Welcome to Texas

I couldn’t help it. As our headlights illuminated the “Welcome to Texas” sign on the side of the dark, lonely highway, I let out the words dear Lord, help me. We had just stepped foot into the state I have been vacillating between dreading and anticipating during the past month. Confused butterflies have constantly been in my stomach.

I get this way each time I come back to Abilene, and I don’t know why I build it up to be such a difficult task for myself. But, right now, as my sleep-deprived body is sitting in the back seat of yet another car on yet another stretch of highway, I’m quite looking forward to my bed in Abilene, and I’m getting closer by the minute. Even though it sits in an empty bedroom with scratchy white walls and a desk with a summer’s worth of dust, and I’ll need to put stilts back underneath the legs and tuck sheets around the corners of its mattress, it’s the most familiar bed I know.

Along with the image of my bed come visions of faces, faces I have missed dearly in my time away, faces I only get to see when I’m in Abilene.

And notice the picture below? Yes, that is my window that I got to come back to. The view of tangled branches, whether dressed in leaves or stripped of green, is a little bit of beauty the Lord has given me to get me through.