Hanging together

By Jeff Becraft

We just celebrated the 4th of July, Independence Day, in our country. Way back when the Declaration of Independence was signed, Benjamin Franklin said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” It was a huge risk that they took. They were literally putting their lives on the line by signing that declaration. And there are times where things are so important in our lives that we do need to lay our lives down.

Independence is a good thing in many ways, like when we are raising a child… you don’t want that child to become an adult and they are still dependent upon their parents. You want that child to become independent, to be able to form their own family. And so that’s a good thing.

But there are times where an independent spirit can run through us, and I know that’s true of me. The older and grumpier I get, the more I realize there are times that I am way too independent.

The reality is, we need to hang together.

Back when I was younger, I had the opportunity to be what was called huddle coordinator for certain FCA camps for several years. As a huddle coordinator, I was in charge of the college huddle leaders who would be the huddle leader for the high school students and athletes that were going to be part of the camps. This is one of the most exciting things I really ever did in my life.

At that point, the huddle leaders would come in two days early and we would have two days together of training, getting ready for the camp… so they could be the best leader they could be for the group of nine to 10 high schoolers that would be in their huddle during that week of camp. During that pre-camp training, I had the guys and we were heading out over to the gym. As we were heading out of the dorm on that college campus, the camp director (who is a friend of mine) says to me, “Where are you going?” And I said, “We’re going to the gym.” And he said, “You need to be training these guys.” And I simply responded, “I am.”

He was a friend of mine but he and I had different views of training. His view of training was having them in a classroom and giving them information. That’s never really been my philosophy towards passing things on to people. Plato said, (and I never had it right but this is the way I would say it to the huddle leaders), “If you play with a man for an hour, you know him much better than if you talk to him for a very long time.” (What he actually said was, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”) And this is one of the leadership lessons I would pass on to those college huddle leaders… so off we went to the gym.

I was looking for them to become a team, that they would lean on one another… that they would hang together. That’s what I wanted to get across.

And this just wasn’t just an independent attitude of my own. I had learned these principles from other guys, mostly Steve Brannan and Mark Newlen, who were huddle coordinators when I was a huddle leader. That’s where I learned these principles… and I simply passed on what I had seen and experienced.

One of the things that both of those guys taught me was that as huddle leaders, we need to lean on one another. It’s like a football team coming together as a team in a huddle, encouraging one another, lifting one another up, bearing one another’s burdens.

So while we were in the gym, I may not have been in front of some whiteboard giving out information to these young college athletes… but they were learning life lessons in a very real way. They were learning to hang together.

We really do need each other.

Jeff Becraft is the Director of Our Place of Hope and the Director Emeritus for Youth Corps and has dedicated much of his life to helping shift the vision of people’s lives. Our Place of Hope is a paradigm shift for people living with mental illness that encourages them to regain meaning, purpose, and hope for their lives. You can connect with Jeff at  [email protected].