Anyone who has watched a beehive up close, even through the safety of glass, notices something that upends the simple picture most of us carry in our heads. We tend to imagine a single queen somehow raising the whole colony. She doesn’t. Worker bees feed the larvae, worker bees clean and guard the comb, worker bees regulate the hive’s temperature by fanning their wings in shifts.
The queen’s job is remarkably narrow — she lays eggs. Everything else that raises a healthy new generation of bees is the collective, tireless work of thousands of ordinary workers, none of whom get individual credit, all of whom depend entirely on the honey and pollen the whole hive gathered together.
But here’s the detail that matters most for what we’re considering today: those worker bees themselves had to be fed, too, as larvae, by the generation before them. The hive doesn’t just raise its young. The hive sustains itself — every bee both raised by, and eventually responsible for, the very colony it belongs to. Nobody simply arrives already strong. And nobody, once strong, is exempt from feeding the next larva in the comb.
A Proverb Everyone Quotes, and a Question Almost Nobody Asks
We’ve all heard it, so often it’s nearly lost its weight: it takes a village to raise a child. Almost every African child grew up under this reality without anyone needing to explain it — an uncle correcting you in the market, a neighbour feeding you before your own mother got home from work, an elder disciplining you as freely as your own parents would, because in that structure, you belonged to everyone, not just to the two people who bore you.
But the proverb only ever asks half the question. If the village is responsible for raising the child, who, exactly, is responsible for raising the village? Who is discipling the discipler, mentoring the mentor, pouring into the elders who are themselves pouring out constantly for everyone else? A village that only ever gives outward, generation after generation, without anyone tending to its own spiritual health, eventually becomes a hive with plenty of honey stored up from decades past and no one left strong enough to keep making more.
Moses Nearly Ran Himself Into the Ground
Scripture gives us a vivid picture of exactly this failure mode, and mercifully, of the correction for it. Moses was single-handedly judging every dispute for the entire nation of Israel, from morning until evening, every single day, until his father-in-law Jethro watched it happen and said something remarkably direct:
“The thing that you do is not good. Both you and these people who are with you will surely wear yourselves out. For this thing is too much for you; you are not able to perform it by yourself.” — Exodus 18:17-18, NKJV
Notice — Jethro wasn’t questioning Moses’ calling. He was questioning the structure around it, or rather, the total absence of one. His solution wasn’t for Moses to try harder or pray longer. It was structural: appoint capable men, share the load, distribute the raising of the nation across many shoulders instead of one exhausted pair (Exodus 18:21-22). The nation needed more than a single leader pouring endlessly outward. It needed a whole tier of people being raised up specifically to help carry what one man was never designed to carry alone.
What the Early Church Actually Practiced
The early believers didn’t treat faith as a private arrangement between an individual and God, worked out quietly at home. Luke describes something far more communal:
“Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need. So continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart.” — Acts 2:44-46, NKJV
Daily. House to house. This wasn’t a once-a-week gathering followed by six days of private, unaccountable faith. And Paul specifically instructs the older believers to actively invest in the younger ones, not merely coexist alongside them:
“The older women likewise… that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children.” — Titus 2:3-4, NKJV
Notice that word: admonish — actively teach, actively correct, actively invest. This was never framed as optional mentorship for those who happened to feel like it. It was framed as the ordinary responsibility of anyone further along the road toward anyone just starting out.
It’s worth being direct about something here: an individual, private relationship with God, however sincere, was never presented in Scripture as the whole of what faith requires. The writer of Hebrews assumes gathering and mutual investment as a given, not an optional extra:
“And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” — Hebrews 10:24-25, NKJV
And Paul describes the church not as a collection of individually thriving believers who happen to occupy the same building, but as a single organism, dependent on every part doing its share:
“From whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” — Ephesians 4:16, NKJV
Every joint supplies. Every part does its share. A body with one joint doing all the supplying while every other joint quietly withholds its share isn’t functioning as Scripture describes a healthy body at all — it’s a body slowly straining one part to exhaustion while the rest atrophies from disuse.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I think of a respected trader who, for years, served as the unofficial peacemaker of his market association — settling disputes between stalls, quietly covering a struggling trader’s rent when a bad season hit, praying with anyone who asked, never charging for the role he’d taken on himself. He often wondered, without bitterness, why so few traders ever thought to ask after his own affairs the way he asked after theirs. He held tightly to a verse he returned to often:
“And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.” — Galatians 6:9, NKJV
Two traders in that market, without any fanfare, made it a quiet habit of their own to check in on him and his family regardless, faithfully, over years. It wasn’t nothing. But it was, by his own honest admission, remarkably little compared to how many he himself had invested in.
Then came a season that tested all of it. Over a couple of years, a string of decisions he’d made — none of them born of dishonesty or a careless disregard for what was right, but simply the ordinary weaknesses of a man under real pressure at the time, but some bad decisions all the same,— finally caught up with him, and his business suffered badly for it. He needed, more than anything, not resources, not rescue, simply the emotional presence of his own people, the way he had offered his presence to countless others over the years. Very few gave it. Some, hearing only pieces of the story, assumed the worst, embellished, expanded and added to the stories and villified him instead, in the very season he could least afford it.
When asked, much later, how he had carried that particular pain, he didn’t pretend it hadn’t wounded him deeply. It had, he said plainly. But he found himself returning to a moment in David’s life he had known well for years, long before that season — the moment at Ziklag, when David’s own men, the very companions who had followed him through years of hardship, spoke of stoning him after their families were taken captive. He had understood that verse theoretically for a long time, the way most of us understand a verse we’ve simply read often enough to recognise. It was only in that particular season that he came to understand it experientially, the way a man understands water only once he has genuinely been thirsty:
“Now David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and his daughters. But David strengthened himself in the LORD his God.“ — 1 Samuel 30:6, NKJV
That, the trader said, had become his own anchor in the same kind of moment. Not bitterness toward the ones who treated him unkindly and left. Not a demand that they explain themselves. Simply the same posture David modeled at Brook Besor — encouraging himself in God when the very people he’d poured his life into had, for a season, nothing left to pour back.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
- Am I part of a community that only takes from me, or one that also actively invests back into me?
- Whose “hive” have I been feeding faithfully, while quietly neglecting my own need to be fed?
- Is there a Moses in my life carrying far more than one person should, whom I could help relieve?
- Have I mistaken private, solitary faith for maturity, when Scripture actually calls for daily, shared life and every part doing its share?
- If my own Ziklag moment came tomorrow, is my strength quietly anchored in the God who never withdraws, regardless of who else does?
Final Word
The hive doesn’t survive because one bee works harder than the rest. It survives because every bee that was once fed eventually feeds another, and the whole comb keeps circulating what it was given rather than hoarding it in any one generation. The village raising the child is a beautiful, biblical instinct — but a village that forgets to raise its own raisers, generation after generation, will eventually have nothing left to hand to the next child at all. Keep feeding forward what was fed to you. And when the day comes that too few pour back into you, may you find, as David did at Brook Besor, that the strength to keep going was never ultimately dependent on their presence at all — the Kingdom of God being gathered even now was never meant to run on one tired pair of hands alone.
If this piece touched something in you — either the joy of pouring into others, or the ache of a season when few poured back — I’ve written more on both sides of that experience. A Friend Loves at All Times explores what real, steady friendship looks like through Scripture, and Entrusted looks more closely at what it means to faithfully carry what others have placed in your hands, even when it costs you. You can find A Friend Loves at All Times now at oludareakinbo.com/my-books, with Entrusted to follow there soon.
