This Way Network: Nina & Jefferson Drexler

Nina:
Good morning. Welcome to the chat session. Look who we’ve got here with us. Jefferson. So happy to see you again, Jeff. How you doing?

Jefferson:
I’m doing well, Nina. How are you doing today?

Nina:
I’m doing good, too. I’m a little flustered because, as you know, we were trying to get on, and my link wasn’t working. And I thought, for a minute there, I was going to miss it completely. I don’t know how you would’ve managed by yourself, Jeff, but I bet you would’ve had a nice chat with yourself.

Jefferson:
Oh man. If I had a nickel for every time that I got caught talking to all the voices in my head, I’d have at least a quarter or so.

Nina:
Well, I talk to myself all the time. The problem is I answer myself back, too.

Jefferson:
Yeah, which is perfectly fine. It’s when you start losing those arguments, that’s when you know you’ve got a problem.

Nina:
Yeah. Ooh. Yeah, that’s started happening already. That’s pretty crazy.

Jefferson:
We have a guy that lives in our town. He’s homeless, and he tends to walk the same routes, and I see him periodically. And he obviously has some issues. And one of the things that he does… As he walks, he conducts as if there’s an orchestra in front of him. And I actually have had the privilege of doing some conducting in my life. And one time I’m driving, and I just happened to… Time and time again, I’d see him doing this. And one time I was at a stop light, and I heard him kind of humming so I could kind of identify what it was he was doing.

Jefferson:
But then, there was another time when I’m stuck at a light for a long time. He crossed in front of me. And I’m watching him do his hands, and the thought hit me, “You’re doing it wrong.” And I was like, “How bad am I that I’m critiquing the conducting skills of this homeless guy with neuroses?”

Nina:
Oh, I was afraid you were going to say, “I saw him doing this. And I knew which piece of music he was conducting.”

Jefferson:
Yes. The overture does not go like that.

Nina:
That’s right. I’m in my father’s home, by the way, right now. He’s having some issues, and I’m here to help take care of him for right now. And part of what’s going on here is he has a little bit of dementia. And what I find very interesting is that sometimes he can’t say things the right way, the way he’s meaning. So he’s might say a different word. And the scary part to me is I understand him completely.

Nina:
So, not sure what that says. One day he said, “I put my dirty clothes in the trailer,” and I thought, “We don’t have a trailer. A trailer pulls a camper. Camper runs with hamper. That’s what he means. He put his dirty clothes in the hamper.”

Jefferson:
Oh.

Nina:
And then I wondered about my own brain. What does that say that I know what he meant? Yeah. Anyway, so what’s going on with you nowadays, Jeff?

Jefferson:
Wow. So we talked about this briefly on your show, that our best friends have moved. They just arrived at their new place in Texas, yesterday. I’m in California. And to help them with the move, my sons and I, we did all… not all. We did a lot of the heavy lifting and got the van loaded, or the moving van loaded.

Nina:
Right. Bless you for that.

Jefferson:
But my wife was the one who actually took the drive with them from San Diego to Texas. Over 20 hours of driving. And so what that means is that I’ve been a single dad for four boys for the last few days.

Nina:
Wow.

Jefferson:
I’ll tell you, if for no other reason to just the chauffeuring and meal-getting? Forget all the caring and loving and all that. That’s been tossed by the roadside. I look at single parents in a whole new light.

Nina:
Yeah. How do they function? That’s what it feels like by the way, slight aside right here. Shameless plug, y’all. My interview with Jefferson is going to be airing next after this program. So stay tuned. Okay? So back to the single parent thing.

Jefferson:
Just can’t get enough of us.

Nina:
No, really. Now, I’ve been a single parent before. Now, to eight. And there was a season when I was keeping my grandkids while their parents were working, or, at least, not all eight of them. Just two of them at that time. But I remember thinking to myself, “How is it that I am so much more present with them than I was with my own kids when I was a single parent? I’m so much more intentional. I enjoy them more. How come I wasn’t enjoying my own kids as much?”

Nina:
And I was beating myself up about that. And then I realized, “Oh, wait a minute. While I’m here with my grandkids, I don’t have to think about, oh, yeah, I need to take the roast out of the freezer. Oh, yeah. I need to put that load of clothes in the dryer. Oh, yeah. I need to…” have all those other responsibilities. I’ve just got them. I just have to keep them alive and happy for a few hours. That makes a world of difference with your presence and your intentionality about things.

Jefferson:
I remember when my oldest son… He was probably four, and my dad had taken him for the day and just totally spoiled him, and took a great grandpa/grandson day. And we’re at dinner that night. And my son’s telling me about the day, and I just shook my head. And I said, “Honestly, I don’t know who that man is.” And he looks at me, very, very inquisitive. And I go, “Yeah, everything you’re describing about Grandpa? I don’t know that man.”

Jefferson:
He goes, “Isn’t he your dad? Didn’t he raise you?” And I said, “Yeah, but the guy that’s treating you is a far different dude than the guy who raised me. If I was in your shoes today, we would’ve been mowing the law, cleaning the eaves, doing all these different things all over the house. And instead, you get to go have ice cream and go to the skate park.” I’m like, “This is totally different.”

Jefferson:
There’s a different… not just mindset, like you’re saying, but just a shift in your totality when it’s your grandkids, that I’ve seen, which I love because, then, my parents get to be the good cop when I have to be the bad cop.

Jefferson:
Well, it looks like I’m monologing now. Looks like we’ve had some technical difficulties. So, as I was saying, my name is Jefferson Drexler. And in this chat session, this is just a precursor for the show that Nina and I pre-taped a few days ago, where we got to talk about a bunch of different things. Oh, it looks like she’s back. There she is.

Nina:
I’m back. Yeah. I had to move to a different room, I think, because I don’t know what happened there. But, like I said, I’m at my dad’s house. So things are a little different.

Jefferson:
And I think that, with wifi today, while they advertise that it’s wifi everywhere, those of us who are old enough to remember having to do the rabbit ears on a television are much more adept to trying to figure things out, where you have to like hold the antenna and then put aluminum foil and one foot in the air.

Nina:
Yes.

Jefferson:
And now you’ve got good signal. There you go.

Nina:
Yes, I remember that. Definitely. And I have moved closer to the router. So hopefully, that will take care of things.

Jefferson:
We’re golden. We had wifi problems so bad in my house a while back that there was one part of the house that seemed to work well for two of our computers. And we didn’t figure it out until later that they worked better at that corner of the house because they were connecting to my neighbor’s wifi, not ours.

Nina:
Yes.

Jefferson:
Then I switched companies< and we were all good throughout the house. But so long as we can connect to my neighbor’s house, we were solid.

Nina:
That may explain things. There are moments in my apartment where I’m sitting there, having a video call with my daughter in Japan, and all of the sudden, I’ll slightly turn in my chair, and we lose the signal. And I have to turn back just like that, and we’re good.

Jefferson:
Yeah. It’s that rabbit ears.

Nina:
That little one-degree thing. Yeah. It’s crazy. All right. So what did you talk about while I was gone?

Jefferson:
Oh, just more of how grandparenting changes your whole, total perspective on life. And while I see it in my parents and in my in-laws and I totally love it, it makes life so much easier for myself, knowing that my kids are cared for in that way. And I can be the bad cop when I need to be because they get to be the good cop.

Nina:
Right.

Jefferson:
But I am in no hurry to cross that bridge. I tell my oldest son all the time, “You take your time. There’s no rush to make me a grandparent.”

Nina:
Yeah. I was not in a hurry for that, I would say. Very grateful when I got there. But I actually had my last child when I was 43. And I had determined early on, for myself, that I was not going to color my hair. I was going to let myself age gracefully and just not even get that started. And then, when my youngest one was about three years old, we were at a restaurant. And this lady came up and said, “Oh, whose grandchild is this?” and looked right at me. And I said…

Jefferson:
My mother’s?

Nina:
That would be my mother. And inside, I’m thinking, “I’m coloring my hair tomorrow.” There was something about it. I could not take the idea that everyone would be thinking she was my grandchild. And I couldn’t understand it because, reasoning with myself, I thought, “Well, my oldest one is actually old enough to have this child.” There was 20 years apart between them.

Nina:
So I thought, “If this was my grandchild and somebody asked me that, I’d be saying, ‘Mine. It’s my grandchild.'” But the fact that it’s my child and not my grandchild made me bristle. So I didn’t understand it. It didn’t make any logical sense, but, yeah, I started coloring my hair after that. But I finally gave it up when I got old enough. And I said, “You know what? You’re…” Let’s see. I think she was 18 at the time. I said, “I’m liberating myself from that hair color.”

Jefferson:
A lot of work and a lot of-

Nina:
Because it’s just too much to keep up with. It is. A lot of work, a lot of expense, and just a lot of headache. And I’m very happy to be grey-headed now. And I don’t care that I look older than my sister, who is actually older than me, because she still colors her hair. But it is what it is. I’m okay with that. I’ll be the senior person in the room. I’m fine.

Jefferson:
Yeah. One of the biggest things that we noticed as parents was not so much the comments that we get about our… There’s not as much of a range. I was 40 when my youngest was born. But where I really noticed most was when we would do activities or just different interactions with the parents of his friends. And his buddies, who are also, say, 8, 9, 10 years old, are their oldest.

Nina:
Yes.

Jefferson:
So, these parents are nearly at the age where they could be my kid. And we’re taking our kids trick-or-treating or whatever it may be, and I’m going, “Oh, I’m in a different set.” Meanwhile, then, I run to the older parents, where we’re… and that’s the funny thing, too, is the older parents of teenagers, college students, young adults… The concerns that we all have are vastly different than the ones whose oldest child is in the third grade.

Jefferson:
It’s like I can give a rip if my kid is eating processed sugars or what… It’s like, “You’ll grow out of that. That’s fine. Are you driving safely? The people you’re with? Are they good people to be around that’s going to impact the rest of your life?”

Nina:
Yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. And it seems like, the more kids you have, too, the fewer hills there are to die on.

Jefferson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Nina:
So the less things matter-

Jefferson:
Maybe you found this, too.

Nina:
Go ahead.

Jefferson:
Go ahead. Go ahead.

Nina:
No, you go ahead.

Jefferson:
Well, I was… there’s that weird… I don’t even want to say “balance,” because it’s not really a balance so much as just continual choices of trying to decide which hill to die on, which hills are mountains, which ones are mole hills, which ones may seem small now, but if you don’t tackle them right away, they turn into significant issues down the road.

Nina:
Yes. Yes.

Jefferson:
I’ve got some friends that they… We used to kind of debate those things. And they said, “If my daughter wants to dye her hair blue, so what that she’s only nine years old? Just it’s hair. Who cares about hair?” And I got it because it’s just a creative expression of their individuality.

Jefferson:
But by the time the kid was 14, her individuality had turned into, “I don’t care what you guys have to say. I’m my own person, and I’m going to make all my own choices, no matter how bad those choices might be.” And so, it’s so tricky, as parents, to try to navigate those waters and see, “Do I make a big deal out of this one? Or do I not? Do I let this one slide?”

Jefferson:
And one of the things that we told my son and still tell him… less, now that he’s in college. And I’m sure you’ve gone down this road billions of times… is there are times I’m going to give you rope and just let you go. There are times I’m going to detach the rope and let you go entirely. But then there’s going to be times where I’m going to step in and save you from yourself.

Nina:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. Right.

Jefferson:
Those times are unpredictable.

Nina:
Yeah. We had a saying that we used often in our family, which was “Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves with it.”

Jefferson:
True.

Nina:
And I had to… You do a lot of praying, trying to figure out, “Is this a place where I’m okay with them hanging themselves?” Because that’s what’s going to help them learn is when they get tangled up in that rope and get hung out to dry.

Nina:
But there are those seasons where, boy, that’s a really hard lesson. Or it has the potential to be a really hard lesson. And is it time for me to step in? Is it time for me to say, “No, you’re simply not going to do that”? And I really do believe that one thing I didn’t understand back then was I’m going to get it wrong. I’m often going to get it wrong, and that’s okay because no one was put here expecting that they would be perfect, that they would always get it right, never make any wrong decisions.

Nina:
And even when you go to God in prayer, have you ever felt those times where it just feels like He’s not giving you the definitive answer that you need? And sometimes, I think it’s because God is actually thinking, “I can be good with either way you choose, because you’re still going to learn the same thing out of it because I am working everything, even your mistakes, for your good.”

Nina:
And I think He’s willing to let us make some much bigger mistakes than we are sometimes letting our kids make because He knows, in the end, it will bring us closer to Him. He’ll be more real in our lives.

Jefferson:
Yep. Preach.

Nina:
Yeah. Well, that’s just been my experience because I’m the one who’s made those mistakes, and sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to get it right, you’re still going to get it wrong.

Jefferson:
Yeah. I know. When I was-

Nina:
But you can give yourself grace.

Jefferson:
When I was growing up, a phrase that my parents often would throw at me… They’d be like, “Look, raising you did not come with an instruction manual. There’s no textbook on how to raise you.” This was the ’70s, where, really, Dobson was the only one who was writing anything on this.

Jefferson:
And I remember… It must have been after our first son was born. My dad and I were walking through a bookstore, and they had this whole section on parenting. And they even had one half a shelf that was dedicated to just parenting boys. My dad goes, “Ah, you don’t have the same excuse that I had.” And I said, “Okay, so now we’re on the level. It was an excuse.”

Nina:
Right, right.

Jefferson:
But yeah, I know I found myself, in those more desperate moments as a dad, going back to when I was at my worst, as far as rebellion goes or just being an idiot. And my mom would constantly pray. She’s like, “God put Jefferson through whatever he has to go through to come back to You. Have your worst, but please, God, please save him from making any mistake that’s going to negatively impact the rest of his life. Don’t have him get arrested for a felony or in a traffic accident that he has to amputate his legs.”

Jefferson:
We’re talking the worst type of things. “Don’t let him affect the rest of his life.” And, in hindsight, that’s kind of what happened. I walk with a limp, both figuratively and literally, because of the stupid decisions I made. But the scars, emotionally, historically, whatever, that I have are just good reminders of really how good God is, that He was faithful.

Jefferson:
And I tell my boys all the time, as we’re reading different Bible stories and such… We’ll read about David. We’ll read about Peter. We read about some of just absolute boneheads in the Bible and go, “See? See? See? And this guy made the Bible. See? This guy had…” It was a man after God’s own heart. This guy, God… Jesus looked at and said, “Hey, Pete, I’m reinstating you. Do you love me? Then tend my flock.”

Jefferson:
And I’m like, “If God can do that with these boneheads, I can hope and pray that maybe he might be able to use me.” And then my sarcastic kids look at me, and they go, “Well, maybe he might someday, Dad.”

Nina:
Well, Jacob with his limp came to mind.

Jefferson:
Yep.

Nina:
I think there are a lot of… And I’m only just getting here in this season of my life, I think, to be thinking this way. But I think there are a lot of things that we think, “Oh, no. We’ve got to spare them from that. That would be the worst.” And God is actually saying, “Until you’re ready to go there, then you know nothing is going to change. Nothing’s going to happen, and something needs to change. So are you willing to let your child go there?”

Nina:
Sometimes, all we’re really worried about is whether they’ll survive. It’s not even what they’ll survive with. It’s just will they make it? But God’s in charge of that, too. When I look back at what He did, I’ve asked myself the question, “Will God lead us into heartbreak?” Well, where did he lead his own son? Into heartbreak.

Jefferson:
Yes. I guess we can argue that or debate that back and forth, because heartbreak is supposed to-

Nina:
Now, I know a lot people… oh, no. Well, I know a lot of people say, “Well, God would not… God allowed that to happen.”

Jefferson:
Oh, no, no, no, no.

Nina:
But it says he was slain from the foundation of the world.

Jefferson:
Right.

Nina:
So we’re not talking about God just allowing some things to happen so that we’ll get a different… there are some things that God creates that… I don’t think anyone standing at the foot of the cross looked at Jesus in his agony, dying, and said, “Oh, wow. Isn’t this wonderful?” Because he was slain since the foundation-

Jefferson:
Someday, they’re going to make a statue of me like this.

Nina:
Yeah. Yeah. Nobody was saying that. Everybody looked at that and said, “This is terrible.” And the ones who believed he was the son of God thought, “The son of God is dying. What hope is they’re going to be for us?” And even though they’d been told, and even though it was there in the scriptures, they didn’t recognize the resurrection.

Nina:
And maybe they didn’t even recognize, okay, maybe he’ll be raised again. But what does that even mean? And even if he was alive, nothing is ever going to be the same. And they probably thought it was not going to be better, for sure.

Jefferson:
Right. Right. And there have been times in the last few years, in particular, here in California… And I’ve even talked to some of my friends who are, we’ll say, right-leaning, in New York or some of these other states where the lockdowns and everything was very oppressive. And I remember just sitting around with these people and talking, saying, “In our case, even if Governor Newsom were to be recalled, or even if suddenly, politically, things were to go our way, what difference will it make? Maybe our lot in life here is just to suffer, and then we die.”

Jefferson:
And I then would take a step back. These types of comments actually came out of our discussions, and we’re talking about lockdowns and business owners and things like that, which are concerns, but I just kind of laughed. And I said, “What do you think that Christ’s followers, the hundreds that were there listening to Him, if not the thousands that were there listening to Him, at the Sermon on the Mount, what do you think that they were thinking when He was crucified and died?Were they like, ‘Ahh, does it get any better than this? Maybe this is it?'”

Jefferson:
None of that really matters when you realize the real calling is to continue to follow… just like Jesus did… follow God’s will even in those harshest of harsh times. Now, sometimes, God’s will is for you to liberate and go somewhere where there’s freedom. But sometimes, it is to really stay the course and fight the fight as God’s calling you to do.

Jefferson:
And the Bible’s laid out of example, example. And history, even modern history, is laid out of people who fought the good fight, stood their ground, and stood up for God’s righteousness. And it wasn’t until the next generation or the generation after that, that really reaped the benefits. So ours is not to then pay your price and then get the payoff. Ours is to stay faithful and stay and give God the glory.

Jefferson:
One of the things that I do all the time, especially when you have your crisis prayer moments, where something’s terrible happening… Let’s get the people together, and we’re all going to circle around and lay hands on them. It’s almost redundant, but I mean it with every ounce of sincerity that’s possible, is I always say, “God, please, at some point, enable us, let us, give us the wisdom to look back, even on this moment, and say, ‘Right here is where God showed up.'”

Jefferson:
And yet, we know that You’ve never left but that where we recognize that You were at work. And let this be a moment in history where we can put a pin in it and say, “God was at work here.” It helps making God first through those tough times a whole lot easier in our own mindset.

Nina:
Yes. Yes. I completely agree. It was the persecution of the Church that spread the gospel to every corner of the world. So I think, sometimes, that we look at things that we assume must be bad, and we think God can’t want that. And yet, that is what God intends to use.

Nina:
So He’s got a whole bigger picture than what we can see. And I think you’re right on the target with what God really wants from us is just, “Stay faithful to Me. For your own sake, just stay faithful to Me.”

Jefferson:
Yeah. Although it’s funny you bring up the scattering and persecution of the Church. I had some friends here in California that, when churches were shut down or when a lot of churches made their own decision to shut down, they said, “Well, it was the persecution of the church that led to the outpouring. Maybe this is God doing the same thing.”

Jefferson:
And I go, “Okay, I can see that if you took every bit of energy of ministry and brought that to your home and your neighborhood. But, really, you didn’t.” The vast majority of people? They just stopped going to church and stopped fellowshipping. And I’m going, “The exact opposite is happening because of your choices. You need to figure out a way to utilize this.” So it’s funny when help-

Nina:
Think how many of us, though, because of what was happening… And it wasn’t just the pandemic, but the pandemic kind of became the catalyst to move us in a certain direction. How many of us got on YouTube or got on some other platform and started ministering to our friends and neighbors through that? And some of us, like me… I didn’t even realize I was ministering to anyone. I just thought, “Well, I’m seeing things that no one’s talking about, but I think they need to be talked about.”

Nina:
And so, I just wanted to bring them up and start the discussion. And I was shocked when so many people started paying attention and listening and saying, “Wow. I look for you every day because, at the end, you always say…” It didn’t matter what I was talking about, as far as what was in the news or what needed to be said. At the end, I always said, “Be of good courage. We are not alone.”

Nina:
And there were people who commented and said, “I get on just to hear you say that, just to hear that every day.” It didn’t seem like hardly anything to me, but people are hungry because the Church sat back, let things happen, and didn’t feed them.

Jefferson:
Yep. And now, here we are. This conversation would never have taken place, had that rattling of cages not happened.

Nina:
Exactly.

Jefferson:
So, Amen.

Nina:
Exactly. So true. So true. And there we have to end the chat because we’ve run out of time.

Jefferson:
Well, next week-

Nina:
We always run out of time. Next time-

Jefferson:
We’ll be there.