SPRING OFFICIALLY STARTS TOMORROW, BUT, IN TEXAS, it started on the evening of February 2 when Amarillo Al the armadillo walked out onto the highway. On the East Coast they have Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who saw his shadow on February 2nd, then went back into his hole, forecasting 6 more weeks of winter weather. Texas
The hardest command in the Bible, (and there are a lot of them), has to be “Love your enemy.” Another tough one is “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
But what happens if your enemy and your neighbor are one and the same?
My wife and I have experienced a lot of bad neighbors in our twenty years of marriage:
Our first apartment had a common court yard. The neighbors in the back sat on their second story porch literally and figuratively looking down on us mocking us whenever we went outside. I tried winning them over by talking with them and reasoning with them, but we ultimately had to move.
The second place we lived had a drunk neighbor who lived in the front house. He would leer at my beautiful wife regularly. In the back, another neighbor had a broom fight with one of her friends over their back fence. (Yes, we watched.) Another neighbor to the side of us refused to keep their pit bull locked up despite our concerns that we newborns crawling around. (And they were just weird, too. The mom was a member of The Le Leche League and had her 5-year-old suckling her teet.)
We moved.
Hunting in the Hill Country
AT THE RISK OF BEING OFFENSIVE I want to report on the biggest pastime here in the Hill Country of Texas, even bigger than football: It’s deer hunting. The majority of our congregation at Community Church of the Hills (CCH) in Johnson City owns a guns and uses them.
One of my friends, Aaron Wardlow, gave me permission to post his trophies from the first two opening weekends of 2016 (he’s allowed five white tail). The interesting thing is his philosophy about why he hunts deer. (These have all been shot with a bow and arrow, by the way). Here is his defense: