TLP 370: You Got This, Dad | Aaron & Elaina Sharp Interview

Oh, I don't think it was that. Is that where the death part came in?

I mean, I've heard it both ways, Erin.

At least you didn't die. You know, there's that.

Opening Banter and Show Introduction

Welcome to Truth. Love. Parents. Where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, A .M. Brewster.

Happy almost Father's Day, everyone. We have many different dads to listen to this show, so it's just as possible that you have, I don't know, 12 kids as it is that you're expecting your first. But regardless of how many children you actually have, if your wife is expecting, and maybe even if she isn't, my special guests and I are going to introduce you to a super valuable, amazing resource.

If your wife is expecting your first, if she has maybe your fifth bun in the oven, if the two of you are just now talking about, thinking about, praying about, trying for your first, I guarantee you, you will benefit from this book we're going to talk about today.

My youngest is almost 11. My wife is decidedly not pregnant, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was reminded of some wonderful and encouraging truth along the way. So even if your wife is not expecting a bundle of joy, stick around as I talk with Aaron and Elena Sharp, a .k .a. Expert Pregnancy Survivor and his wife, Wonder Woman.

Aaron is the author of You Got This Dad, and if their improv is as sharp as their written wit and sound theology, then today's show is going to be fun, inspirational, and challenging. According to their website, OurSharpology .com, The Patriarch Jacob worked seven years and got a wife.

He spent seven years at DTS and got a degree and a wife. Take that, Jacob. And Elena also has a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, although it only took her six years. She has done some freelance writing and curriculum projects, but her day job is being the owner of a commercial plumbing business.

God has an interesting sense of humor. She also homeschools the tiny sharp humans. Crazy doesn't even begin to describe her everyday life. Unquote. Thank you guys for taking a break from your crazy to join our crazy.

Please tell us more about your family. And I really want you to tell us a little bit more about their delightful nicknames that you use throughout the book. I thought they were so fantastic.

You know, the funny thing for us is, Aaron, like parenting and writing have almost been on parallel paths for me slash us. My first book came out in 2012, but the manuscript was due at the end of April in 2011.

And our first child was due May, middle of May in 2011. And he decided to come a few weeks early. So the first 10 days of his life were the last 10 days of me trying to finish a book manuscript.

So that's really fantastic timing, by the way.

That's always amazing. Thank you, baby. And everything. It was awesome.

Nick's book is on family planning and what we don't know about it.

Exactly.

But for us, you know, writing and parenting have sort of really coalesced together. And so at some point, I guess it was inevitable that what we wrote about would involve our family and our kids. And so what we wanted to do, you know, I'm making a choice to write and put myself out there.

And Melinda is, too. Our kids don't really have a choice. So to give them a little bit of anonymity, but also it kind of creates these characters of taking their personality traits and kind of developing a little bit.

So we went with, you know, an eight year old. He had the fortune of having a little bit of life under him before I started giving these nicknames. So he inevitably became the zoologist because he is steadfastly sworn that his career in life will be his path in life will be as an animal expert.

The six year old is currently the ballerina, but that may have to switch because in her own words, she has retired from dance.

And our pocketbooks thank her.

Yeah, they do. Our four year old, when we first went with the nicknames, we actually called her the demolitions expert because there was a period, there was a Christmas where she took, she broke so many ornaments.

But she is now.

The shatterproof ornaments even.

Yeah.

Wow, that's impressive.

But she is now pretty, pretty locked into being our fashionista. And, you know, our two and a half year old, he has gone from being the Jedi because he gave us, you know, we had two boys and two girls.

He sort of brought balance to the force. But he went from being the Jedi to now being the slugger because he seems to have a real affinity for baseballs and bats and all that. So they have to change as we go along.

And then, you know, like I said, Elena has made the decision to do this, but I've kind of given her the moniker of the Wonder Woman. She sort of keeps the whole family going here.

Yeah, it's awesome. The problem is, though, when you write more books and you start using different nicknames, people are going to be wondering, did they have more kids? Did they get some up for adoption?

What happened to the Jedi? Where did the ballerina go?

Well, if people are following along closely and that closely, then I think that's a good sign for us. We can we can deal with any confusion. So good.

Well, at the time of this interview, Aaron has written five books and Aaron and Elena have co-authored The Most Important Women of the Bible, all of which I will have linked in the description of today's episode.

And one of the things I enjoyed about You Got This, Dad! really was its tone. Simply put, it's funny. You can ask my wife, but you have to be pretty hard, generally speaking, to elicit a laugh from me, especially if you're trying to elicit a laugh from me.

Generally, it doesn't work. But Aaron and Elena both did that while I read You Got This, Dad! Aaron summed up his approach to this whole writing process by saying this, quote, Life is hard and then you die is something Elena grew up hearing.

It was a lighthearted push towards keep on keeping on, but perhaps lacked a little empathy. We know that life can be hard and we want to help lighten it a bit. If we can help you find something to laugh, smile, quirk an eyebrow about while you're in the trenches, then our mission has been accomplished.

And maybe we will all learn something along the way, too, unquote. And I really think that beautifully sums up this book. I did laugh. I smiled. I definitely raised a quizzical eyebrow and I learned quite a bit.

So, guys, mission accomplished. You two, well done.

Thanks, Aaron.

We really, from the get-go, wanted to have before us the idea of trying to be encouraging. My paternal grandmother, known to me as Nanny, she's been gone for a number of years now. But she always quoted the verse in Proverbs, of course, from the old King James.

It was the way she did it. But that a merry heart does good like medicine. And so we kind of have taken that approach to a lot of our writing. The feeling that a lot of times, even if, of course, with kids, we've watched Mary Poppins how many times, but that spoonful of sugar sometimes is pretty helpful on a lot of things.

Now, I do have to correct a little bit of your humor, though. I have to say something just to be true to the scriptures. In your bio, you said that in seven years, you not only got a wife, you also got a degree.

But I just have to point out that Jacob not only got a wife, he also got a ton of livestock.

Did my dad offer you any livestock, Aaron?

No.

There's that.

So let's at least make sure your humor is grounded in scriptural realities.

That's a good heartfelt correction, Aaron.

We'll go back and rework the bio.

Yeah, I think you need to rewrite it.

I came up with a little bit of debt. Can that count for livestock? I don't know.

Sure.

Maybe.

Why This Book Was Written

Now, I always love to hear what inspired an author to go through the arduous process because that's what it is. It's an arduous process of writing. It's hard work. So clearly, you believe this book was worth it.

What's the history there? Why this book?

Well, for everything, I think, maybe for everybody, but it sure seems to be for Elena and I, there's what we started out doing and there's what ended up happening.

Like the plumbing business.

Yes.

Like his first book, I didn't sign up for this. Yeah.

But for us, as we kept on writing, we did the book together about the most important women of the Bible, and then we were kind of thinking, well, what's next? And processing, we both have full-time jobs.

I'm an IT director for an organization, and so we've got these kids. Baby number four, we wrote the book together while she was pregnant with baby number four. And so how do we keep doing this? What is going to provide the return on investment for us as a family, for me as a writer, and encourage people, and began to develop that.

And so along the way, began to say, you know what? One of the things we really can talk about is family. And my initial idea before this was to write something about my grandparents, and that may still be at some point revisited because I have four kids and four grandparents, and I'm not sure which of the four was craziest.

I have an idea, but I'm not going to say it here.

Well, the ones you're thinking of had a long track record.

If you put the four of them in a single bed, kind of like a Willy Wonka feel, maybe?

Yeah, yeah, it really is.

That's fair.

Yeah, it really is. But we, you know, developing the idea from family, thinking of ancestors, but then kind of moving forward, talking to my agent and talking with a publisher, and it kind of just kept getting, you know, workshopped and chopped down to where we had this idea of, like, let's just write a book specifically about pregnancy, and encouraging people to go through that.

And, you know, it was never, this wasn't the original idea, but it's what came out of that original idea with a lot of people's input and a lot of wisdom, I think.

That's really awesome. And it's fun to know the process of how people boil down and get to a really tight scope for a book. And I love the book, I really do. However, before I explain why, I do want to let everyone who's listening know that Aaron has graciously donated two copies of You Got This Dad to our TLP book giveaways.

So stick around to the end of the show, and I'll let you know how you can win a copy, your very own copy of You Got This Dad. And because we're so close to Father's Day, perhaps maybe it'd be an awesome gift for your dad or your expectant dad.

For me, the book was so different from the vast majority of parenting books that I review because it has a solid helping of what I'm going to call hyperbolic humor, that great over-exaggeration, which I love so much.

And I enjoyed the book because it had the ability to address these deep, significant spiritual truths while at the same time maintaining a lighthearted tone from the beginning of the book to the very end.

And I honestly don't think I ever laughed that much reading a book about pregnancy, or a book about being a husband, or a book about parenting. And I want to take a moment to highlight a really fun device in the book that just stuck out to me.

I think it's safe to say that the average parent, at least maybe the average parent who listens to this show, doesn't read a lot of books with footnotes. And for those of you who aren't even sure what a footnote is, footnotes generally provide additional information about a statement or a quote in the main body of the text of the book, but the information is ancillary enough that it's kind of just relegated to the bottom of the page.

It's kind of, you know, forced to wear this smaller font for those people who have, you know, the interest in reading extra and who have a magnifying glass. Which, if we're being honest, is just super uncomfortable for everybody.

Why'd you even put it in the book and make them feel bad that way? Anyway, all the footnotes in You Got This Dad are really kind of fun because Aaron didn't write them. And they're not really intended to be scholarly references citing adjunct books or paragraphs pontificating on theology.

These footnotes were all written by Elena. And it's as if she were reading the book to you and stopping every couple of pages to make her own comments. Actually, a couple of times per page to make her own comments.

Most of which, if we're being honest, are snippy. But many of which really are just genuinely endearing as well. I promise you that you have never read. I want personally, I have never read every single footnote in any book ever.

But you better believe I read every single one of them in You Got This Dad. So, Elena, please tell me, whose idea was it for you to fill the footnotes with your delightful takes? And what was your favorite part of that process?

You know, we have, Aaron and I have been racking our brains trying to remember where that idea came up. And the best that we can do, because we're not totally sure, but the best that we can...

We've had four kids, so we don't remember what happened last year.

Our brains are mushy at this point. I think what happened was, you know, because I read his writing a lot. Even before he sends it to his agent or to the editor. And so I was reading it and I was, you know, interacting with it to him.

Saying, oh man, you know, this would have been funny. You know, if I could have responded here. And he was like, we should put it in the footnotes. And then we just had like an aha moment. Like, that would be so great.

And so then I got to have a really fun part in the book. I got to be snarky and I got to, you know, relive my own pregnancy memories. And so we just, we had fun with it.

Well, I thought it was funny because, it's funny for lots of reasons. But one of the things that I thought was really cute was the fact that you would correct parts of his story. And, you know, which in theory, had you corrected part of his story, you know.

He could have gone back and just edited it and made the story more accurate. But no, it's better for it to remain inaccurate so that you can correct him. I thought that was great.

And let's point out there were a couple of times she corrected me. And it's still not, it's still out there who was really right.

Yeah, we don't agree on a lot of it.

It's true.

So really, if you think about it, this book is just like dropping in the middle of a marriage conversation.

Exactly.

You are the proverbial fly on the wall at this point.

Pretty much.

I mean, that's what most of the conversations in your house sound like. It's not too shabby. I mean, there are some death threats and whatnot.

But otherwise, it's okay.

We like to call that Thursday around our house.

Okay, that's fair. And I think everyone resonates with that. Now, do you remember any particular footnotes that just you really, really enjoyed? Do you have a copy of the book?

I remember the one about, I said something like, really the person who's in the doctor's office that's not in the stirrups feels uncomfortable.

Yeah, yeah.

That one really stuck out to me. I like that one.

I do too.

That was good.

I think my favorite was the one where she asked, did you die?

Did you die?

Because that's the perfect illustration of what it's like to be a man who's married to a woman who's pregnant. Because if you get run over by a bus and attacked by angry wolves and survive a nuclear bomb and you walk in the office, back in the house, you have nothing to complain about if she's pregnant.

There's nothing you can say because she's pregnant. So you just shut your mouth and move on.

Did you die? You didn't die. And actually, when you mentioned that, I kind of thought it was one of those moments where maybe I misread it or maybe I'm thinking of another one. Because I thought when she said that, it was basically like, you had done something you shouldn't have as a father, as a husband, expectant husband.

And basically, she was just saying, yeah, but I didn't kill you. Which I like a little bit.

I don't think it was that. Is that where the death sentence came in?

I mean, I've heard it both ways, Erin.

At least you didn't die. You know, there's that.

Spiritual Significance, Humor, and the Joy of Parenting

Oh my goodness. Now, I do want to take a moment to talk about the spiritual significance of the book because it's there.

It is.

It's deep and I love it. Many times, though, with a book of this flavor, if it's light hearted and it's funny, it just tends to lack any significant depth. So I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised when Erin unleashed like this thoroughly biblical, theologically accurate and extremely practical application alongside his quick wit.

In fact, if I'm being honest, I probably wouldn't love the book as much as I do had those elements been missing. It would have been a fun read, but the real life changing power of the book would have been gone.

So, and this is primarily for Erin, but I'd love to hear Elena's thoughts as well. Talk to us about the spiritual significance and the purpose you had for this book.

One of the things, Erin, that I think that's really on Elena and I's heart as we write, as we parent, as we live really, is when we talk to people or even just talk to ourselves, you know, is this idea that I think too many times we divorce parts of life from each other that shouldn't be divorced from each other.

And I think we say, well, if there's humor, they're not taking things seriously. And sure, there are. I mean, one of the big things we do when we have, when we try to do a family prayer time is it is this big like, okay, guys, we're talking to God.

This isn't the time to be doing what it is you're doing. But it's like, how do we, you know, how do we put that back together where we can laugh? And that brings levity. You know, like we talked about earlier, my grandmother quoting that a merry heart does good like medicine.

Well, if you need medicine, it's because you're sick. And most of us wouldn't consider that to be, quote unquote, a laughing matter. But that's what having a merry heart and encouragement does. So I think there's something to be said for there's wisdom in humor and in finding wit and wisdom in life that helps us get through hard times and helps us, you know, endure things that may be a little difficult.

I like that mix because you sometimes when you're being spiritual, people expect you to be solemn. I actually had the opportunity to portray Christ on stage for seven years in a performance in Chicago.

And the very first time I did it, I had somebody very, someone very well-meaning, someone gracious and kind come up to me and thank me for what I did and whatnot. But they did want to throw in this little idea that, you know, I expected Christ to be more somber, more solemn, kind of had this like this sagely, I don't know, Obi-Wan Kenobi type of picture in their mind.

But I spent a lot of the show and when it was appropriate, smiling because, I mean, Jesus, yes, was perfectly holy, but he also was perfectly joyful. I imagine that he probably had a fantastic sense of humor.

I always say, I think that God has a great sense of humor. One thing I'll go as we're planning on, you know, he's probably amused a little bit when we whine and when we kick and scream and work against it.

I think heaven's going to be a place where there's going to be a lot of, there'll be jokes, there's going to be fun, there's going to be humor.

I believe that with all of my heart.

Well, one of the things we talked about earlier with my grandparents who are all gone now, but we all the time, my parents and I will sit down and look at my kids and say, man, I bet your grandparents are dying laughing up in heaven.

You know what I mean?

They just got to be cracking up at what you're going, what you're dealing with, you know? And, you know, I think that that's part of even very difficult times is looking at it and finding the humor. I kind of imagine God before he sent us our slugger saying, hey, watch this.

Getting the angels around to be like, wait till you see what I'm about to do.

I think he did that before each one of the kids did. Each in their own little way.

I love on your Instagram, the little quotes you share from the kids. I think those are fantastic. They're beautiful. And I think in a way it's like, I think maybe humor runs in your family in a way it maybe doesn't in other families.

I don't know. But man, because your kids got some quick wit.

I don't think they're even trying to be funny.

I think that I think the takeaway practically is we need people to pray for us here.

And I think that's what that means.

Well, I do. I do remember specifically enjoying the really the spiritual emphasis of chapters nine and chapters 25. Chapter 25 is called The Wonder of It All. And it's this beautiful end to the book. But what's really interesting is that chapter nine was about registering for baby showers.

And still, I remember the significance of that chapter from a spiritual standpoint. Do you mind discussing, like for you, the theological implications for registering for a baby shower?

Yeah.

I mean, I think for us, and Elena can probably chime in and correct me here, too. But, you know, when we were, you know, you take a book like this and it kind of loosely follows the path of a pregnancy, right?

You start out with finding out and all the way to, hey, you're in labor, the baby's coming. And one of the things that we talked about was remembering when we were registering and the pregnancy meltdowns that Elena would have over just these random things.

I think picking up baby bottles.

Meltdowns, really? Are they meltdowns, though? Since the toddlers have meltdowns, can we use a different word?

That's fine.

Blow up, maybe?

Blow up, I don't know.

These incidents that would happen.

Okay, fine.

These tearful incidents. But, you know, I think one of them was the bottles. Because, you know, you're doing this for the first time. Especially for a woman, there's all these, like, this pressure. There's these emotions going into this.

And you've got all these lovely, well-meaning people giving you all this advice that you may or may not need. And, you know, you've got, you know, oh, it's got to be BPA-free. It's got to have this, you know, all these things.

And I just remember her in this aisle just, like, weeping, you know? And I'm just sitting here going, what have I got myself into? But we have this encouragement in 1 Peter for husbands to dwell with their wife with understanding.

You know, as we develop that, and he has on there, so that your prayers may not be hindered. And I think too much of what we hear, even in the church culture, is, well, you know, women can't live with them, can't live without them, you know?

But that's actually counter to what the scriptures are telling us. Because as a husband, it is my job to attempt, with God's power, to understand my wife and what she's going through. And just stepping back and saying, I don't get it, actually hinders my prayers.

And if there's anything that being a father has taught me, it's I'm going to need my prayers not to be hindered. And so I think, you know, it was a moment of kind of clarity for me of this realization of, you know, men and women are drastically different without pregnancy in there.

And when you throw pregnancy in there, it's sort of this microcosm of everything that you do as a husband. It's sort of amplified and under a microscope. Because if you don't understand her when she wants the house cleaner than you do, you're really not going to understand her when she's weeping over baby bottles.

And so just that part really kind of clarified for me, my job as a husband.

Yeah. And I think what you guys are explaining or what you're illustrating for us is really that this book can be super valuable, even if you're not expecting. And this is where, you know, again, where I was, you know, my oldest, Micah, is going to be 13 and my youngest is 11.

And like I said before, my wife is decidedly not pregnant. But there was so much that I could still benefit from. The call from Peter to live with my wife according to knowledge, the wonder of it all.

Because I talked to somebody else recently who made the observation that in a way we're all new to this. It was Jay Holland from Let's Parent Our Purpose who was talking about this. He just said, you've never parented this child at this age, in this culture, at this time in your life, in your time of maturation.

So it's always a brand new experience. So even though a lot of the elements in the book are specifically about pregnancy and it's great for especially a first time dad who hasn't had guided his wife through this process before, super helpful stuff.

But the spiritual truths go far beyond just those first nine months and the first few weeks after pregnancy. These are things that need to stay with us for the rest of our lives. And the wonder of it all is part of that.

Now, before I talk a little bit more about chapter 25, I want to share just this one scene that I really loved from the inductions chapter of the book. You wrote this, quote, we have a woman in labor who just heard the doctor utter the phrase emergency C-section.

At this point, you must be there for your wife. You must be her rock, her Gibraltar. You cannot stand and tell the storm to be still like Jesus did, but you can sit by your wife and hold her while everyone rushes around her in a frenzied state.

Plant yourself like an unmovable tree beside your wife because this is what a man does. And because she has a grip on your hand from which the jaws of life could not free you.

Unquote.

You read that really well. We should do the audio book.

Well, I did.

I did a minor interpretative speech in college, so I love the theme. I love the challenge and obviously the humorously accurate depiction of the state of your hand. It's all great. And Aaron, you refer to yourself as an expert pregnancy survivor.

I love that. But your in-depth knowledge of the experience really shows at that point. I mean, it's so obvious that you really are an expert at this. But I think, again, the focus of the final chapter just really encapsulates, I think, the heartbeat of the entire book.

But what I'd love for you to do now is, I mean, you've done this already a little bit, but really sum up for us by applying kind of all of this to all dads and all moms who are listening, whether they have a newborn on the way or not.

Because, again, I want people to read this book not just, again, because of the pregnancy advice in it, which is fantastic, but because there really is something far more applicable to us, regardless of how many kids we have and what stage of life we're at.

You always hear it around Christmastime, which is unfortunate because we should hear it a lot more, but about Mary and about these things that the angels are telling her. And it says she treasured those things in her heart.

And sort of she kind of packs that away to remember. And I think that's one of those things that you have this day and who knows how it's going to be. You know, we had one time where the water broke and every other time was an induction.

But you'll have these moments of like, hey, stop and take a breath. You know, for lack of a better way of putting it, kind of smell the roses a little bit, but stop and soak this in. Like, you don't know how many times this is going to happen.

One of the things we discovered as a husband and wife as we went to get pregnant was how often things like miscarriages happen and infertility and those different things that we never knew about until we started going down this process ourselves.

And you don't know. I mean, every kid is a gift from God. And you may have one. I'm an only child. That wasn't my parents' plan. It's what God had in mind. We've got four. I've got friends with six. You never know.

You don't know how many times you're going to go down this road and soak it in and just wonder and kind of bask in the glory of what God is doing because this is such a God thing, no matter how many doctors and hospitals there are.

This is all a God thing.

I was going to say, you know, we had a miscarriage before Micah, before the zoologist, the eight-year-old. And then we had almost lost him when I was newly pregnant. And then we had a miscarriage after him, before our second baby.

And so you just, you never know, you know, exactly what God has planned.

And so for us, even as parents after childbirth, I think it's been a good discipline to have to try to keep these things in our hearts. You know, the kids' quotes we post on social media, that's part of that.

Who would have thought a kid, our fashionista, when she was three years old, developed the habit of basically handling every difficulty by saying, well, sometimes things happen. And like, she would, you know, spill her milk.

You'd be like, why did you spill your milk? Yeah, sometimes things happen.

She called her the philosopher.

Yeah, she really, you know. But, you know, you keep that in your heart. So that when that same child is four years old and she is throwing a wall-eyed fit because she wants a particular dress and it is too cold to wear that dress, you know, you keep that in your heart.

And because it's going to help you deal with those things. And I think that's been very important, not just in the pregnancy part of life, but moving on into the parenting part of life, is taking these things and just treasuring them in your heart.

Because, you know, there will come a point in time where the memories will be what you will have. They'll be out of the house and hopefully, you know, you'll stay close. But they won't be there. You won't be changing their diapers.

And at the moment, you're really excited about that. But there will be a day when you're going to want to have that treasure in your heart, too.

Yeah, and you'll miss it, believe it or not. You really will. I would reference being able to have the opportunity of portraying Christ on stage. I had one of my favorite memories from my daughter when she was really young happened while I was changing her diaper.

I come in there and I just had my hair and my beard dyed jet black. And she looks at me and she says, Daddy, what happened to your hair? And I said, Oh, I dyed my hair. And she's like, OK. And she's a little kid, you know, diaper change.

A few days later, we're in a store and we're standing in line and she looks up at a complete stranger and goes, my dad's hair dyed. And that's just a beautiful thing. I think I've worked a lot with at risk families, families with troubled teens and things like that.