of basketball season. You and I are both sports fans. I am a huge, huge college basketball fan one month out of the year. In March with the rest of the country. And actually what I found though, and I think a lot of sports fans heard about, was something that didn’t take place in March, but actually took place last November. And that was a record-breaking scoring feat in college basketball. Just to brief our listeners on the story, it was back in November. It was this huge matchup, not between Duke and North Carolina or Georgetown Syracuse, no, this was the powerhouse of DIII schools, Grinnell College and Faith Baptist. And in that matchup, David Larson of Faith Baptist scored a whopping 70 points.

Rod Drexler:
Wow.

Rod Drexler:
70 points this guy scored. I mean, how many times, how tired is the guy’s arms from throwing up that many shots to score 70 points? You can only imagine what his shooting percentage was. I’m sure it wasn’t fantastic, especially towards the end of the game when he was just tired.

Rod Drexler:
It’s probably a hundred percent

Jefferson Drexler:
No defense, that’s for sure. 70 points, David Larson scored. His team scored 104, so the remaining players on his team only scored 34 points.

Rod Drexler:
Right. Right.

Jefferson Drexler:
But he’s overshadowed. Poor David, didn’t make very many headlines. He was an asterisk in the articles that were written because superstar Jack Taylor, sophomore guard of Grinnell College, was on the other side. Jack scored 138 points on his own.

Jefferson Drexler:
Wow.

Rod Drexler:
138 points. 25 more than the NCAA record that Jack broke. And so you got Jack Taylor scoring 138 going against David Larson who scored 70. Both guys, there would be nobody that would argue with them if they went home and scored, “Hey, I scored a ton of points tonight.”

Jefferson Drexler:
Right. Right.

Rod Drexler:
And yet at poor Dave Larson goes home on the losing end. And did he score a lot of points? How do you define a lot of points?

Jefferson Drexler:
Right.

Rod Drexler:
Even if you look at both of these guys, if you got a DIII guard scoring 138, is that anywhere near as valuable as a shooting guard for Duke scoring 40 in the NCAA tournament? That’s a lot of points.

Jefferson Drexler:
It is.

Rod Drexler:
So I guess what we’re looking at, Dad, in today’s podcast is the dad-ism that you have poured into our lives and that I call it varying values. And basically, what it is is you’ll walk up to me when I describe a situation. You’ll hold up two hands, one with five fingers up, one with two fingers up. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I know exactly what you’re talking about, but anybody who just sees us chatting in a parking lot, Dad, what is that varying values? What does it mean when you’ve got five fingers on the one hand and two on another?

Rod Drexler:
That’s where we don’t need a podcast, we need a video podcast for that one because it’s a visual, but you’re right. It’s been something I’ve done over the years. Sometimes I’ll be at church and hear a pastor do a sermon and I’ll look over at somebody that I know and I’ll hold up five fingers on one hand and the two on the other hand and they just start chuckling and laughing saying exactly, “I know what you mean.” What it’s always meant to me was is that words have different values, like you’re talking about these different points. I would probably change it a little bit that when I use the word blue, for example, you can ask a person what’s a color blue look like, and probably don’t know, what do you think? There are probably a hundred different shades of blue. But when you hear the word, something comes into your mind and you actually think of a certain shade or anything else, whether that it’s a deep, dark blue, or whether it’s a baby blue or something like this, you just hear the word blue and your mind goes there.

Rod Drexler:
And so that has a word value to it. I don’t know how to measure those things, but they do. And somebody else hears the word blue, they’re thinking something completely different. So if you say the word, “I have a best friend. This friend is really important to me.” And somebody else says, “Boy, I have a best friend as well.” And it might be completely different. It might be that your best friend, you see two, three times a week. You’re in an accountability to group together. You’re able to share all your in important things in life and they’re able to help you through it. Okay? And that would be a great best friend to ever have. And the other person may say, “Yeah, I got a great friend, or my best friend, and they live on the other side of the country, now. I see him about every other, every third year now. But well, we talk on a phone once a year or something like that.” But they’re still calling it by the same term as you did, best friend. And so again, it has a different word value.

Rod Drexler:
So I found that lots and lots and lots of words have that value, and we have to determine what that means. And so that’s how it comes across. And so the poor guy that scored all those points, but the other guy scored so many more. Was it double?

Jefferson Drexler:
60…

Rod Drexler:
Yeah.

Jefferson Drexler:
68 more.

Rod Drexler:
So, yeah.

Jefferson Drexler:
Nearly double.

Rod Drexler:
I can’t imagine having that great of a game and then to be overshadowed by somebody that much of a difference, but it does happen in our lives. And we do see that when we are talking about certain things, we have to come up with a value on it. And where I’ll see it is sometimes people will talk about it in a sermon, maybe they’ll hear a word, “Okay, now what does this mean to me?” I want you to know that’s what you’re supposed to do. Every sermon that you hear, every message that you hear, you should be able to evaluate it and say, “Okay, what does this mean to me and my life?” And so some people will gather different things from a message like that than the person sitting right next to them because of the value of those particular words.

Jefferson Drexler:
So you’ll hear a word. I’ll hear the same word. You put a value of five. I put a value of two. To be very simple, that’s what the hand gestures mean.

Rod Drexler:
Right. Right.

Jefferson Drexler:
But I guess more importantly, because really neither you, me, I don’t think anybody you or I are very close to, are going to go play in an NCAA game and score anywhere near 70 points or even 138 points.

Rod Drexler:
I probably could, but I like to hold back a little.

Jefferson Drexler:
I don’t think you could do that if you were playing at Chuck E. Cheese.

Rod Drexler:
You’re right. I tried that at Chuck E. Cheese a while back. They wore me out.

Jefferson Drexler:
I don’t think that if we’re dealing with a color blue, I don’t know if we’re really going to run into real issues. Where this comes into a problem though, is when you’re dealing with interpersonal relationships and somebody says, “Ooh, I’m really committed to this.”

Rod Drexler:
That’s exactly it. Yeah.

Jefferson Drexler:
So where do you see this as really being a real issue? And then what do we do about it?

Rod Drexler:
Okay. My wife and I have always used the word c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-commitment because it’s hard for people to even speak it sometimes because they’ll hear something, they’ll say, “You know what? I really want to do that.” And so how important that is to you, that’s a big question mark on things. We just passed a new year and everyone has new goals that they’re setting for themselves for the year. And they say that within five days, I think it is, that 95% of those are already out the window. And so what happens with it is is that it’s talking about an important- What did you think this thing meant when it said diet? Did you think that meant I’m just cutting down from seven Oreo cookies to six, or did it mean I’ve decided not to eat those cookies for some time?

Rod Drexler:
And so that would be the value of something. And you can measure every word that there is, and it’s a matter of how important life is. And so I think it comes down to where I’m looking at, do we evaluate our lives or do we just keep going with life, whatever’s in front of us? We just keep taking step after step, rather than looking at the real would map and figuring out where we’re going.

Jefferson Drexler:
I know a lot of people when they meet with you and all of a sudden you’re putting up your two hands like that, usually it’s because somebody in that relationship is frustrated. Usually it’s a situation that they’re having an understanding of what they’re defining as whatever commitment. Let’s make a trip. What you mean by trip? Let’s do a vacation, let’s watch our budget, whatever it may be. One of the people is frustrated and the other one is just in there going, “I don’t know what you’re frustrated about.” Usually that tends to be the way that it goes. Why is it, Dad? Why is it that we’re so frustrated in those moments? And why is it that this other person in the, a room with us, these are two people that tend to have a lot of conversations together. But how is it? They tend to be on two opposite ends of the spectrum of their understanding.

Rod Drexler:
Maybe when they’re looking at a particular word, they’re seeing it in a different light saying, you talk about the word trust and so the word trust is huge. I mean, this thing’s really, really mammoth. Somebody says they trust something and how much trust do they really have in it? That’s determined by the five and the two. They may say that they trust something, but do they really trust it? There’s the old thing about how much trust that we have in a chair that every time we go to sit down, we don’t even think about it that it’s going to collapse. We just automatically sit in there and how sometimes we’re surprised when something goes wrong, but we do have a lot of things we have trust in. But if you, if you’re talking with a spouse and you say I want to accomplish something in our marriage, and they may be thinking a value of two, you’re thinking of a value of five, might go the opposite way.

Rod Drexler:
And so I’m trying to get on a baseline with somebody, so that we have a real good understanding. If I say something’s valuable to me, and you say It’s valuable to you, is it got the same amount of value to it? And if it does, then we’re on the right path together. If it doesn’t, then we’re talking about two completely different things. That’s where I want to just get to a baseline with a person, when I’m having a conversation, that we are talking the same thing, rather than just talking words.

Jefferson Drexler:
Now let’s talk some specifics. I know I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen in my own marriage where you could say, “Hey, it’s really important. We learned this lesson. We needed to be doing a date night.” Date nights are important. That’s the two of us, even just a cup of coffee or sometime where we can just the two of us connect and both people agree, “Yeah, we need to do that.” But we never lay down the terms. What type of a real is one thinking just a cup of coffee and the other one’s thinking of a five star dinner? Or is one of them thinking a weekend away somewhere? Is one thinking that we need to do this at every week or the other party thinking, “Oh, it’s like every six months we do this.” I guess, so that being the big mystery that’s out there, how on earth do we solve this riddle?

Rod Drexler:
I’ll bet a lot of fights in marriages are over that because a wife may have said we need to do this, and she was thinking this particular value of it. And then the husband was not. And so now she’s really disappointed that he didn’t follow through as much as she was thinking it. And again, that’s kind of like how do we get on the same path with each other that we know what these things mean? And I’ll tell you that it’s, it’s very hard to do sometimes, but if you’re talking about something that’s valuable and important to you, you can accomplish it.

Rod Drexler:
Maybe when I talked about somebody joining a home group, a Bible study, home Bible study or something like this, and we’ll say, “How valuable is that to you?” And they’ll say, “I can’t do it. You know, I just don’t have any time. It’s too hard for me to do.” And then I say, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. If I offered you a thousand dollars every time you came, would you get there?”

Jefferson Drexler:
Suddenly, they find the time.

Rod Drexler:
They do. They do. And so the value of it just changed. Okay? And so what happens there is sometimes we got to look at the things in life. Sometimes the things are much more valuable than that thousand dollars that we’re thinking about, but we will make the adjustment in our lives for that thousand dollars. Will we make the adjustment in our lives for something else?

Jefferson Drexler:
So to solve that puzzle then, the key is to thoroughly communicate and make sure that the two of you are speaking the same language. It doesn’t even need to necessarily mean that both of you think that something’s worth a thousand dollars. It could be that both of you think that something’s worth a nickel. As long as you have the same definition.

Rod Drexler:
Same standard. Yeah. And so sometimes what happens is that we got to get back to “Okay, when you said this, what did it mean to you?” And then we can come up with the center focus of, of where that thing is. And we can come up the value of it when “Oh, no, no. When I said the word blue-

Jefferson Drexler:
And isn’t it crazy because you just said just a little bit ago that you think that, and I agree, that many, many marital fights come down to people just not having the same value on whatever word it is that’s thrown out there.

Rod Drexler:
“I thought We talked about this. I thought we had it all settled!” And you go, “Well, I thought I did it.”

Jefferson Drexler:
And yet really, to resolve that fight, it really just needed a little bit more of a conversation of “Wait a minute. What did you mean by That?”

Rod Drexler:
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes these are just tweaks. And I’ve talked with people that have ended relationships, friends for years, and they believe something that was done, that that may not have been done from the other person’s point of view, just as they were thinking of it as a different value. And so whenever you’re going to set something down in stone and something that’s going to be real important, I think we have to talk about what the value of those particular Words are.

Jefferson Drexler:
Dad, thank you so much. And like we say so many times in our podcast, the real point of all this is is put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Stop putting your needs, your desires, your selfishness in front of everything else and think of somebody else for a change. And you’ll find that you’ll see things from a different perspective and actually maybe even see their value on something and you can avoid a whole lot of heartache.

Jefferson Drexler:
Dad, thanks again for coming and shedding some light on these things. If you like what you hear, then go to our website, realstuffmydadsays.com. Or you can check us out on the E-Squared Podcast Network. That’s at e2network.net. And there’s a ton of other podcasts there that you’ll also enjoy. If you love ours, you’re going to like them. If you don’t like ours, then I’m pretty sure to going find something else there that really is going to float your boat. And Dad, thanks again for coming on board.

Rod Drexler:
Mkay.

Jefferson Drexler:
And thanks for your pearls of wisdom. Thank you for listening. And Hey, like I always say, and like my kids always say, “I’m just trying to help.” So thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.