Life Lessons for Young Men Part 1

Nothing says Christmas like a water buffalo. For a poor family in Asia, getting a water buffalo is like getting a farm tractor to pull a plow, or getting a milk truck full of delicious milk, or getting a stand at the market to sell cheese. A water buffalo opens the door for work, food, and income. More importantly, it opens the door to talk about Jesus.

And nothing says Christmas better than that. This is Andy Thomas from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we discover what it means to be a wholehearted man. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Here's our host, Will Hardy, and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white guy.

Well, you got the black guy here, but you don't have the white guy today. But we have a studio full of shiny bright faces in the building. So we are going to be talking about Trail Life USA. And in the studio, we have Jim Medeiros, and we have Son Horton, and we have April Horton with us, along with the crew.

And we're going to be talking to the crew later. But Trail Life USA is an organization that Son had got into, and he works with me on the Talking and Walking Christian men's ministry. And we're really excited about it, because as I was reading on the website and seeing some of the things that you guys do in reference to the more of the biblical aspects of the organization, that really caught my attention. And Proverbs 22.6 talks about if we train up a child in the way that they should go, that when they are old, they won't depart from it.

So that's a promise, and God don't break promises. We do. So tell me, Son, how you got involved in Trail Life USA and what Trail Life USA has done for you as an individual.

Yes. Well, the program itself has started about maybe eight, nine years ago. So my wife and I discussed about a program.

We had Caleb, our youngest, he was about six, seven years old. And we needed to do something more than just the things we were doing around the house or the church. We wanted to get him to experience what a man should be above and beyond what the world tells us a man should be.

So we looked at the scouting program, and we were discouraged with how it was moving. So my wife found out about the program with Trail Life, and she told me, go to Calvary, a different church than we're at now, Tuesday night, 730. And I'm like, okay, and do what?

She's like, just show up. So I just did that. I showed up. I had no clue what the program was about.

I've never been in scouting myself. I spent seven years active duty in the military, so I had some understanding of those concepts. But when it came to what it was going to be for a relationship with my sons, I had no idea what that was going to be. So I showed up. There's a bunch of dads, a bunch of kids running around, and that's the genesis of it.

Just getting, that's all you have to do sometimes is show up. You know, take that step forward and let God lead you the rest of the way. So I got involved with that program, but before that we started talking to First Christian Church about starting our own Trail Life program. And Pete Kunkel and Mike Wallace said, we love the program, but we just don't have the men to help. If you want the program to succeed, you have to start it. And we're like, oh, no, no, no, no.

It's just an idea. So two years into the other program, the second year into the other program, the leadership saw that I had some capabilities to give instructions. So they asked me to step up to train the boys.

So I reluctantly did so, but I enjoyed it. It was a different skill set, training men to training boys. So in that same second year, the scouting program, the Boy Scouts went farther to the left. And we had a gentleman said, hey, if you're really interested in starting a troop here, I'm interested too.

And then Mike Wallace said, I know a guy that's on fire for that. And then I got the phone call. Right. So that's how it started. We started with about six boys, and I ran the entire program.

There's a new program, so we didn't really have a lot of foundation. But the foundation that we knew had to be Christ focused. Everything that we touch, everything we do, everything we say had to have Jesus in the middle of it.

Not, you know, our opinion of things, but Jesus in the middle of it. So our program grew. Second year, Jim is here with me. He stepped up along with another gentleman, Chris Sawyer.

So there's three of us now instead of just one, a quarter three is stronger than one. So we focus on just making sure that it was faith based, that the kids were having fun, and that we were learning things such as, you know, sharp edge tools, kids handling knives. That never happened in school. You know, marksmanship training, camping. How to burn pancakes.

How to burn pancakes. Yes. Yes.

So that's another aspect of it. There's a lot of men in the program that's not had the same experience. They have not gone fishing. This first time they went fishing is when we took them fishing. Never went camping.

Never fired a firearm before. A lot of experiences that these boys are experiencing first for the first time was their fathers are experiencing for the first time. And so Trail Life is not necessarily just a scouting program. It's a ministry. And we're ministering to families that are single moms, single dads, grandparents bringing in their grandchildren.

They're looking for something that the world's not offering. You know, and so we're service based. We do service programs.

We do fundraising. We do a lot of things for the kids to have a buy into it. And I tell the families that come and visit, you're not obligated to do anything. Show up as much as you like. If the boys are interested, then buy into the program. There's no monetary commitments.

There's no resentment if you decided to stay or to leave. This is at will. And our troop now, including parents and kids, are up to 126. Wow. That's phenomenal.

And a 95 percent participation rate. Yes. That's even more phenomenal. Yes. Yes. So we want to bring we want to bring Jim in here. So, Jim, what role do you play within Trail Life in the troop and what has your experience been?

They call me the house mouse. My my official role is membership chair. And so I help with helping new families be welcomed and integrated into the program. Also help support the leaders, make sure that, you know, we're doing the things that we need to do.

People are wearing credentials and training is done on the other part of what I do is really about training. So I've taken on a lot of or some of the Trail Life, the higher level Trail Life training, so that I can bring it back and train leaders in the troop or even leaders in other local troops on the program itself or the policies of Trail Life USA. And so how has it benefited you since you've been part of it?

It's like song. You know, it's done a lot for our family. It's done a lot. I have two boys in the program and now a grandson that just entered the program. And and honestly, like San said, you know, I came I came in without any scouting experience. And it's helped me be a better dad and a better example while, you know, I, I guess it's fair to say I was a grounded Christian coming into it. It's helped me really. I had two girls and then about 10 years later decided to have a boy and then had two boys. But, you know, I needed to there are other skills that are necessary in raising boys and boys to be men of God. And so that's how it's really benefited me is just really I guess God gave me an eye for it.

And I really bought into the program and just wanted to learn as much as I could about the program. And so when when you're at a meeting, all of us as leaders, when we're there and sometimes not doing anything, just stepping back and watching what God has done by raising up new leaders. We have twenty six men, I believe right now that we consider registered leaders, men who have gone through the training.

They've been background checked. And I mean, we went from one to twenty six. Wow.

You know, in just a few years. So it's just amazing. You know, and I think that's the the crux of of what we as believers, what we're looking for is in ourselves and certainly a spouse. So we got the spouse of the troop master here.

And so we're going to get the real spiel. So as as the wife of a troop master in trail USA, April, tell me how. What changes have you seen in song that has maybe brought you guys closer together as a family?

Wow. Well, I will say that son didn't have an active father in his upbringing. Would you say he was always gone?

He was always deployed military also. So I think and we just didn't have a lot of examples within our lives and our family structure. And so I think that it has provided a lot of examples to not just our family, but all families. I think we grow together as people.

And when we see someone discipline a child or teach a child, we all benefit because what works for this one may not work for that one. But you you grow together. And so that's what I like about the program is that the men are growing with the boys. The boys are growing with the men and they're growing together with God. Oh, wow.

And I will say it. My youngest is seven and we had a tornado drill and it was a real tornado watch. I think is a watcher warning, whichever one you go to the basement for. So we're going to the basement and he's grabbing a fire extinguisher. He's grabbing water and flashlights. And I said, son, how do you know this?

He says, well, true life, mom. These boys run wild. They're teaching and the boys are literally climbing the walls, rolling on the floor. And they don't look like they're paying attention, but they are. And I think that's the thing when it comes to children is they're very observant in what they see. But they also reserve sometimes, depending on the age, certain comments that they may have until until they're either one on one with a parent or both parents.

And then they share these things. But see, this is the thing that I like about what trail life is doing is it's building from the ground up. And getting the biblical base, because that's what this country has gotten away from. We have gotten away from the biblical standards there. I mean, the the nation as a whole, we're putting God out of everything, you know. So when we do that, obviously, we start as a nation to fall. But see, trail life, when I see this, I see hope. I see men coming back to that biblical standard and I see the sons of those men coming back to the biblical standard and reassuring themselves that they are indeed men of God.

We'll be back right after this. TAWCMM would love to have you join their community of men for breakfast every first and third Friday of every month and Bible discussions and fellowship after the best breakfast in town. The meeting location is at their gracious Host Church, First Christian Church in Kernersville, 1130 North Main Street in Kernersville.

They have a hard start at seven o'clock and a hard stop at eight o'clock. First time visitors eat for free. Join your hosts, Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white guy. Affordable Chiropractic in High Point, as you might tell from their name, affordable chiropractic, even for the cash patient. Dr. Jeff Fricke has been caring for patients in High Point for 34 years. Physical therapy such as ultrasound and spinal decompression for disc conditions such as herniation, comprehensive care for auto accident injury patients with no out of pocket expense. Remember, affordable chiropractic on West Lexington Avenue in High Point.

Call 336-885-1987. We are back. I'm liking that music. We are back at Man Talking. We're talking with Jim, we're talking with Son, we're talking with The Better Half, April and Trail Life. And you know, when we were off there, we were talking about some of the things that Trail Life, some of the details.

And we're going to get into that next. Some of the details involving Trail Life and what some of the young men and older men are involved with as far as what they do within the organization. So we were talking about election badges, you know, that they can achieve. So what is the basis behind the badges and the motivation, if you will, behind that to drive a young man to want to earn one?

What's the motivation? Well, I can talk to about the Woodlands program. And Jim, if you can talk about the Navigators and Adventurers program. The Woodlands program is from kindergarten to fifth grade. And they're broken into three different troops. For kindergarten, first grade is the foxes.

There's the hawks that are from second grade, third grade, and the mountain lions are fourth to fifth grade. So these are little patrols that they're in. And then the Woodlands side, it's about participation. It's about showing up. They don't need to know everything. They just need to absorb some of the information.

So they have the criteria that they show up for the meetings. And then we have a hit the trail type of event. Like we just went to the fire station. We'll go and visit. We'll go camping.

Go fishing. Something outside of the normal troop meeting that they have to participate in. Recently, we participated in the Veterans Day presentation at the Carolina Field Honors, handing out programs during that presentation. So trying to get into the community, trying to get them outside, but getting them to show up. And then later on, then the the older boys, junior high and high school.

Jim, if you can speak to that to that aspect. Yeah. As Son said, you know, the program begins in Woodlands and it begins to build the concepts and it repeats it over and over again. So that because we would have boys coming in at different times. Right.

Not every boy is going to start at the age of five and work his way all the way up. So the program is done in such a way to kind of elevate each time you move from when you move from a fox to a hawk. Let's say we that the the point of separating them is that now we can we can raise the bar. So even though we may all be doing the same lesson that evening, maybe we're going to learn about wood tools. We may be using different wood tools and talking about different wood tools in the hawk group or especially in the mountain lion group than we would in the fox group. Right. And so navigators going into the navigators group, which is our our middle school group, it's the same thing.

The structure changes a little bit, but but it really brings everything that they learned in the Woodlands program and just multiplies it. And it's in what I'd like to tell parents is in. Chris and I just experienced this. We had to learn the program because we didn't when Son started, you know, with the one in six boys. We only had younger boys and and we we had to create this program a few years ago and we had to learn a lot about it. And the best way to describe it is in Woodlands, there's a lot of seeing and maybe doing some finger thing.

There's a lot of fun when you get into navigators. It's a lot of doing. We're not going to spend an hour teaching them a concept. We might spend five minutes reminding them of what they've already learned in years past.

And then we're going to give them the materials and have them do it. So there's so within within those groups, the foxes and the hawks within those groups, then they are specific goals or in in respect to the election badges that each one can earn. Yeah, that the program is pretty neat. It has different as different awards for the Woodlands versus the Navigators in adventures, which is high school. So when you're in Woodlands, you have a patch and it has seven. You have opportunity to earn seven branches in each branch.

You want like one branch would be outdoor skills and other branches. Christian values, heritage, science, technology, sports. And that's the one one that caught my eye was Bible basics. So so what what does Bible basics entail? There's a walk worthy award and they have to participate in five devotional type sessions and watch a video memorize verses. So it's it's a Bible study for the individual boys that they have to participate in. If they don't participate, they don't get their award.

So there's a lot of it's again, everything points to Christ on this. We want them to be able to see his work and everything they do. And the separation between the patrols like the hawks, if we're doing edge tools, they might be using plastic knives and soap bars where the mountain lions are actually using pocket knives and wood. And so it's it's geared to what their individual skill set may be. But it challenges them and encourages them to look ahead because if they won't use that pocket knife, they can't do it until they get there. Right.

So it gives them an incentive to continue with the program. Recently, we had a fishing trip. So the boys had to the navigators at least had to catch the fish, had to clean the fish, had to cook the fish and had to eat the fish. Wow.

So that's all requirements in the badge. Yeah. So there's the boys are the first time handling a knife and I'm hovering over them going and praying the entire time. You know, it reminds me when I first got my first Swiss Army knife, I thought that was the coolest thing.

And it was like, wow, all these fancy tools that I have, you know, what do I do with some of these things? But as you were stating, say, I had a dad who liked to fish, you know, fortunately. But there were some days when Saturday morning cartoons was on. It was like, Dad, that's pretty tough. Saturday morning cartoons and going out fishing. But when we went out fishing, that was a time to bond. And we did a lot of that as, you know, father and son. And my dad, we went up to Canada on private property and the man knew him. And so he would, you know, we would go through his fence and all my dad has to do is blow his horn and wave his hand. And the guy would just usher him on through. And we would catch things like that.

But that's that time when we went up, I was probably about maybe eight years old. And he said, this is what you're going to do, exactly what you said, you're going to catch the fish, you're going to clean the fish, you're going to cook the fish and eat it. And the thing about when we went out hunting together, he said, son, you never hunt for anything that you don't eat. That's absolutely right.

You don't hunt for anything that you don't eat. These are the concepts that we're trying to instill. And this is the thing, getting back to some of these basics, because I think, you know, and this really excites me and excites me to do the show, because I know that there's listeners out there who have young men who want to get out and become part of something that is not only beneficial to you physically, but it's beneficial for you spiritually. Amen.

And the answer to your question a few minutes ago, what is it that draws them or what is it that keeps them? It's the word adventure. The program is creating an opportunity, a system for adventure. Boys are different than girls. And, you know, we're losing our boys before they become men. There's so many distractions out there.

You know, electronics, video games, phones, right, girls, right, lots of things. And not that all those things are bad or anything, but that they're finding adventure in the wrong places. Right.

And I know that for me as a young man, I was looking in the wrong places. So it's kind of a double edged sword in a way, because we have to keep the program adventurous. That's what's going to keep them. And you're right. It's like that Swiss Army knife that you had. Right. You open it all up and you're like, wow, what do all these things do?

But, you know, if you get through them all and you can't do anything with them, the knife's probably going to go down and sit on the shelf. And then you're going to find the next thing to do. So we've got to keep the program relevant. You know, we've had great opportunities. God has just been so good to us and our troop. And we were hearing great stories from other local troops as well where, you know, things are changing for the better. Right. We had our best camping trip just just a month ago.

Absolute best. We never even envisioned a camping trip going and having as many different activities. We were actually, Son and I were talking about, we were concerned about, you know, doing the same thing over and over again. Our camping trips before that point seemed to be pretty much the same. And then this one came along. Somebody offered their place, said, hey, camp here.

And not only that, hey, I have this person across the street, which was a mile away, by the way, who's a taxidermist and is willing to talk to your boys. It was just amazing. We had a professor at Liberty University, Dr. Nickens, came and brought a pars will. And he taught the kids how God molds us out of clay. And he dropped the cup that he built. And he said, sometimes we fall. And then he repurposed that into a bowl. And sometimes God creates us into another person.

Something new, yeah. The boys were just engaged. The parents were engaged. There's a father.

That's a key point. When I was a child, I left in the morning. I went into the woods. I didn't come back until suppertime. And I had to be back by suppertime.

But I had my adventure. These boys, these ladies out there, they can't even walk away. They walk down the street.

The police are being called. They're not free-range children. They're children. So when we have these camping trips, these boys are going on adventures. They're going to the creeks. They're going to the woods. They're finding their way through it all.

And the parents are getting connected. Well, you know, we have to continue this conversation. So next week when we come back, we're going to be talking with these same three and the crew. We're going to bring the crew in here. And we're going to talk to the crew about some of the things that they did while you were on this last camping trip. And we're also going to hear more from April on next week. But we want you to get involved.

So go to the website, find out that troop that's closest to you, understand what they do, what they get involved with. And if it's something that fits into what you want to do and your son or your daughter, bring them on in. We thank God for you. We thank God for everything that you're doing here. We will see you next week.

Thank God. As we wrap up today's show, be assured that TAWCMM, Talking and Walking Christian Men's Ministry, is building a community of men that are Christ followers with a desire to be servant leaders in their homes, communities, churches and work environments. Check out our website for upcoming events and regularly scheduled meetings. Drop us a note for topics that you would like to have us visit in the future. Thank you for joining us on Man Talk today. Visit us at www.tawcmm.com. Men walking the talk. This is the Truth Network.