Williams Hosts Guardsmen Before Deployment

Representative Ryan Williams celebrated Thanksgiving early this weekend, hosting a dinner for over two hundred service members of Cookeville’s National Guard set for deployment in September.

Williams said the dinner served guardsmen as well as their friends and family because they will miss many important events and holidays while they are gone for about eleven months. Williams said the event is a good opportunity for service members to bond and ask questions as this will be the first deployment for many of them.

“Once they get their orders and they know where they’re going, it helps them and their families to prepare better for it,” Williams said. “But I don’t think anything can prepare you to miss, you know, that first birthday or, you know, your firstborn or, you know, a ball game that your kid’s going to participate in.”

Williams said parents came from all across Tennessee to enjoy the food and live music with their children before they go. Williams said it was a blessing to be able to support those serving because deployment is challenging for both the service members and the families that will have to live without them.

“One had four kids,” Williams said. “We knew who the mother was. We didn’t realize the father was in the guard. And so they’re all under the age of six and she’s going to be doing it at home by herself. It’s not just him being gone, but it’s that mother and those four kids going to be missing their dad. And so it’s a huge blessing. The sacrifice they make is really unfathomable for (Abby Williams) and I in a lot of ways.”

Williams said the event was hosted at Life Church’s Cookeville campus.

“Each family got to leave with a specific prayer of protection for them and their family members while they’re gone that the Life Church did,” Williams said.

Williams said this is the third time he and his wife Abby have hosted this event.

“The general, if you will, and I became pretty close prior to the current general and he was telling me how it felt like sometimes the community was unaware unless you were in the guard as to what the service that they were doing,” Williams said. “And so my wife and I are very passionate about our servicemen and women, so this was an opportunity for us to love on them and provide them a meal. We felt like it was the least that we could do to do that.”