My earliest education as a writer came writing for newspapers.
I planned, after all, to be a journalist. I wrote for my high school newspaper; I interned at my hometown city’s paper and wrote a recurring monthly column years into college. And more than anything, memories of “the beat” linger.
A “beat” is a particular reporter’s assigned scope, focused either on a topic, an institution, an organization, or a particular area. A reporter might be on the “police beat” or the “college football” beat or the “city government” beat. The beat is the origin for many news stories that you encounter in the day to day: why your local college’s athletic director is leaving, what the recent city ordinance means, what caused the crash that held up traffic for nine hours.
But I’m not going to lie: during my internship, I found “the beat” incredibly boring.
To me, a young writer interested in flashy stories and national headlines, mastering the beat seemed…mundane. Mostly, it meant talking to a lot of the same local people and going to a lot of the same local places: wash, rinse, repeat. I didn’t understand why the reporters in the newsroom seemed to take such pride in the beat to which they’d been assigned, or why it mattered that they spent all day on phones or out riding around.
Then I met the reporter I’ll call Felix.
He was the youngest in the newsroom, and handsome, which made him 150% more interesting than the older, gruff veterans. He also got assigned the most exciting stories. One day, as I sat in front of the computer reading stories from the AP Wire, he tapped me on the shoulder. “Get your stuff, hurry, let’s go.”
I scrambled to follow. “What’s going on?”
“Major accident.” At the time, all the reporters listened to police scanners. If an accident proved particularly concerning or alarming, they’d hop in their cars and drive right to the source.
I remember my heart pounding as we hit the road in Felix’s car in the middle of a pouring thunderstorm, driving faster than the speed limit should have allowed. I wondered if we’d be a second accident, and if someone would have to report on us. On the way, he gave me terse instructions about how to prepare myself and what I ought to expect: we might see the ambulance crew trying to resuscitate someone. We might see an uncovered dead body. If there was fire, we needed to stay far back. And if it all sounded like too much, he understood, and I should stay in the car.
But most of the reporter life wasn’t like that at all.
Having managed the car accident assignment maturely and with some success, I wound up tailing Felix more often. I thought this would be exciting: I expected we’d show up to all kinds of major news events, jostling others from other organizations, insisting loudly we deserved to be there.
Instead, we mostly drove around. I sat in the passenger seat while Felix drove to the water company, or City Council meetings, or school board meetings full of irritable tired parents. I sat at his desk with him while he made phone calls to the same people, day after day after day, and scribbled down a note or two.
One day, glancing at me sidelong—perhaps perceiving how bored I was—Felix pulled into a gas station and offered to me a drink. He handed a Coke over, sat in the driver’s seat with his nondescript gas-station coffee, and then didn’t pull out. He paused instead. “Wish it was more exciting, huh?”
I glanced up at him, surprised. I was nothing if not polite, and so I lied. “No—no. This is really interesting.”
He snorted. I laughed. Then we both laughed. “Look,” he said. “I get it. That big story, something crazy, it comes once every six months. Maybe. But the things we’re doing now matter a lot more.”
And he explained to me, carefully, what it was we were trying to learn: about the policies passed by the school board that would impact students and families, or water rate hikes, or whether or not the City would be able to open the pool for summer next year. What we were learning impacted the people I knew, my own family—what we paid for things, what we could and couldn’t do, what opportunities might be available to us.
“The big stuff is fun,” Felix concluded. “But the local stuff is important.”
This is, I think, particularly true for the Christian life, and particularly true in an age where technology and media tempts us into perpetual engagement on a global scale. We are lured daily to worry about any number of enormous and overwhelming problems that affect not just us, but entire other countries. As believers, we fret about issues relevant to the church at every level from the global to the national to the denominational.
But the local stuff is important. The most important.
The New Testament churches were ultra-local: Paul’s letters addresses the needs and characters of distinctly unique churches. Your church and your community is local, too. And thinking on a local level requires the same effort as ever it did: talking to the same people, going to the same events, listening, watching, learning.
I am largely powerless against AI data centers and Big Tech. But I have a voice in how AI is used, or if it is used, in my local congregation and local faith community. And yes, there may be broad concerns plaguing the church at other levels, but there are also small concerns that need to be addressed in my own small community: material needs, organizational concerns, ministry opportunities. To neglect these is to neglect our community: to tend to them, we also tend to something larger than ourselves.
The car accident that Felix and I pursued that day turned out to be less daunting than I expected. The rain came down in sheets: I could only glimpse two cars, jumbled up roadside, surrounded by sirens. A police officer came over. He spoke with Felix at length. Then we drove away.
If I’m honest, I was disappointed we hadn’t seen anything more. I was surprised that Felix seemed relieved. “You didn’t want a big story?”
“Some of that stuff you can’t unsee,” he muttered. “I’m glad you didn’t have to see it.”
But the larger lesson he left with me was that these types of events rarely are the big story. The quiet need, the local question, the individual doing something heroic with scraps—these are the stories in which we must become fluent, because they are ours.
As a result, whenever the world gets too overwhelming, I try to narrow my focus. I ask myself what I can do—not for a nation, not for even a state or a denomination or a large vast group, but for my local church, for the neighborhood, for the community and city in which I live.
The good that starts small expands over time. But if we live at the level of the large and the frenetic, we miss all the necessary life right by our feet.
Samaritan's Song 