36. A Season of Healing

© 2020 Christ Revealed Bible Institute

August 2001 – August 2002

A Door Opens Wide 
In the first week of August, I found an ad for an English teaching position available in a school district called Three Way ISD.  The school, which turned out to be the smallest by population in Texas, was located in the cotton-ginning tiny town of Maple, Texas, right against the border of New Mexico, truly in the middle of nowhere. 

This would be a two-bit, low paying job, and I was frustrated that it was the only thing available. I made an appointment for an interview with the superintendent of the district, Dr. Tom Alvis, and drove by myself out into the empty cotton plains to the school.

Dr. Tom Alvis was a small man in his early seventies. He had been an honored Texas school administrator for many years. In my first moments with him, it was evident to me that he loved Jesus and was filled with the Spirit, not from anything he said, but from the light upon his face and the welcoming cheerfulness that always flowed out from him.

We chatted for a bit. He looked at my credentials and commented on the fact that I had a principal’s certificate. It was a good interview, and I returned to Lubbock in some hope. The next day he called; I was hired. School would be starting in a couple weeks, and, of course, Kyle would be in fifth grade there and Johanna in second grade. 

I was soon driving out by myself, in order to be prepared before classes began. It wasn’t long into my time that I discovered that Dr. Alvis had hired me as “the principal,” which I had not realized. I would also be teaching high school English. 

Let me define that role. This was a small school district, fewer than ninety students with all grades in one building. Although Dr. Alvis was the superintendent, and his wife, Geneva, the district secretary and school counselor, he also fulfilled the public and “political” functions of a principal, whereas my actual role would be more that of an “assistant principal.” Nonetheless, for that year, I was the one who signed my name on everything as the principal.

Even when school started, I continued to drive out, with Kyle and Johanna now, from our home still in Lubbock, for several more days.

Living and Teaching at Three Way 
Because I was also the principal, my pay was higher than the other teachers. At the same time, Three Way was one of those West Texas schools that provided homes on the school grounds for many of the staff. Tom and Geneva Alvis had been staying in a house in the front, alongside the road, but gave it to  us, and moved to a home behind the school. There were four houses in a row next to the road, ours was the second. Then, there were a few more homes on the back of the school property.

The school and its buildings are long gone from Google maps, but the plan of the walls can be seen in the lines on the slabs still remaining. I include a map of the school and other buildings, once located a couple miles north of Maple, Texas. The Baptist Church across the road is still there and in use.



Frieda and others helped us to paint and clean our new home, and when it was ready, Maureen and the little ones moved out with us – on Labor Day, September 3. Our home was three bedrooms, with a large master bedroom on one end, an office space in front of it for my computer, a bath, and a bedroom for the boys. Then the living room, dining and kitchen, with another bath and the girl’s bedroom on the other end. There was a small, enclosed back porch. Our yard had a fence all around of solid roofing metal buried into the ground. This was to keep out rattlesnakes. Thus our space was safe and enclosed. There was a tree in our backyard, one of several on the property.

There was no rent for us, and our utilities were electricity only, at fifty dollars a month. For this reason, we were reasonably well off through our time at Three Way. Of course, I had to start paying off the student loans.

I put our trailer up for sale and soon found a buyer. We had felt a growing discomfort the final few weeks we were in the trailer park, with people moving nearby us that seemed unsavory in their conduct. I got a decent price for our two trailers together, and thus we soon had no obligation there. Then, we found out later that the family who moved into that trailer experienced a series of burglaries inside their home. God had protected us in His grace.

I loved the short walk from our home to my classroom and office in the school. In fact it might have been just a hundred yards from our front door to the front entry into the school.

My four English classes did not start until late morning and then into the afternoon. Thus I typically spent the first few hours of the day in the Principal’s office near the center of the school, just inside the side entry doors. The school was a ‘well-oiled machine,’ and so I typically had little to do except walk the hall on occasion. Only the more difficult disciplinary cases were brought to me from the lower grades, just a few times through the year. 

Mr. Alvis took care of all the public relations and dealings with suppliers, thus the non-teaching staff answered to him, while I interacted with the teachers. 

I had a nice large classroom, back from the main hall and right next to the library. I don’t remember the order in which the grade levels came into my classroom, but I taught a class of seven ninth graders, ten tenth graders, six eleventh graders, and just two of the eight twelfth graders. The other six seniors were taking advanced English via a live Internet connection from a teacher in the “nearby” Sudan school.

The students in the school were about 60% Hispanic and 40% white. Some of the white students were children of the local cotton farmers whereas most of the Hispanic students were children of the farm workers. Many families, including ours, had children scattered through several grades. There were other teachers who also lived on the property and had children throughout the school grades.

I have the school yearbook for that year and so I can look at the pictures of everyone involved. Kyle was in fifth grade with Mrs. Smith, who lived at the end of our row of houses. She had five other students besides Kyle. And Johanna was in second grade with Mrs. Viera along with five other students as well.

I had twenty-five students, which I will not name except for two families, Heinrich and Rodriguez. Kara Heinrich was a senior, actually not in my class, who was, one might say, the personality center of the student body, well-liked by all, an intelligent and wholesome Christian girl. I had her brother, Canaan, in my tenth-grade class, and there were Heinrich’s in the younger grades. The Heinrich’s attended the Baptist Church just across the road, and so we visited there on a number of occasions. Then, I had Rigo Rodriguez in my ninth-grade class. His older brother, Robert, was a senior, but not one of my two seniors. Those two seniors were Chase Cannon, whose dad had a large cotton farm on the way to Lubbock, and Amanda Kingsley, the daughter of one of the high school teachers. I mention Rigo, because he was just a great kid, always helpful. In fact, I hired him to work for me for a few weeks after school was out.

Because these were small groups of kids, in primarily a Christian environment, this was a wondrously good first year of public-school teaching for me. I enjoyed my students and, I soon learned, they also appreciated me. 

You see, my tenth grade class had not liked their English teacher the year before and so one of the girls persuaded the others to fail their state test so that the teacher (and the principal) would get a savagely low mark in Texas school ranking. That taught me that the state test does NOT determine how much the students know; it determines how much they care. (Through my public-school years, my students always did well on those tests.)

I wasn’t long into the enjoyment of our new home and my new role before I began to hear a terrible rumor. I refused to believe it at first, but finally, Dr. Tom Alvis confirmed that it was true. The Three Way school district, with fewer than 90 students in pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade, was too small for the state to justify its continuance. For that reason, the state had asked Dr. Tom Alvis, who had been retired, but who was very capable at handling such a thing, to be the superintendent for the final year of this district, and to oversee its choice of which neighboring school district to which it would then become a part.

This was so very sad, because one could not have found a more ideal living/teaching situation. 

This was how Three-Way was formed, however. In the sixties and seventies, three small rural school districts had closed out their schools and come together to become “Three Way.”

On a final note, there was a nice block building not far behind our house that had been used as a shop. Mr. Alvis gave me permission to turn one corner of that building into my own little shop. So this was very nice; I had an enclosed space with a garage door that locked and a concrete floor for my shop tools. 

September 11 
I was settling into my role as teacher/principal, and getting to know the students and the flow of the days by September 11 of that year. – And this is one of only two world events that I will bring into this narrative, the only such events that had any affect on my life. 

That morning was a school morning like every other, with me starting the day in the principal’s office (without all that much to do). The high school science teacher was Mary Ferguson; she was also the “home” teacher for the seniors, and so her classroom was always filled with them in and out through the day.  

That morning, she came to my office and said, “Mr. Yordy, you need to come and see.” I followed her back to her classroom where all the students were glued to the large TV screen mounted on the wall. The first of the twin towers in New York City was pouring out smoke. We watched while the second tower was hit. At this point, schoolwork was not important. Then, however long after, still before my classes would start, I watched the first of the two begin it’s eleven-second collapse at free-fall speed. I am a man of years of practical experience, including working with steel and concrete. Within four seconds into the collapse, my brain was informing me with all clarity, “I am watching a controlled demolition.” Even before my late-morning class, the name of Bin Laden was being sounded on the news, before any criminal investigation could even begin.

Both buildings had collapsed the same way by the time my first English class began, with my regular classes in the afternoon. I did the same thing four times that day for my students. First, I explained the purpose of “terror” as a strategy, and that is to get the targeted people off kilter so that they will do predictable and stupid things in response. I then drew a map of the Middle East four times that day, moving on the assumption that the news casters were not wrong in their assigning blame on Bin Laden. I explained that if it were he, then his goal would be to draw the US forces into Iraq, in anger, and thus the American empire would be subject to destruction. I was not prophesying, but simply stating clear geo-political strategy. 

Dr. Alvis then invited all students who wanted to gather with him for prayer around the flagpole. Many joined with him to pray over the next several days. This was not considered a problem in rural west Texas. 

Of course, in that setting, we had a state-of-the-art Internet connection, and I had a reasonable amount of spare time. I had to know what on earth had happened. So I spent many hours online researching the facts, even for several years after. Within a couple of days, I read an article written by a professor of engineering at a New Mexico college explaining why it was clear that this was a controlled demolition and calling for an investigation into how those buildings had been wired for such a straight down and rapid drop.

On Monday of the next week, however, I found another article written by this same professor. In a robotic tone, he recanted of everything he had said in his prior article, stating that he was wrong, that it was only a natural collapse caused by the small fires.

The moment I read that, my blood went cold, for I knew what it meant. Then I read more articles of teachers being called into their principal’s office and fired on the spot for daring to “explain” things to their students, even though the “official” story had not yet been spun.

In that moment, I knew that, in leaving the move fellowship, I had chosen to be momentarily deceived. You see, I had entertained the thought that maybe the world wasn’t so bad after all. I had even voted for George W. Bush because I had believed what he said about good relations with all countries, including Russia. When I read the New Mexico professor’s recantation, I knew that I had been wrong, tentacles of power reach everywhere.

And so I researched that event more than any other before or since, so that I might know the difference between actual facts and the impossible story pushed by the government. But that is not the topic of this narrative, and so I will leave it at that, except for one point. One of the first things I searched out was who were all these people who had come into power with George W. Bush. There were four Gentiles visible at the top, but almost every person right underneath of them were the sons or grandsons of the same Communist Bolsheviks who had sailed from New York City to St. Petersburg in 1918 to wreck such awful terror and death on the Russian Christian people. And that is a statement of fact, over and over.

It was learning this, above everything else, that returned me fully into the knowledge of this world that I had gained from Gary Allen, in None Dare Call It Conspiracy, and other similar texts I had read and sermons I had heard preached in my early years in the move. For the next ten to fifteen years, I will read more than a hundred pages of news on the Internet almost every day. I have never found the actual facts of any continuing event to counter that basic understanding.

Back to Our Life and Work
Because we did have a number of debts, besides the student loans, Maureen found work at the local cotton gin in nearby Maple, where she served as the dispatcher for the scales. Farmers would call and schedule their cotton to be picked up by the gin trucks, get weighed, and then unloaded. Maureen’s job was to oversee and keep record of all the movement of trucking and weighing. Maureen’s boss was named Marvin McCaul.

Maureen’s job became twelve hours a day seven days a week, then, during the heaviest part of the harvest. And so her parents, Claude and Roberta Mack, agreed to come from Bowens Mill to Maple, Texas around the first of November to take care of the children while Maureen worked the long hours at the gin. The house in the row next to ours was empty. We set up a bed there for them. However, there was little other furnishing in that house, and so Claude and Roberta spent most of their time in our home, continuing until the cotton season finally closed after Christmas. 

This was not an easy thing for me. My relationship with my in-laws was cordial and respectful, but not good. It seemed to me that they were set in their mind-set of being “the elders” and thus did not always submit to the flow of our home. Again, this was never anything outward, just a sense of strain for me on a number of occasions. Nonetheless, we were very grateful for their time with us and their input into the lives of their grandchildren.

All the time we lived at Three Way, we continued in Church attendance at City View in Lubbock. It was about an hour’s drive, which we drove each weekend. Because of the lengthy trip, we usually spent the day in town, and often Saturday night. Lois had bought a house on the south side of Lubbock, not far from where our trailer had been, so there was always a place for us to stay. We often ate at our favorite place to eat through our children’s growing up years, Souper Salad. We continued, as we were able, with the leadership training and with continued fellowship with brethren who also attended City View. 

Sometime near the end of 2001, Maureen and I were able to purchase a better family vehicle for our needs. We were staying at Lois’s over a weekend, planning to go looking at used car lots on Sunday afternoon. The evening before, I was feeling unsure about this step and raised my concerns to the Lord. That Sunday morning, the devotional for the day read, “The Lord gives blessing, with no sorrow added.” We went out in peace and soon saw a large green family van, a Dodge Ram. Sure enough, it was available for a price within our budget and the bank agreed to give us a car loan. Our new family vehicle had a large carrying capacity and was very comfortable. I was able to sell our old Ford station wagon to some people in Maple who specialized in buying fixer-upper’s. 

In west Texas, high school football comes a close “second” to church. And so football was a big deal at Three Way. The football field in the back corner was very nice and kept green and watered. Typically, the principal was the one who ran the loudspeaker at the football games, but I am so very grateful that Dr. Alvis knew that I was not made for such a thing, and so he just stepped into that role. And he was good at calling the names of each player as they did this or that in an enthusiastic way, over the loudspeaker. The whole area turned out for the games, with much hoopla. Our young men were very good sportsmen and usually won, both football and later basketball. Little Rigo Rodriguez, though in ninth grade, was as skilled as his older brother and the two of them were often at the center of leading us to victory in both sports. 

This was my home, and I was very quickly committed in heart to my students. Nonetheless, this was a first to me, to sit there in the bleachers and watch my own young men so very determined to strike visiting young men and knock them to the ground. My heart wept inside as I watched it. I remember walking home from those games through the dark in the Spirit of the Lord, crying, “Oh Father, there has to be something else, something real upon this earth.”

John Eldredge and Heath Ledger
Johanna had been involved in ballet up until we moved to Three Way. She was scheduled to perform in the Nutcracker Suite with the Lubbock Ballet in early December, so we kept her in practice. At the same time, such ballet groups always have a problem finding boys willing to fill young boy roles in the Nutcracker, and so Kyle had agreed to participate. He also was trained for his role. I really liked that, for it taught him how to present himself with dignity to girls.

The week of the ballet, Maureen was planning to stay in town, at Lois’s with her parents. I returned to Three Way by myself. Before I left Lois’s house that afternoon, however, I saw a book on her shelf titled Journey of Desire by John Eldredge. The very name of the book demanded my attention, so I pulled it off the shelf and read these words.

~~~ “There is a secret set within each one of our hearts. It often goes unnoticed, we rarely can put words to it, and yet it guides us throughout the days of our lives. This secret remains hidden for the most part in our deepest selves. It is the desire for LIFE as it was meant to be. Isn’t there a life you have been searching for all your days? You may not always be aware of your search, and there are times when you seem to have abandoned looking altogether. But again and again it returns to us, this yearning that cries out for the life we prize.” ~~~

Myy heart was gripped fiercely by these words. I told Lois, “I’m running off with your book!” At the same time, I had picked up a movie to watch titled A Knight’s Tale, with Heath Ledger.

I was at home alone, then, for the next few days. I opened Journey of Desire and began to read. How can I explain such an experience, lasting over months, even into 2003? 

John Eldredge is a Christian psychologist based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I have never known anyone who understood ME all the way through. As I read his books, John Eldredge took me back through event after event in my life, all the way from my childhood to our leaving the move, and opened to me every place of pain and hurt, and in doing so, John Eldredge gave me the answer that sang for real all through me, an answer that healed, an answer that rang true to the gospel, an answer that was the opposite of every specific “answer” I had been given in the move.

But this was no simple thing. For the extent of my hurt was beyond understanding. I know that, if not for John Eldredge, I would have died before now from the grief. 

Every page in his books was like a sword going all through me and on every page, I wept. Time after time I was on the floor in tears before God as His ANSWER came into untold numbers of raw and open wounds. 

And the first time I was on the floor was this word, coming into me for the first time in my life – My heart is good. My heart is good; my heart is filled with Jesus. – When that knowing pierced into me, it was like oozing sores of deep, deep hurt discharging onto the floor. 

Let me explain. I am hyper-sensitive, and I remember everything through my life, every cutting word that hid its pain inside my soul. Then, at the same time, I had lived under a theology for years that told me that I had to “hack away” at myself because I was evil. The truth is, more than half of my hurt was self-inflicted. 

In contrast, I have rarely known someone to open himself up to the reader in the way John Eldredge does. And what he does is take the reader through every episode of life to show you that God intended you, but not the hurt. That it was not your fault.

To take the overwhelming weights of shame from off my human soul was no little thing.
Through all of it, of course, it was Jesus, coming to me through John Eldredge’s words and stories, showing me that it was always He, carrying me with honor through all. One of the more terrible moments for me was when John Eldredge took me into the locker room at Lacomb Elementary School and Jesus said to me, “It was not your fault. – You were not at fault.”

Probably on the second evening alone, then, I watched A Knight’s Tale. It’s mostly a silly story, but good, and I was on the edge of my seat throughout. Then it came to the climax, when all of his companions tell William Thatcher, played by Heath Ledger, to run for his own sake. He had been pretending to be a knight so that he could compete in the jousting tournaments throughout England and France, but he had been found out and was about to be arrested and broken. William Thatcher listened carefully to each one with full respect, but torn inside. When they had finished urging him to run, he paused, and then said with great fervor and certainty, “I will not run. I am a knight.”

Those words again went all through me like a spear thrust. I stopped the movie. I was gasping for breath with great sobs. I had run away. I had run away from the eldership; I had run away from Blair Valley; I had run away from the move. Or had I? Or was it that I had not run at all, but only into God? I did not know. I did not know what it meant, only that the line just tore me to pieces. Indeed, I know now that I was running a gauntlet, as I have described in earlier letters, and that I was almost dead from the blows. Yet I also know now that I did not run, but that I have never veered aside from the covenant I made with God at age 22, that I would know Him and that I would walk with a people who know Him.

Yet no answer to that great tearing of heart came to me at that time.

I will go on to other topics, but I spent nearly three years with John Eldredge, and I count him to be one of the dearest of friends in my life. I have not met him, but he shares himself openly in his books. I did write him a letter and received a good and lengthy reply. After Journey of Desire, I read The Sacred Romance, then Wild at Heart, then I read all three again, still weeping on every page. Then I read them all again, adding his fourth book, Walking with God. On the third time through, later in Houston, I wept not as often.

The healing was slow, it was deep, it was terrible, it was day after day, and it was not completed until writing this autobiography.

And I really don’t care what anyone thinks or says. All the way through, it was Jesus showing Himself to me through every difficult place in my life. And all the way through, the answers I received from John Eldredge were the answers of God towards every human difficulty.

My heart is good; my heart is filled with Jesus.

Continuing with Life and Work 
With our new family van, we took some vacation time to drive to Carlsbad, New Mexico, where I took my family through the same wondrous experience of the caves that I had enjoyed years before. On our way home, we drove through Denver City, Texas, and found the home of Richard Hernandez, but he was out on his job of driving truck. I had spoken with Richard twice during our time in the Lubbock area. I had wanted to drive down to see him, but he said both times, “No, I will come up.” Except he never did. That was a sorrow I could only bear quietly.

By the beginning of 2002, the steps needed to merge with another school district were well under way. Maureen’s cotton ginning job had ended in January, so now, Mr. Alvis offered her a part time job as a remedial teacher with the school, with very decent pay. She did that through the remainder of the year. I do remember picking the little ones up from a babysitter in Maple on occasion. 

Because I was the principal, I was invited to attend and be a part of the monthly school board meetings, probably starting in September. This was my third foray into governance, and I enjoyed it very much. Marvin McCaul, who managed the cotton gin, was also the head of the school board. As superintendent, however, Dr. Tom Alvis led the meetings. I was free to participate in the discussion, although, along with Mr. Alvis, I did not have a vote. I learned this about education in Texas, that it is very efficient, and that money cannot be wasted. Of course, schools in Texas do not have to deal with activist teacher unions.

A lot of our discussion, then, was pertaining to negotiations with two neighboring school districts, Morton and Sudan. Morton was closer, but Sudan was wealthier. In the end the local voters would decide between the two. And in all this discussion, we had a close and practical look at much school law and due process.

In the vote that spring, the community chose to merge with Sudan, which also meant a forty-minute bus drive twice a day. Again, the board discussion continued with the practical aspects of merging Three Way and all its assets with the Sudan district. Sadly, they neither needed nor wanted any part of the school facility. They did hire some of the teachers from Three Way.

In the picture below, I am at the school board meeting; I was now 45 years old. Dr. Tom Alvis is at the head of the table.



Let me share a number of additional experiences that were part of my role as teacher/ principal, not in any actual order. 

I was reading The Fellowship of the Ring out loud to my two seniors (as part of their British literature), and so when it came into the theaters that fall of 2001, we made seeing it a field trip. In fact, when the trailer for The Fellowship of the Ring came out earlier, it was likely the most watched movie trailer ever, for millions of people were highly suspicious of what they would do to the beloved story. I was one of the first to watch it the moment it appeared.

This was an agricultural community and very involved with county fairs. In fact, the school had a large and well-equipped agricultural and farming shop as part of its facilities and curriculum. That is now the only building remaining on the property. The agriculture teacher found two goats for us, one for Kyle and one for Johanna. I was greatly disappointed when he brought them home, however, for they were Boer goats, scrawny and wild. They were not at all like the goats Maureen and I had known when we were children. Our own children could never connect with them as pets. 

Kyle did show his goat in the county fair in Muleshoe, though it was not of the quality of the other goats in the show. However, Three Way also put on their own fair, and so a judge came for it. Since our goats were the only ones in the contest, Kyle got first place for his and Johanna second place. They received ribbons and an ornate belt buckle. They had their ribbons pinned on their wall for years.

One of the farmers gave Johanna some chickens that ran around in the back yard, and we had a rabbit for Katrina.

In the spring, I went with a bus load of students as their oversight to a school quite a distance away for the annual academic competition. I remember watching the new Pixar movie of Joseph with the students on the bus on the way back, hearing God speaking to me all through it. (Johanna’s teacher took them all to watch Monster’s Inc. in the theater, which I thought was a terrible idea by the name – that is, until I watched it myself and loved it.)

In April of 2002, Maureen and I were invited to be part of the Junior/Senior dinner which took place at the County Line restaurant on the north side of Lubbock. A number of other teachers and spouses were included as well. When I look at the pictures of that event, I remember it with much fondness. This was a good time.

I was accused of racism, two different times. This is when I was so glad for Tom Alvis, for he was wise and anointed of God and helped me through these things. The first time I was at fault, not for “racism” but for insensitivity towards some students. The difficulty was resolved by my apology. The other time was neither racism nor our fault, but Mr. Alvis and I were able to work it through. The thing is, when I was confronting any out-of-control student, it was always a white male on the other side of that confrontation. Hispanic boys are very peaceful and always easy to work with, though they get themselves in trouble just as much.

We had a student body that was majority Hispanic, so obviously, a majority of difficulties would be with Hispanic children, and the school board was all white. Nonetheless, at no point did I ever know anything but deep respect and care for every student, regardless, coming from Tom Alvis, from myself, or from the school board. Certainly, in the grind of the day, we sometimes say things we should not, but which “group” a student was part of never entered my mind.

Dr. Tom Alvis was towards me the same as Abel Ramirez and Don Howat had been, sharing wisdom with me and encouragement in the Lord, while giving me full liberty and respect. 

A New Season of Writing
Meanwhile, I continued to write. And with the wondrous new knowledge that my heart was good, my heart was filled with Jesus, my understanding was at a new level of knowing God.  

Near the end of December, I wrote, “My life is forever changed. I have found Jesus anew.” 

On February 14, 2002, I sent the letter to John Eldredge with this opening paragraph.

~~~ Dear John, I want to thank you so very much for the books Journey of Desire and Sacred Romance. I have sought to walk with the Lord for over twenty-five years and in that time I have never read something that has changed my life as much as these books are doing. I am reading them the second time and still, page after page penetrates my heart and resonates deeply with the years of longing to know the Lord and the countless experiences of deep disappointment. I lost my breath when I saw your chapter title, “The Wildness of God.” I had never put wildness together with God, even though I have lived in the Canadian wilderness for many years, but I immediately knew it was so. I love to watch a storm beat itself against immovable mountains. I also know what it is like to be caught in the grip of overwhelming disappointment, knowing that a loving Father is in control, justifying Him in spite of the confusion, yet not understanding why. Your books put words to things I’ve felt inside to be true, but which my past “theology” seemed to contradict. Jesus has been using your books to make Himself profoundly real to me as never before. I am grateful. ~~~

I went on to share with him my vision for a Christian renewal center and community of Christ, a vision similar to what he shared in his books concerning the Church.

I wrote two long letters to Pastor Gary Kirksey through these months, sharing with him concerning my difficulty with my in-laws, not as people, but as “move elders.” I shared some of the difficulties of my community experience and my present vision for a community of Christ.

The most important writing, however, is that I began this story of my life in the early months of 2002. All the chapters concerning my experiences at Graham River that are found in The Great Story of God, and that were then transferred to this autobiography, were written at this time. Although I added things for this larger story, there is very little change in wording.

I needed, so very much, to get that first vision and experience of community down on paper.

The first chapter of The Great Story of God, “Unquenchable Desire,” is found here: https://christrevealed.info/story/unquenchable. If you are interested, you could read through that again, knowing that I wrote most of it in February-March of 2002, during this season of healing.

A Sad Closing
And so the school year came to a close. There was a finality about it because Three Way would be no more. I had known it only for one year, but most of the seniors had spent their entire school lives in its halls. It was such a place of peace for me and for my family. God could begin healing there because there were no further hurts being added. 

Once the vote had chosen Sudan, that school district now “owned” everything that belonged to Three Way. The superintendent and principal from Sudan came to a school board meeting to discuss the transfer. Sudan wanted only the newer computers and distance learning hub, everything else was superfluous and was to be disposed of.

We had the graduation of Three Way’s final graduating class in the school cafeteria/auditorium. Once that was finished, the disposal of things began in earnest. All the houses were put up for sale to be trucked away, except that the teachers were free to remain in their home until such time as they had found another place to live. The library was opened up to people wanting the books; I was able to make off with a large number of books. We had an auction during which I purchased filing cabinets, school desks, and other things we could use for home schooling. 

The school was a very nice building, but to the Sudan school district it was only a liability that would cost them money to maintain without any value to them. Their long-term plan was to demolish it. The thing is, and I have groaned over this for years, if I had been able to offer them $250,000 for the grounds, the buildings, and everything in them intact, they would have grabbed the offer immediately. We would have had a perfect site for a community and school with a strong Internet connection by which we could have made a living. 

Yet I had no money, and everything is now gone from the site, and I know it wasn’t the Lord for us. I had an appointment with God coming up just four years later, and that appointment was in Houston, not Maple. 

The local community did NOT like their school being gone, however, and so they tried to negotiate with Sudan to keep the building going, partly so that the local boys could continue using the beautiful, maple-floored gym. There was also a desire to turn one of the classrooms into a long-term display room for Three Way’s history and many sports trophies. 

Sudan agreed to this, though it was an agreement that did not last.

Because I was a woodworker, Dr. Alvis asked me to bid on doing the cabinet work for the display room, which would be down by the cafeteria in what had been the kindergarten room. I bid a decent price, which made Mr. Alvis flinch, but which the school board accepted without question. Nonetheless, it simply meant that I would be making 10-12 dollars an hour instead of the 3 dollars an hour that was typical in my bids in Lubbock.

At the same time, I hired Rigo Rodriguez to work for me in my cabinet shop and in installing the cabinets with glass doors in the new display room. This was a first for me, because Rigo did not always measure up to my “construction zone” requirements. I had to pause and say to myself, “No, he is more important than the work.” 

I would still receive my monthly paycheck through August, so this job was a significant amount of money towards our next move.

Several of the teachers from Three Way were hired at Sudan, but they did not need an assistant principal or an English teacher. I made an effort to be hired there, but did not feel a witness that it was the Lord nor find any door opening in that direction. 
We continued to live at our home on the Three Way property, however, and Kyle was enrolled in Sudan for his sixth grade year. They graciously allowed us the home for as long as was needed. 

A Wrong Direction 
Meanwhile, I was continuing to work on my ideas for a different kind of school, which I called project-led learning. I am convinced that junior high school kids, from seventh to ninth grades, have no business being forced into a school desk and assembly-line routine. They ought to be doing valuable things with their hands, with learning tied loosely to their work.

There was a young couple in Lubbock whom we knew through City View fellowship named Jared and Dana Squires. In fact, Maureen and I had become friends with several young couples, something unusual for me, a big plus of being married. Jared and Dana had become interested in a particular type of approach to Christian education that was a hybrid mix of homeschooling and classroom. Students would attend class two days a week to direct their learning, and the remainder of their time, they would work at home. This would give them a focused education without the expense of full-time private school. While sharing with Jared concerning my own ideas of a school I would like to start, the suggestion came that I might be the principal of this new school they were starting called Kingdom Preparatory Academy. 

And so they hired me. Jared and Dana had formed a non-profit and thus had a “school board.” I presented my ideas to this board and they were well-received, although they did not really fit with the model the Squires were using. I started driving into Lubbock, then, before the end of June, to work on getting the new school set up. The Squires had negotiated with a Lubbock Presbyterian church to use the upstairs of their teaching building, which was no longer in use. Part of my job was to get this place set up for school starting in August. In fact, I donated quite a few of the books I had obtained from Three Way to this new venture.

Tim and Frieda were back at the Lubbock community at this point, in one of the homes. I spent the nights with them through the week, so that I did not have to drive the long distance every day. 

The Squires had begun to advertise for Kingdom Preparatory Academy. They had prepared, with the help of other families, a float for Lubbock’s big parade in July. And so Maureen and I with our children walked beside the float through the parade, handing out pamphlets. I was not feeling well at all, and so part way through I had to ride in the vehicle rather than walk along the front of the crowds. Of course, the hand-pumping political part of a principal’s job was entirely outside of my ken.

The problem was that the parade started in a poorer part of town and ended at Texas Tech. For that reason, through the first half of the distance, we were giving the pamphlets to children who would never be eligible for the private school, and when we got to the wealthier section, we had no more pamphlets. 

This reflected a serious issue with me, one which I argued with Jared over. Most Christian schools test all incoming students with the bar set at achieving a standardized test score above the 50 percentile. That means that ONE HALF of all children are always ineligible for every Christian school. Although it’s falsely called “maintaining a high standard,” it really means, “we don’t want you in our school if you are stupid or have any learning limitation.”

In my mind, a Christian ministry was meant to serve all, regardless of where they began. And I would much rather teach special ed kids, actually, then the smarter ones. 

This approach to schooling was popular among Christians in Texas at that time, so there was a large conference held in Marble Falls, Texas, which Jared and I attended together. I was getting my first taste of the mind of “Christian schooling” in America, and I was not overly impressed. That is, there was so much hoopla that this new approach to schooling was going to “save” America. Yet, the truth is, it retained so much of what is wrong with schooling in general and it held no appeal to me.

Jared was the kind of person that was quiet and listening, easy to have a conversation with, yet never revealing his true thoughts. (Richard Hernandez was like this as well.) In contrast, I have always been too trusting and thus, with such a person, I most definitely talk too much. On the long trip home, I not only expressed some of my concerns about excluding children, but I also talked about events in America, including 9/11. I explained how the George Bush family was, in fact, one of the most powerful organized crime families in the US.

Several days after our return to Lubbock, Jared and Dana asked to have lunch with Maureen and me. Jared said that he had come to the agonizing realization that he had made a mistake in hiring me. My thoughts concerning the US government, my inability to play the crowds in the parade, and some other things I had said, had persuaded him to offer me a lesser role in the school, something he held out because he was an honorable man.

Even though I turned this new situation down, the Squires did pay me what they had promised for my summer work, which now gave us plenty of funds for a move. Yet it was now the beginning of August, and suddenly, I had no teaching position, again, just a couple of weeks before school would be starting.

A Trip to Houston
As we knew that my job at Three Way would end by summer, I had been looking around different school districts in the Lubbock area, in the hopes of finding an English teaching position. Most of them paid the same as at Three Way, but without a home in which to live. 

Thus while driving around the Lubbock area, we looked for a place to live. But I just could not bear it. I can survive without mountains, though I don’t like it, but I cannot live without trees. The only trees in the Lubbock area are inside the city. The point is that I was just not connecting with West Texas anymore.

That first of August a single English position opened up on the state-wide teacher hiring website. This was in a district called Sheldon ISD in Harris County, just to the east of Houston. Because an oil refinery sits inside this district, it was one of the wealthier in Texas and offered a much higher salary than schools in West Texas. 

I looked at Google maps and determined that there were TREES in this school district. I also looked at house listings in the area. When I clicked on the first house in the list and a picture of it opened on my webpage, I gasped, for the thought rose strongly in my heart, “This is our home!” But I was not yet hired.

So, I filled out the application and immediately received an invitation to come down to Houston for an interview. School was starting, and they would hire anyone who was qualified.

Kyle went with me in the green van down to Houston. We spent the night in a motel just on the east side of Interstate 610. We went out to C.E. King high school for the interview the next morning. It was the principal of the school, Frances Baccigalopi, and the director of curriculum, Vicki Giles, with whom I interviewed. Vicki Giles had been an English teacher and then the head of the English department before becoming part of the administration.

It was a pleasant interview. Tthey hired me on the spot and sent me to Human Resources to sign a two-year contract. We were moving to Houston!

My last service at City View in Lubbock had been quite strange, however. just before Kyle and I went to Houston.

I had seen Jared visiting privately with Pastor Gary. You see, I had crossed the line. You can’t really be a Christian educator in Texas without being a supporter of the Republican party and a flag-waving adherent of “God bless America.” 

In that last sermon, Pastor Gary was preaching on the death of Moses and Joshua stepping into the new leadership role. At a certain point he looked straight at me, and, although I know that sometimes I imagine such a thing, this time, I am convinced he was intentionally addressing me. He said something along the lines of “Moses is dead, it’s time to move on.” Maureen also remembers this.

I knew in that moment that God was taking us elsewhere.

Closing this Chapter of My Life
I must bring this time at Three Way into the Lord Jesus, and place Him upon every moment and circumstance.

I was planning to draw you an outline of the rooms of the school, but then I saw that I was holding to a sentimental attachment to “what might have been." It would have been nice if the Three Way property had been God’s place for us, but it was not, and so we leave it.

Yet “leaving” Three Way was a wonderfully new experience for me, that is, to regret leaving a place, the first time and only time I had such regret in my life. As I think now, however, I do have one regret. Probably because I was so emotionally fragile, we had little private interaction with the other people on the school property or in the Maple area. It would have been nice to have had different ones over for dinner, and especially Tom and Geneva, but I don’t think we ever did. We should have gotten to know them much better; they were wonderful Christian people.

I have a couple of regrets towards Kyle through this time that I want to place into the Lord Jesus. He had wanted to join a baseball practice group, and I was, in fact, driving him there. But I could not bear the thought of his being humiliated if he did not “measure up” (as I had been as a boy) and halfway there, I turned the car around and we went back home. I tried to share why with him, and he always respected me, but I doubt that he understood. On another occasion, he was attempting to help me attach the blue van to a horse trailer. He was not doing his part right, and so I hopped out and chewed him out. He was just ten, the poor little guy. I felt so ashamed afterwards. He tells me now that he does not remember it.

But Kyle, I want to ask your forgiveness for the many times I failed at being a good father to you. I wanted to be, but I did not always know how.

Lord Jesus, I thank you for this time we had at Three Way. I thank you for Tom and Geneva Alvis and their goodness towards us. I thank you for my good experiences in that school. And I especially thank you for John Eldredge and his great gift to me.

And Father, I am sorry that I was not able to be what Jared and Dana needed. That was entirely my fault. I pray that you bless them with all Your goodness. And thank you so much for Pastor Gary Kirksey and what he meant to us through this necessary season of healing

I place you, Lord Jesus, upon every moment and memory of our time at Three Way. All of it was You in me, and all of it was good.