Latest / Desoto Hills Baptist Church / MID WEEK MOTIVATION - October 7, 2026 "How DeSoto Hills Found Land To Grow" (Ben Smith)

Transcript

MID WEEK MOTIVATION - October 7, 2026 "How DeSoto Hills Found Land To Grow" (Ben Smith) · Desoto Hills Baptist Church

0:02
SPEAKER_01: You're listening to the Midweek Motivation Podcast from DeSoto Hills Baptist Church in South Haven, Mississippi.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: Here's your hosts, Mark Lewis, David Burgess, Laura Ulrich, Hunter Smith, and Pastor Grant Stiegall.
0:17
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Midweek Motivation Podcast for October 7th, 2026.
0:24
SPEAKER_02: Today's podcast is a little different from our normal format.
0:28
SPEAKER_02: Over the past month and this month, we are celebrating our 20th anniversary here at DeSoto Hills.
0:34
SPEAKER_02: And as we approach that milestone, I had decided to sit down with a number of people who've played influential roles in the move and in helping shape the church as we know today.
0:46
SPEAKER_02: We are on with Mr.
0:48
SPEAKER_02: Ben Smith.
0:49
SPEAKER_02: How are you today?
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Doing great, Mark.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: How are you?
0:52
SPEAKER_02: I'm doing fantastic.
0:53
SPEAKER_02: Now let's go way back and tell us when you became a member of Carriage Hills.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Gail and I, as I mentioned, we were not uh charter members.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh we were the first uh of the first hundred we were members joined the church.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh the reason we joined at that time was because we had relatives here at the church was uh my uncle B.K.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Hodge and his my cousin, his son, is Ken Hodge, and of course Kay and Ken are still members here.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: So we joined the church in 67 or 68 is when we joined Carriage Hills Baptist Church.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh we were meeting in a house.
1:36
SPEAKER_02: So you were st you joined one that was still in the house.
1:38
SPEAKER_02: Y'all didn't have a building yet.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: We were in the house on Mill Branch between Brandywine and State Line Road, uh, in a house.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: I think two two of our church members actually may have built.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: They were they were home builders.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: That was uh Bob Gray and um Art Huggins, which Joy is still a member of the church here, the daughter.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: And uh very interesting.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh the preacher, I'll get to that just a minute ago who it was, but uh back then, Mark, most of the houses built were they had what they call the Tennessee floor plan.
2:16
SPEAKER_02: Okay, what's that?
2:17
SPEAKER_00: All right, you walk in the four-year and on the right is a formal dining room.
2:22
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: Most houses today don't have formal dining rooms, unless you get into the big houses.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: On the left, uh, that would be the formal living room.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: Right.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Down the four-year, it opened into the den, which is at the back of the house.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: The den was just to hang out and watch TV in.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: And most uh most all of them were paneled at that time.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: So um when we called uh I was on the uh search pastor search committee that we when we called uh J.B.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: Miller to be the pastor, um he would actually s had his pulpit there in the foyer, and he would preach to the living room crowd, the dining room crowd, the living room crowd, and the very few he could see back in the den.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's that is so funny.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the way it is fascinating.
3:18
SPEAKER_02: Now all now all of these homebuyers come into these Tennessee floor plans and want to rip every single wall out.
3:25
SPEAKER_02: They just want one big open room.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: They remove the wall between the uh former living room and the den and from between the kitchen and the dining room.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: They took those walls out.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: So you get the open floor plan that we s we see today.
3:39
SPEAKER_02: But uh I love HGTV and all of these homes when I see, and and and now that you mention it, like that is probably the plan I see the most whenever I see any house on there that is built in the 60s or 70s.
3:52
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
3:54
SPEAKER_02: You're right, the living room was right there on the left as soon as you walk in.
3:57
SPEAKER_02: But I always wondered why did people build those formal living rooms when they had the den?
4:02
SPEAKER_02: Because today your family tends to pick one room to hang out in, and that's the one you always hang out in.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: Correct.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: And most of the time the uh living room uh furniture never got set up.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: It was a showroom.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: It actually uh ended up being a showroom.
4:17
SPEAKER_02: And um So was that for like relatives for like Christmas and Thanksgiving?
4:22
SPEAKER_02: Is that kind of where those rooms came into being used?
4:24
SPEAKER_00: Back then.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: That's that's that was the popular floor plan, they called the Tennessee floor plan back then.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: So uh JB, we called him JB, would preach in the four-year.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Man.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: So we started out uh in the house, and uh we uh acquired uh the property which is now uh Carriage Hills sits on, which was actually uh subdivision lots that were purchased.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: And it it sits on either four or five subdivision lots.
4:59
SPEAKER_02: I've always wondered how is it in just in the middle of this neighborhood is this massive little plot of land where the church was.
5:06
SPEAKER_02: Well, I brought it.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: I brought a subdivision platch, you can see it.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh I will show it to you how it came about.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: And this is Carriage Hills.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: This is Carriage Hills Church, and now did you have a uh a piece of putting Carriage Hills together as far as doing all that building?
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh not really.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: I was involved in the building.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Um here is uh the property.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm showing him the plat of Carriage Hills Subdivision Section O.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: And you can see that uh the Carriage Hills church uh set on uh I can count it.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean I can one one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, maybe thirteen or fourteen lots.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: It was supposed to be a little cul-de-sac there, right in the middle of the property.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: That's correct.
5:57
SPEAKER_02: Cul de sac, right.
5:59
SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness.
6:00
SPEAKER_02: And is this is this pretty close to what it looks like now in that neighborhood if you went in there?
6:04
SPEAKER_00: That is the way it is.
6:06
SPEAKER_02: So they sold this plot right here, which would have actually dipped right into that cul-de-sac.
6:10
SPEAKER_02: They took that out.
6:11
SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness, that is fascinating.
6:13
SPEAKER_02: Was the school already there?
6:14
SPEAKER_02: Yes, the school was there.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: The school was there.
6:18
SPEAKER_02: Was that part of the reason y'all decided that piece was?
6:20
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: I was not involved in a selection at that time, and of course, um uh it was in the middle of Carriage Hills, and that was uh a growing area at that time.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: So um they purchased those lots and uh still a beautiful neighborhood.
6:36
SPEAKER_02: That neighborhood is still just absolutely beautiful.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: It's well kept, and it's been well kept.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: So we um so Carriage Hills was built.
6:45
SPEAKER_02: When was that church built then?
6:48
SPEAKER_00: About.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh it was been uh I got there and six in the 70s when the church is was built.
6:55
SPEAKER_02: Um and you built just that first building that that was the the preschool or the the children's spot first.
7:03
SPEAKER_02: Y'all had multiple building.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Correct.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: And actually I brought you some.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: If you go on the county website, it's very interesting.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: But they have aerial photos that goes back to the 70s, so you can see actually see what a piece of property looked like.
7:17
SPEAKER_02: That's crazy.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: In the in the 70s.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And um about uh let me uh here is just one one deed where lot 664.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh can you see it on here?
7:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't see it anywhere, but okay.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh Section F Carriage Hills.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh it was purchased by uh Carriage Hills, and by the way, the trustees at that time were Ken Hodge, B.K.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Hodge, and James Wiseman were the trustees.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: But oh my goodness.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: When they bought that.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh but that was the date on this plat, uh 1968.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: So um here is the church building.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: There it sits.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: That's uh Carriage Hills.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: Here's the lots that you can see.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: And um And you eventually turned a lot of this to parking lot.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: We turned it into a parking lot.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: Did these lots were turned into a parking lot.
8:25
SPEAKER_02: The original building here.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: Do you remember when y'all built the newer section?
8:29
SPEAKER_00: Because the that I don't know.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh when that was done.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: Had to have been the 80s, wouldn't it?
8:36
SPEAKER_00: Had to be.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: I can I can vary it.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: Next time I'll look for you and give you an answer to it.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh here is the um church uh 2026.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: By the way, this aerial photo was taken in see if the date's up here for you.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: Very interesting.
8:57
SPEAKER_02: You may have to leave these.
8:58
SPEAKER_02: I'm on the I write copies.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: 1974.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: So 1974, this is what uh uh the the sanctuary was here.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh looked like the um parking lot at the rear.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: This L-shaped building had the nursery in it, uh and there was a couple portable buildings, classrooms.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: They they were here at that time.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: So this is the layout in 1974.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: Of course, this is 2026.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: It will show the way it looks like the parking lot just the way it looks now.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: And so that's I'm gonna leave that with you.
9:36
SPEAKER_02: I think there's two copies here.
9:37
SPEAKER_02: Our people would love to look at some of that, so thank you so much.
9:40
SPEAKER_02: And then you now you found the property we're sitting on here today.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: How did that story unfold?
9:46
SPEAKER_02: Because this would have been when we moved here, it was farmland all around here.
9:50
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, we were growing, and like I mentioned earlier, we were meeting everywhere.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: There's classes everywhere.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: So uh we were.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh we were meeting just about everywhere we could set up a class.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Um we were growing.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh we were boxed in.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, at that time all the houses were built around us.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: There was a uh group at the uh convention board, a Baptist board in Nashville, uh, that they would come to your church and analyze your situation and make a recommendation to either buy land, move, or whatever it is.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: So we were having problems.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: So uh the experts came down and interviewed uh everyone, and um their recommendation was do not expand there.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be too expensive.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: You'd have to buy a house, tear it down.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: And uh to get enough land for our projected growth, it would be uh financially impossible to do.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: We thought it was impossible to do.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: And the recommendation is don't bill there.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: I don't know where they made a recommendation to move or not, but so at that time uh it was realized that we can't grow here and we're gonna have to find another location.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh at that time, of course, I'm I am a civil engineer.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: I designed subdivisions mainly.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: Right.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: And that time I was working uh for uh two different families that owned the majority of the developable land in Soda County, which was the Bridge Force and also the Whittens.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: If you looked at an old ownership mount back then, it was Bridgeforce, Bridgeforce, Whitton, Whitton, Bridgeforth.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: And uh I was working uh and uh Mark uh the the Lord put on my on my heart the church needs to move and we need to find some land.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: And it was a burden on my heart.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh I started looking and I and I said, I need to go.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: At that time Steve Howell was the pastor.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: Said, I need to go talk to Steve about it.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: We need to move.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: So I walked in there one day at the office, and he saw me walk by and he hollered at me and said, Come here, I need to talk to you.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: And I went in there and uh he said, I need to talk to you, so I think we need to move.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Steve, that's why I'm here.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: The Lord led me here this morning to talk to you about moving.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: That is crazy, isn't it?
12:35
SPEAKER_00: So we uh started looking.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: I started looking, I guess, maybe someone else, but I started looking.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: First looked at the church road interchange that was coming.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that'd be great to have a church there on one of those uh clover leaf or whatever, one of those places there was not possible to find anything.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: At that time, uh I was uh designing Roseberry, which is to the north of us.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: And it's owned, it was owned by the Whitten family.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh Laney Fon de Berg uh married Bertie B.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: Whitten, so he married into the family, but Laney was a a friend of mine.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: I did his work.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: Uh I've actually played a little semi-pro baseball with him.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh he was mayor of the uh Hernando for one term, by the way.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: And uh uh I was uh uh working on Roseberry, and I knew what Bridgeworth were planting at Dickens Place and other developments.
13:34
SPEAKER_02: All this was still farmland.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Farmland.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: And uh I said uh I went to Laney and I said, uh Laney, uh, would you sell us some land on Getwell Road?
13:47
SPEAKER_00: And he said he would, and here is the uh deed.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: We're Betty B.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: Whitten uh Thunderburg, which is uh Laney's uh wife, she they're both still alive.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: Um he sold us 15 acres, and it's uh 625 feet by 1,100 feet.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: At that time, uh here's the property, and this is 1996.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: The deed is 1998, if I'm not mistaken.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh 1990, I think is the date on this thing when we bought the property.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh first of the day of 1998.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: We bought the property in 1998, May of 1998.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: We bought 15 acres from Laney.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: At that time, it was just farmland.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: You could see here's this would be almost the center of our property.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: There was an old tenant house here.
14:49
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: And that tenanted house had, of course, had to be torn down.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh so we bought 15 acres from uh Laney.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: Um and by the way, uh there's Pinehurst right here.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: Pinehurst is behind you over here.
15:05
SPEAKER_02: So um And was it it was already there, it was being developed.
15:08
SPEAKER_02: It was in the middle of being developed.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: It was in the middle of being developed.
15:11
SPEAKER_02: It was not mu it was not anything like it is today, but my parents bought their so that would have been but when he came here he he y'all moved to Pinehurst.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: So it was under development.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: So uh but Laney agreed to it, and we bought 15 acres.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, uh a couple church members, church members paid it off, paid the land ode off.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: That is what I mean.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: The church owed no money on the land.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: Um so uh I was designing Roseberry to the north, and we had 600 and what, 50 feet, I think, of frontage.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: And um I'd already designed the lots in there, and I I got the thought, what if we could ask Laney if we could both split the cost of putting a road on our north property line.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Instead of just having 650 feet, now we've got 1,100 feet of frontage on a another road.
16:07
SPEAKER_02: Brilliant.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: So uh went to Laney and he said, Yeah, I'll I'll do that.
16:11
SPEAKER_02: So So this road was not even originally.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: It was not originally planned.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: No, but we changed the subdivision plan so that half the road would be in Roseberry, half of it would be DeSoda Hills.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: We agreed to pay half the cost.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: And Laney was nice enough to let us pay it, pay it off over several years.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: So we actually made installment plants and payment off.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: So now we ended up 650 feet of get well frontage, 1100 feet of roseberry.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: And that makes up our property.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: Here's uh 2006.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: This is what uh the site looked like.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: You can see it's under construction.
16:49
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: The building's under construction, and that's 2006.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: And it looks like it's got some construction trailers or something on the site in 2006.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh 2016, uh parking lot.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: The other building's not built.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Right.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh yet.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's what it looks like today, 2017.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: I had one in here if I could find it.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: This is it says 2026.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh the North Parking lot, I guess, prior to 2016 was not paved.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: It was gravel for a long time.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Long time.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: And we had a church member who wrote a check.
17:35
SPEAKER_02: I had no clue.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: That's how that ended up.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he wrote a check.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: He was in the asphalt business, and uh uh he uh faithful member here.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: Um his wife got ill and moved off, but he uh he paid for the north, paving the north parking lot.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: So it was paid for.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: We've been blessed so many different ways.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: Mark, you wouldn't believe I was on the finance chairman, finance committee.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll call it something else now.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, for I didn't think I ever was gonna get off of it.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: But it was amazing that when something was needed, somebody stepped up, paid for it.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: So uh we've been very blessed.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: But uh that's that's the story of this land, man.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: I the So I got you a copy of the deeds.
18:28
SPEAKER_02: I thank you so much.
18:29
SPEAKER_02: The the the fact that you were in the position you were in to be able to see the vision of what this area was gonna become.
18:40
SPEAKER_02: Because this area was nothing, even in 98-99, there was nothing really over here.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, I knew what was happening at the Getwell church area, because I was right there designing uh months before uh actual subvision ever got started.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: It takes months to do that, and so I knew that was coming.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: And that would this would be the place to be in the church.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: And we got ready uh so we owned the land '98.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: We owned the land in 1998.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: Um what uh Brother Steve moved on, and of course your dad comes, and he was came at the perfect time, the perfect man at the perfect time.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: He came here to lead us to the quote promised land, but yeah.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: At that time.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh when we left, there was a group that uh wanted to stay.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh most of them were older, um, my age now, but they were older, and they wanted to stay there in that area.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: They grew up, that's where they wanted to be.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh what we did was that we used and we had a building fund at that time.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: We took that money, some of that money out of the building fund and painted everything at the church.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: Repainted everything, made it new.
20:02
SPEAKER_02: There was some roof damage here and there, I think.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: We fixed all that.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: Uh there was even an air conditioned unit, it was not out, but the it it was getting some age on it.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: We actually replaced a air can air air conditioned unit.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: So um Glenn Marsh was the kind of the representative for the group that stayed there, Dr.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Troy's dad.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh there was not, if I don't recall any confrontations or bad words or anything else, it went very smooth.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: So so when we left to come over here, uh we left the money in the we left all the money that was in the carriage hills uh bank account, savings count, building fund.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: We left it there.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe not the building fund because it was it was to be designated out here.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: So when we moved, we left them in very good shape.
20:52
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: And uh and they done quite well.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: It's still doing quite quite well.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: So we moved over here.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: So um we were fortunate.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: We had the architects were members of the church.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: Doug.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: Doug and and Bradley.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh Bradley Wallace and Doug Thorne.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: So the Lord set it all up.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: So it's been an experience.
21:14
SPEAKER_02: What do you think these days when you walk into this church?
21:17
SPEAKER_02: Are you flooded with lots of memories?
21:19
SPEAKER_00: Uh as you can tell, I'm talking about 'em.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh how did we get here, you know, and why did we end up here?
21:26
SPEAKER_00: Um how did we get where we got room to grow now?
21:30
SPEAKER_00: We got 15 acres.
21:32
SPEAKER_02: We still got plenty of room right now.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: We got plenty of room right now.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: And the cost of this land, Mr.
21:38
SPEAKER_02: Ben, today would be I don't think a church would be able to it'd be tough.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: And uh a lot of people don't know this, but the pavilion was was uh furnished or given to the church or paid for by a church member.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: So we've we've seen that over the years.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: We've been blessed.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: So uh will can continue to be so.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: Well, we want to thank you so much for all of your contributions over the years, Nelson.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's been a it's been a trip.
22:08
SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us today.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's interesting to me to pull all this out and uh see my uncle BK and Ken Hodge uh is on uh uh on one of the deeds here.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: So it goes back.
22:24
SPEAKER_02: So thank you for asking me.
22:26
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, man.
22:27
SPEAKER_02: We appreciate it.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
22:28
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
22:29
SPEAKER_02: If you don't have a church home, we'd love to see you here on Sunday mornings.
22:32
SPEAKER_02: You can catch our services here online at DeSotaHills.com, our YouTube channel at DeSota Hills Baptist Church.
22:38
SPEAKER_02: For all of our church family, we love you.
22:40
SPEAKER_02: We'll see you back here next Wednesday morning, bright and early.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: God bless.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: This has been your midweek motivation.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: We'd love to have you join us in person on Sunday mornings.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: Our services are at 9 and 10 30 a.m.