In this spoken clip, the presenter recalls a story from a Promise Keepers men’s conference that resonated with him. The story describes a father who, overwhelmed by work, tells his children he will play with them once they assemble a cut‑up picture of the world. The children quickly finish the puzzle, explaining that the back of the picture shows a man; once the man is assembled, the world is complete. The anecdote serves as a metaphor for the importance of a father’s (or any adult’s) presence: when the ‘man’—the person who loves and leads—is whole, the world (family, relationships) is whole. The speaker uses this narrative to urge listeners to prioritize personal relationships over busyness, framing it as a spiritual truth about God’s portrait of a man completing the world.
Chapters
And I want to leave you with this. I remember Promise Keepers, they're bringing it back around this year. I'm not sure if you all are familiar with that, but it's a big man's conference that they used to do a long time ago. And I was— we were supposed to go last year. I was supposed to go with my dad and my father-in-law, and COVID hit. And so I ended up watching it online. They had a virtual. And this one story really stuck out to me. Is that it was a father and he had 2, 3 boys, or maybe 2 boys and a girl or something like that. But anywho, his kids wanted to play with him, and so he was busy. He was always busy trying to provide, trying to do things, and just, he would pawn them off, pawn them off. And so they would come in his office, he'd say, well, I tell you what, today I'm very busy. But he thought he had something figured out to kind of push it on them versus him them take responsibility. So he said, here, here's a— he found a picture of a world and he cut it up in all these pieces, start cutting it up. And he said that when you put this together, I'll come play with you. I'll take some time on my busy schedule and I'll come forward to you and play with you. So he thought this was going to take about a day or two because he was shifting responsibility. And so the kids came back about 20 minutes later, 20, 30 minutes later, and he was distraught. He was like, wait, this, this is complicated. You don't put things like this together that fast. And one of the children spoke up and they say, Dad, well, it only took us this long because on the back of that picture it was a man, and we knew if we could get the man together, the world was going to be put together. Wow.
