Ole Miss Vaught Hemingway Stadium – 2016
(10 years ago!)
Graduation Gift
For those wanting to give a graduation gift before June 25, 2026 (Induction Day at USNA), please use the links below or leave a comment/send us an email & we will send you a US address for gifts.
Senior Portrait – Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
Short videos
More videos to be added in the next week.
USNA, West Point, and Back to Mississippi
– John Hugh
We have recently written about our oldest going to the US Naval Academy. We celebrate this out of a thankfulness for how God and others have formed him our last 5 years in France. Personally, I wanted him to go to one of two universities: Navy or Ole Miss. And honestly, I often leaned Ole Miss.
I love Ole Miss. Yes for the sports. I was in the Ole Miss basketball locker room at 3 years old as my uncle, John Stroud, played – very well – for our team. Dad and I saw first-hand the Ole Miss vs Vanderbilt football game in 1989 where Chucky Mullins gave the hit, and didn’t get up. I’ve grown to love the history and teams of Ole Miss football. We now don’t miss a game on the “radio” of the Ole Miss sports app, regardless of late nights or early mornings. And goodness, I love baseball. I’ve enjoyed watching the teams develop, win, comeback, and play ball.
But it’s altogether more. Ole Miss, like for so many others, gave me a chance. From the Chancellor’s Leadership Class to an English and French degree, to studying abroad at the University of Savoie, it opened the world to me and showed me how we can be lifelong learners and growing leaders.
It also beckons of home and my sense of place. I was born in Lafayette County Hospital (a name that means much on this side of the Atlantic) and spent the majority of my formative years between Oxford and New Albany on Highway 30 West – now named William Faulkner Parkway. I’m from New Albany. I am an Ole Miss Rebel.
Here, it’s different. Our oldest and our other kids have seen this. It’s what Willie Morris described in his wonderful memoir of essays, “Terrains of the Heart” – this difference of being from somewhere or coming from the world at large. He wrote:
“I was talking with an Ole Miss student who had just returned from visiting a Mississippi friend at Harvard. They went to a party in Cambridge and the young man from Ole Miss got into a conversation with a Harvard man.
“Where are you from?” the Mississippian asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, where are you from? Where did you go to high school?”
The other man mentioned an Eastern prep school.
“But where did you grow up? Where are your parents?”
“Well, my father is in Switzerland I think, and my mother is asleep in the next room.”
The Ole Miss student then told me: “For the first time in my life, I understood that not all Americans are from somewhere.”
There is a difference.
I desired for our oldest to go back to his Mississippi roots and dig deeper. He chose to grow his wings. He still knows his roots run deep. He lived in Jackson, Mississippi for his first 14 years yet still comes back for an Ole Miss football game from Paris. We want those formative times to reside deeply in him.
Ultimately, we all have a sense of place. It can be New Albany, Mississippi or Balikpapan, Indonesia (where Linda grew up) or Geneva, Copenhagen, Manila, Brooklyn, and even Annapolis. As a Christian, I believe there are “no accidents in Christianity.” What I mean by this is God knows, and He knows best. He first placed us in our sense of place yet shapes us from there.
Willie Morris continued, in his memoirs, to show the challenges our sense of place can bring:
“‘Time is very important for us because it has dealt with us.’
Eudora Welty of Mississippi says. ‘We have suffered and learned and progressed through it.’
For instance, many of the people I know here of my age had great-grandfathers and great-uncles who fought in the Civil War. Some survived it, some did not, having fallen at Brice’s Crossroads or Shiloh or Chancellorsville or Gettysburg, in that near obliteration of the young officer class which rivaled England, France, and Germany of the World War I generation. The experiences of these men have been brought to their great-grandsons and daughters through diaries found in attics, through the words handed down, and through the ancestral relics: a pistol, a sword, old buttons, a shred of grey cloth.
Many Americans, to express it boldly, have remained afraid of Mississippi.
I witnessed this fear time and again in the East (in the 1980’s), and I see it to this day. It was, after all, not too many years before that D.W. Brogan, who was a British historian but might just have been speaking for much of Northern sentiment, could describe Mississippi as the most savage and backward of of the 48 commonwealths.”
For me, I remember making this connection when I was a study-abroad Ole Miss junior in Savoie, France. Living in an international student dorm, I made friends from all over the world, particularly across Europe. Three good ones were from Germany. One day, we went down to get a drink or lunch at a local brasserie. When the owners found out my friends were German, they were asked us all to leave. This was 1995. My friends then confessed how both World Wars still cast a shadow over their identity, their families, their sense of place. “It will never go away” they said. “We are left to carry the burdens and price of our shared history.” They felt ashamed.
Our boys have felt this same sense here in France, even the 2020s. While Linda’s home state is technically California, albeit while growing up abroad, our boys have quickly learned when asked where they were from in the USA, there are different responses and reactions if they say Mississippi, or if they say, “well, my Mom is from California.” They first added this. Now often, they don’t.
We are shaped by our past and by our places. But that is not the end of our story. For the Christian, all faith looks forward. We believe there is something much greater than the parts of our past.
In Mark 10, when Jesus talks of the challenges for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God, he tells His disciples:
“There is no one who had left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, who will not receive a hundred times more, not at this time – houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions – and eternal life in the age to come. But many who are first will be last, and the last first (verses 29-31).”
This is true – for Christians with deep roots and also those living to forget their past, and above all for the seekers – there is much more to be gained in life with Christ and the global community He offers. Where you have been and what you leave behind does not define you. When we know our true home is with Him, we can be at home anywhere on earth.
We have tried to instill this in our boys, as well as to the expats, students, and immigrants to whom we minister now. As Tim Keller has said, “in Christ the bad things turn out good, the good things become better, and the best is yet to come.”
Many do turn from, move away from, and sometimes even swear they’ll never go back to their place of origin or a place like Mississippi, an urban ghetto, a small hometown, or a tribal community. We see this here in a city like Paris. People are more and more moving to the great cities of the world. We all can hear that train whistle in the night and wonder where it’s going and if we could be on it. We want to make a name for ourselves, to build something, just as they once did at the tower of Babel. “If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere.”
We want to be close to the center of things. We want to be in the inner ring. Leaders and strivers and over-achievers still go to Navy and Army, Harvard and Dartmouth, then New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Dubai. We can all have, “visions of Paris plums, dancing in our heads.” Such ambition can be a good thing, yet life in Christ always pushes us deeper into ourselves and outwards to others.
He takes us deeper in Mark 8: 34-36, as Jesus says:
“In anyone wants to follow after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Me and the gospel will save it. For what does it benefit someone to gain the whole and yet lose his life?”
He presses us outward in Mark 10: 43-45,
“Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you will be a slave to all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”
So we can give the good gifts of our home and place while encouraging others to move out to the high seas. As CS Lewis wrote, we can “not think less of ourselves, (but) think of ourselves less.”It’s a call to live a life of service, loving all our cities, our neighbors, and the nations who make up our neighbors.
We believe our oldest will profit immensely from 4 years in Annapolis and at least 5 years of service to his country at different ports around the globe. He will always have Mississippi and it’s a place he and our family will always come back to.
My Mom always said the greatest gift one can give to any child is roots and wings. We believe it’s definitely both. Our daily and weekly time with our oldest is coming to a close. He’s going to university in the USA while we remain overseas, and then entering the US Navy as a 2nd Lieutenant . Annapolis and the US Navy now has him and will shape him.
We have taken time to imprint the roots and foundation to give him an anchor. They can remain over the course of a life.
Go Navy. Beat Army. And Hotty Toddy!!
Paris Partner Goal
We have intentions to stay in France for another 5 years. God has been gracious to open so many doors.
Please consider becoming a Paris Partner for $25/month, $50/month, or a 1 time donation of $1000 or more. We have more ideas and dreams for Paris. Join us in the adventure by donating here!
Follow our church plant @eicrivegauche on Instagram or Facebook or visit www.eicparis.com.
