Living in the Village

I have had this on my mind for some time now and with me speaking in church this coming Sunday, maybe I will be able to refer to some of this while talking about this topic.

People say that it takes a village to raise a child, not just parents. I couldn't find this to be more true. However, the one thing that brings me concern is who that village is.

I lived in a neighborhood for 7 or 8 years where I actually hung out with my neighbors. They would walk over to my house or I walk go to theirs. It was heading into the 5th grade that my family moved to a house about a mile away where we were no longer in a neighborhood of any kind. We were literally a house on a hill all by ourselves with the nearest neighbor literally being a good 500 yards away. I still had friends from my new school and of course there was family, but the neighborhood friends faded from my life pretty quickly after the move.

I believe that kids conform to the village that they spend the most time with. When this expression was originally formed, it was a long time ago when kids had this one thing in common: their village was the place that they lived. There were very few exceptions to this. The kids in the village went to school together, played on sports teams together, went to each others houses together, and went to church together. Many of them would date and end up marrying each other. Villages were tight knit, they looked out for each other because they knew that they could trust each other (they had no other choice). Everyone knew everyone and everything going on in the lives of the people in the village.

The same village scenario is exactly the same today...... except that it is the polar opposite. For a few years in my life, I had friends separated into categories like colors in a crayon box. I had school friends, basketball friends, baseball friends, soccer friends, church friends, family friends, college friends, and sometimes just good ol friends friends. Most of the time, those friend groups never really overlapped. I never really realized this until the rise of Facebook when I thought about how many different ways I knew people and how many of my friends only fit in one category.

We have become a culture of options. There are options for literally everything. We have options on the food we eat, the tv shows we watch, the cars we drive, the technology we use, the schools our kids attend, the teams they play on, the churches we attend and the houses we live in amongst thousands of other things. Options vary from likeability to affordability to competition to potential and eventually all the way back to likeability.

Thanks to social media, smartphones, and the internet, we have every option laid out in front of us at all times. Any kid with a smartphone gets pretty much the same options and because of this, they get to choose which village they spend the most time with. They don't have to hang out in their neighborhood unless they want to and I'll say it again: We all eventually become a product of our village.

I say these things to go back to the village that raised me. The people who affected me the most from my village were people whom I still look forward to going back to Nashville and seeing every chance that I get. They are people who played a major role in forming me into the person I am today (so if you don't like me, it's definitely their fault...). To name a few:

Mike Hayes
Mike Dorris
Tucker Anderson
Molly Hayes
Mark Agee
Jeff Shouse
Alex Sylvis
James Anderson
Todd Lawson
Mac Hughes
Chad Hedgepath
Will Baxter
Henrietta "Metta" Vaughn and miss Julie
Jenny Hayes
Cindy Anderson
Pat Hughes
Keith Welch
Van Barendht
Mark and Nancy Barrett
Roger Chester
Mama Bear Hestle
Real Peloquin
James Lynn
Mark and Sonya Dupay
Tom and Debbie Willett

To almost everyone who reads this, these names mean absolutely nothing to you. I'm leaving a ton of people off but the people listed above have two things in common:
1. I am not related to any of them (My mom would disagree with that statement, but according to her, we are also related to Elvis. I would prefer to be "related" to a hall of fame athlete but I guess I'll settle).
2. They were/are all members of Berry's Chapel Church of Christ where I grew up.

I have realized on several different occasions that BC is the village that helped raise me the most. There have been plenty of other people who have played huge roles earlier in my life, but whenever I came to church, I knew that way more than just my own two parents were looking after me. Some of the people on that list were parents of friends my age in the church, some of them simply decided to take a vested interest in me, most of them were both of those things. The village that raised me was the church. Looking back, I think they played an enormous role in my decision to go into ministry. I got to see why God gave us the church and what the church does for so many of us and after seeing those things, I don't know why I wouldn't want to play a full time role in the church.

I could not have asked for better parents. They worked so hard to raise me and give me the very best life that they could offer, but now that I am a parent myself, I have learned something that I hope every current and future parent understands. Every parent has weaknesses. I know for a fact that I do. I think my parents had some and I think any parent has things that just aren't strongpoints. This doesn't make any of us bad parents. It simply means that we have to rely on the village to fill in the gaps, particularly the village that God has given us.

I learned more about taking action for the things you believe in from Mike Hayes than I did anyone else. I learned what it means to be family to people you aren't actually related to from Henrietta "Metta" Vaughn. I learned that there's no limit to creativity from Cindy Anderson. I learned that church camp never gets old from James Lynn. I think I am surviving being a crash course adult largely in part because of them.

These people truly are family to me. I spent more time with church friends than I did anyone else growing up. They really genuinely care for me. That's why when I come home, after reuniting with my family, I look forward to seeing them more than anyone else. I rarely track friends from high school, I have no idea whats going on with the guys I played basketball with, I only keep up with a small few of the people I went to college with. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy my time with them or that I don't care about them anymore. I wish them all the best. There's just something that cannot be fully explained with words when it comes to my relationship with my church family at BC.

Looking forward, I have two beautiful daughters that I am in co-charge of. I think they have the best mother this world has to offer, which is good cause you can't expect much out of me. However, as hard as we both try, we have areas where we are incomplete as parents. What has been wonderful is the village that has surrounded my new family since moving out to Huntsville when we were still learning how to be a family. We have already started to get Audrey involved with different women in the church that she looks up to. I know that so many people in our village are already playing a huge role in her life as well as Addison's. It's people like Dorothy Houchin, Karen Altom, Eugene Kelly, Matt and Danielle Springfield, Foy and Mitzi Mills, Toni Sikes, Sydney Andrus, Larry and LeeAnn Wells, and all of the Correas, to name a few, that will be a people whom our girls view as family during their time here and that one or both of them look up to and/or enjoy spending time with.

As a full time youth minister, I get to see the cause-and-effect of the village on a weekly basis. Whether it is something in worship, before or after worship, in a class or activity, or even out in the community during the day, I get to see the church in action. God gave us the church, not so that we have a place to show up to on Sunday, punch our Jesus card, and go home on a weekly basis, but so that we can be the church.

I love the youth ministry that I get to be a part of. One of the group's defining characteristics is that almost half of them are in families that do not go to our church and some don't go to church at all. A couple of weeks ago, the rest of our church family got to see how special this is. We honored our graduating senior class a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday night. Seven different seniors were honored and thanked for being a part of our youth ministry. Of those seven seniors, only two of them have families who are members of our church family. The other five seniors began coming to our ministry's activities because of the two who have been raised at the Huntsville church.

It's because of this village in Huntsville that I am confident in the rearing of my soon-to-be-born son, Gatlin, when he makes his grand appearance into this world, which we're expecting to witness in early August. It's because of guys like Nathan Spencer, Gonzalo Correa, Scooter Langley, Kelvin Riddler, Chris Kern, Jacob Chandler, Spencer Ehlert, and Brent Slott that I am confident in his rearing because I know that they are men who can help me be the dad that Gatlin and every other boy in this world need. I pray that maybe people can turn around and view me in that way to some degree one day.

I know that villages like the one I grew up in at Berry's Chapel and the one my family is a part of in Huntsville are by no means set apart from so many other church families. They don't exclusively exist in Huntsville, TX or Franklin, TN. They are all over this country and even this world. These villages raise some of the most amazing people currently living in our world today and my prayer is that this is a cycle that God continues to bless our world with.