Chapter two of Jarah’s Belmont story, from the war she fought in June to the bridges she’s building now.
Back in June, I wrote about a war my daughter fought in a Nashville parking lot. A breakup. A phone she couldn’t put down. A father praying for the strength to model something steady while she wrestled with pain dressed up as connection. If you missed The War on Broadway, that’s where this story starts.
I told you then that the battle belonged to the Lord. A week ago today, I watched the fruit of it.
I sat in Belmont University’s Curb Event Center and watched Jarah become an official freshman. The processional filed in. The deans took their seats. Before a single class had met, two people stood up and told over a thousand new students exactly what kind of place they’d just joined.
The daughter who once couldn’t stop checking her phone in the gaps between orientation sessions sat in that arena looking settled. Confident. Whole. On that settled ground, Belmont handed her, and every freshman in the room, a bigger assignment: stop guarding your own wounds long enough to build a bridge for somebody else’s.
Susan’s Bridges
Pastor Susan Jones went first, and she talked about bridges. Not brick-and-mortar bridges. People bridges. She told the class about the Bell Tower Scholars, a partnership with a dozen Nashville high schools that brings fifty new freshmen to Belmont every year, many the first in their families to go to college. She told them about foster kids who, instead of aging out of the system at eighteen, get to age in to a Belmont education. She told them about the men inside a Tennessee prison earning real business degrees from Belmont faculty, dozens of them graduated now, and not one has gone back. She told them about Little Bruins, the preschool right on campus, so the youngest among us grow up knowing they belong there too.
Then she gave the freshman class their assignment: be a bridge. Learn the name of the international student in your class. Wave first. Invite the kid sitting alone to lunch.
Greg’s Hospitality
President Greg Jones picked up right where she left off, and he named it. Belmont builds its whole formation around a framework the students call SOUL: Seeking excellence with humility, Offering gratitude with joy, Unleashing hospitality with love, Living the dream together with hope. Every year, the university leans into one phrase. This year, it’s unleashing hospitality with love.
He told the class about a high school football team in Baltimore, coached by a former NFL lineman named Joe Ehrmann. Before every game, the coach asks his players one question: “What’s our job as coaches?” A locker room full of teenage boys shout back, without flinching: “To love us.” “And what’s your job?” “To love each other.” A parent once asked how the team would do that season. The coach told her he had no idea. He wouldn’t know for years, because he wasn’t measuring the season in wins. He was measuring it in men.
The Same Road, A New Shape
Back in June, I clung to Deuteronomy 6 on I-40 like a lifeline, the part where God tells parents to teach His commands to their children “when you walk along the road.” I meant it literally that week. Five hundred miles of highway, a flat tire, a daughter fighting a battle in the passenger seat.
Turns out the road doesn’t end at orientation. It just changes shape. It becomes a dorm hallway. A dining hall table. A stranger’s name you decide to learn.
I built MindWolves on three words: Vision, Process, Love. Vision is the calling God has placed on my life. Process is the purpose He’s given me to walk out. And Love, Love is third. But only in the order it’s counted. Never in the order it matters.
Love is the glue. It’s what Belmont calls hospitality. It’s what Susan calls a bridge. It’s what I call Neighborly Love, God first, others second, myself third.
Jesus was asked once what mattered most. He didn’t invent a new answer. He reached back into the same Hebrew Scriptures I quoted in June, Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, and gave His questioner one word, twice. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these ” (Mark 12:31). “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8).
Love is not a nice sentiment. It’s the whole architecture of the good life, and it’s the same architecture holding up a war and a bridge, a breakup and a beginning.
The Turn, Parent
So here’s the turn, same as it was in June. You prayed your child through the war. Now pray them into the bridge-building.
One wolf keeps its distance. It guards its comfort, waits to be noticed, and calls that safety. That’s the wolf that wins when a child is nursing a wound alone with a phone in a parking lot. The other wolf builds the bridge first. It waves first. It loves first, even when it costs something, even when nobody’s watching, even when the scoreboard won’t tell you if it worked for twenty years.
Feed the wolf that builds the bridge. In your own house, this week, before you ask it of your kids.
Along the Road, Again
You don’t have to have this figured out. I didn’t drive to Nashville in June with a plan for a breakup or a flat tire. I just kept choosing, mile after mile, to point my daughter back to the God who already won the war. That’s the whole job. Not perfection. Just presence, along the road, daily.
Learn a name you don’t already know this week. Wave first at the person you’ve been avoiding. Open your table to someone who’s never sat at it. And if you want a habit that trains your heart toward this kind of love, I’d love to send you a copy of The Family Wins Devotional, the same resource I pointed you to in June, completely free, no strings attached. Get your copy here.
One More Thing
Jarah is stepping onto a campus that’s going to ask her, every single day, whose bridge will you be? Back in June, I wasn’t sure how she’d answer that. Today, I am.
Proud doesn’t begin to cover it, Jarah. Go build some bridges.
Feed the Good Wolf. 🐺