Texas

Year of First Visit – 1993

Point of Entry – Houston Hobby Airport

“Life's too short not to live as a Texan” says the magnet on my fridge. I got it in a welcome basked of goodies from the women's group at our church not too long after we moved into our house in Houston and I tested that statement out for about 5 years when I lived there.

Before first visiting The Lone Star State for job interviews, I'd heard that everything's bigger in Texas. From day one there I found that to be partially true. The part I hadn't heard is that things aren't just big, they're also brand spanking new.

I taught is a school system so big and growing that the question was “How many new schools are opening this year?” It was a wild switch from the “Can we keep it open one more year before declining enrollment forces us to close?” situations I'd been a part of in other states.

I bought my first house in Texas. Though modest by Houston standards, we were its first owners and it was bigger than pretty much anyone else's in the family. And our “yard of the month” held a pool, 2 decks, an arbor, 9 trees, over 30 bushes, and still had lots of open green St. Augustine to cut (one year growing so fast that we had to cut it 3 times per week).

Our firstborn nearly immediately mandated a big, new van to haul him around.

We enjoyed the big sites in the area, ranging from Space Center Houston to the cowboy restaurants in Bandara, from the LBJ Library in Austin to the GHWBush Library in College Station, the flat dry plains of West Texas to the Riverwalk in San Antonio and Moody Gardens on the beaches of Galveston.

That bigness rubbed off on my spirit and let me dream big of what could be ---- new and growing ministries under Interstate 45 and the possibilities that I might do things that have big(er) impact on the world than what I was already doing.

And though I left my big new house and yard in Houston for a 100+ year old tiny rowhouse in Baltimore and my job at big new school for one at a little dilapidated storefront church, the knowledge of big and new that is deep in the heart of all Texans, native and transplanted, kept me looking for the possible and reaching for the impossible.

And if that's what it means to have a piece of Texas in me, then life truly is to short not to live as a Texan.