A 50/50 Life

The duplex of the demarcation: Christopher Court in Huntingburg, Indiana. Nov. 22, 2000 (a few days after we moved in).

If my calculations are correct, the number of days from my 1977 birth in Paris, Tennessee's Henry County General Hospital until the day we left Cedarvalley Drive in Nashville, Tenn., to move to Dubois County, Indiana has been 8,626 days.

The number of days from Nov. 20, 2000 until July 3, 2024 has now been 8,626 days.

23 years, 7 months, 13 days.

This means that I have lived, as of today, a 50/50 life. 

Half a Volunteer. Half a Hoosier.

Call it a midlife crisis, but I've been mentally and emotionally wrestling with some things lately. My daughters are graduated. My job is at a crossroads as I'm starting to release the part of my job I've done the longest to focus on more coaching and taking a more focused role of helping lead a church of three locations and more than 2,300 people.

It's also been an intensely difficult year, full of stark and sudden realizations about the capabilities of fallen man and how short life can ultimately be.

I'm starting to realize I've spent way too much of my life wanting to be somewhere other than where I am. We want what we do not have. That's the opposite of contentment. I'm getting closer, I think, to resolving this.

Although I loved my childhood in Paris, Tenn., the Peaceful Meadows Lane gang of boys (my brother and me, Jeff and Jeremy, Harrison and Derrick, Travis, occasionally Daron, as well as a few guys who made their way in and out, or just visited, from 1986 to 1995), I never imagined I'd live there past high school. I didn't hold anything against the town, per se, I just thought once I graduated high school, left home to go to college, I would then move somewhere else. That was the story of my parents and would be my story, I assumed (my Tennessee mom was from Florida by way of central Indiana, my dad always from west Tennessee — but both spending a year in the panhandle of Florida as a married couple). I just thought that's "how it was."

When Shannon (a Georgia Peach relocated — against her will in 1992 — to Spring Hill/Columbia, Tenn., back when that area was very rural) and I left Nashville in 2000, it was to get a year of experience under my belt in the newspaper world (something almost every newspaper employer wanted at the turn of the millennium). I thought for sure we'd make it back to middle Tennessee. After all, since leaving Paris, I'd lived in Nashville, gone to school in Murfreesboro, and gotten to know each and every street in Franklin — via my college job of delivering pizza for Domino's. I liked Nashville, circa 1995 to 2000. Murfreesboro was cool enough, but that was really just for college. But, I loved Franklin.

However, The Herald newspaper in Jasper, Ind., called me back after I scattered resumés and work samples across the country (seriously, from California to North Dakota, to Arizona).

We moved the week of Thanksgiving 2000. I started work the Monday after Thanksgiving. So, so scared. "If I keep my mouth shut, I won't say anything stupid," was my internal mantra.

Sept. 11, 2001 put an end to our initial chance of leaving. The job market dried up pretty fast for a while. We signed a lease for another year in Indiana. I talked to the Columbia, Tenn., newspaper in that time. "Now, we have to let you know, this is an entry-level job." No worries, I was still entry level, I said. "We're looking at about $18,000 a year."

No dice on that. I wasn't making tons more than that in Indiana, but taking that job would've required me to go back to delivering pizza part-time — something I was very determined not to do — especially since one of the last things an assistant manager at Domino's had said to me when I left was "you'll be back."

2001 turned into 2002. We were expecting a baby. There was a miscarriage. We couldn't afford a lapse in health insurance.

Early 2003 brought a daughter, Isabella. We thought "we better buy a house and move out of this duplex." The market was right. Poor folks like us could get into a house with little down. My brother loaned us a $1,000 to get in to a blue house on Main Street. Idyllic in old Jasper. We didn't kow how good we had it, to be honest.

"Well, we can't sell the house right away." Equity must be built.

2005 brought another daughter, Gabrielle.

We were heavily involved at our church. I was leading music worship as a volunteer (started in 2002) because I uttered the phrase "I play guitar if you ever need me." Life was taking a hard right turn and I didn't even know it.

By the time we looked up, Isabella was starting school. Then Gabrielle. The church hired me part-time.

All the time we thought "Tennessee is the place to be," as Dolly once said on a state tourism commercial.

I left the newspaper for full-time ministry as a music and communications minister at our church. The best of both worlds.

In 2012, an opportunity arose in Tennessee. 

Jackpot.

Except it wasn't. 

We decided not to pursue it beyond a few initial emails ... I can't really remember why, exactly. All I know was, a short time later, that church fired its minister for plagiarism and another minister's wife caused a Tennessean-headline-worthy scandal there, as well.

Bullet dodged. God protecting us. God putting us where he wanted. Something like that.

But, the years rolled on and that unsettled feeling never subsided. A sense of "home" was always absent from our hearts and minds. Her family was in Georgia, mine in Tennessee. We lived on the moon — so it seemed. A 2015 stop in Franklin messed me up for a good year. It was always this elusive thing. We probably couldn't afford to live there anyway, even if I did get a job there. Something to hold onto in our dreams, I suppose.

Another conversation happened in 2019. This time, I was an Executive Minister at our church, along with continuing my worship duties. This would be a step back (especially in terms of pay) into music worship-only, but Isabella was only two years away from finishing high school by now. We talked about it with both girls and decided we couldn't do that to them.

Then ... COVID. What a mess. 

That opportunity would've been a disaster. God protecting/keeping us again. We kept asking. He kept saying "no."

However, the past three years have been years of deep conversation and growth with Shannon and I. Counseling has been a Godsend. We all should do it.

Earlier this year, Shannon's dad had an intense health scare. I thought for sure we'd have to relocate now. Tennessee. Georgia. Something like that. Instead, out of that trip, Shannon revealed to me that "maybe Jasper is not all that bad."

What is happening here? Mind. Blown. In our little life, this one sentence carried enormous weight.

If you grow up in "The South," you know all the gravity that moniker carries. The pride and the glory of it all. "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God," after all.

It's all wound up in your DNA and it takes a long time to unpack and examine it, if you try to do such things with self-reflection. It's never really left us. But, for the first time since we've been here, we're at peace with living above the Mason-Dixon Line. Sure, we still call a shopping cart a "buggy," we still make our tea sweet enough for the spoon to stand up on its own in the pitcher, and we don't really root for any northern teams (except for me — alone — rooting for the Pacers) and are die-hard Braves fans 'til we die. 

Even so, we blinked and it's been almost 24 years here. I mow my grass on Thursdays (even if our landscaping is not Jasper-worthy and it bugs me to no end). I appreciate these German Catholics and their ways. They built a great little community — even though it is also changing (as things tend to do).

On the second day of summer this year, at my sister's birthday dinner in Hendersonville, Tenn. (close enough to drive to and back on a Friday night — exhausting, sure), my brother asked me if I was ready to move to Columbia ("Columbia is now what Franklin was 15 years ago," people tell us). For the first time, I told him "I think we're Hoosiers."

I said it with 100% confidence, even if I will probably only ever be 80% sure about that. There's still a gnawing in the back of my heart that longs for something resembling "home" — whatever that really is. I'm not sure this side of eternity, that will ever go away. Perhaps this is a reminder the writer of Hebrews gives us about this world not really being "home." However, I've stopped leading with "originally I'm from Tennessee" when people ask where I'm from at conferences and the like. I've stopped romanticizing everything about "The South" and tried to see it a little more clearly — the flaws and the beauty of it all.

Living here has been good for us. Good for our marriage. Good for raising our kids into adulthood.

Only God knows what the future holds, but I've crossed a line.

Today, I've been a Hoosier just as long as I've been a Volunteer.

I think I got that year of experience for which we were aiming.