Hayden Nix is an Arkansas Storm Team Meteorologist with KARK channel 4 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Hayden is a graduate of Mississippi State University where he obtained a degree in Meteorology. He has earned the broadcast seal of approval from the National Weather Association. In addition to his day job, Hayden uses his knowledge and talents to serve Central Baptist Church in North Little Rock as a volunteer on their technology, broadcast and stewardship teams.
“It all started with a childhood story. We had a pretty significant storm that came through that traumatized me. I grew up in Kingsland, Arkansas, a small town about an hour and a half south of Little Rock. We had a storm come through in the middle of the night and I woke up because a tree had slammed on my window…The next day we had an incredible amount of damage at our house. For several years after that, I was terrified of storms.
Eventually that fear turned into a curiosity and I wanted to learn more about why the weather does the things that it can do. I decided that I wanted to be a weatherman. I’ve always wanted to help others. I could learn meteorology and be on the air and help people through the day-to-day weather story. Most importantly, when it comes to severe weather nights, I could be a calming, reassuring, and respected voice that people can listen to and know the situation that’s at hand.
I grew up in a church family setting. My parents were faithful, my grandparents were faithful. Church has always been a part of my life. Moving outside of a small town, where you have this really tight-knit family, I started learning a little bit more about the world and diversifying the different knowledge that I had and building upon that. There’s always been people that have come up and said, “How are you able to still tie your faith into weather?” And I always tell them it actually secured it even more because the more I learned about the complex atmosphere, it solidified the fact that this all could not have happened by an extreme coincidence. This was all meticulously planned and designed by God. Going through four years of classes where there’s a lot of high-end math in physics, it blows my mind that we’re able to have and understand the atmosphere that we do. I’ve built on my faith from that and I try to use that as a testimony to tell people that this is something that’s just not coincidental.
With the technology part of things, that’s just one of those things I grew up with as a hobby. It’s never really been something of a desire to have as a job but, working in broadcast you have to have it as a part of your job. I wanted to use those tools that God’s given me and having that ability to understand technology very quickly to be able to help out my church and make sure that we can get that message out to as many people as possible. That’s something that I just want to do, is help serve the church and serve God.
Whenever I got into television I learned more about equipment that gets us onto your screen at home. Building off of that love of technology, I started learning more and more about it and asking questions with our engineers at the station, trying to learn how a lot of this stuff works. Whenever we had that problem come up where we were trying to figure out how to still have our service at church with what we had available, I said, “I can help provide some insight on what we can do and the best route to make it possible.” I started utilizing some of the things that I had learned at work with the different software and hardware that we had in trying to put that in place at the church.”
Hayden Nix, #BaptistsOfArkansas