07 May 2011

UNDER THE WATERFALL: Patrick ButlerThere was a woman from Hawaii near tears sitting next to me during the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast in Tyler, Texas, this year during the 60th National Day of Prayer.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she told me by way of explanation. “To see civic leaders so involved in prayer and hear them praying so freely” nearly overcame her.

“I’m just so blessed to have been part of this,” she said.

I am not from the South. I was raised in Manhattan, in New York City and spent my high school and college years in Southern California, in Orange County south of Los Angeles. Then I moved to San Francisco and Seattle.

I too, have never seen the civic commitment to prayer, Christ and reliance on the divine as I have here in Tyler, where I landed from Seattle in 1999 to take a media-related job for a season. I ended up staying on, and never regretted the decision.

East Texas may be an anomaly in the United States, but I’m thinking it may be a fore-runner, a pattern, a paradigm shift for the rest of the country. It’s so far “behind” one may muse, that it’s actually ahead of the curve now. While the rest of the nation experimented with tossing God out of concepts of existence and teaching the young principled living, as reasons for ultimate existence, East Texas held on to its roots.

As an “outsider” to this area, I can tell you East Texas has gotten a bad rap — even from the rest of Texas, which often snobbishly considers itself more “sophisticated” than its unfairly stereotyped neighbors to the east.

To be forthright and candid, there certainly is an element of illiterate, myopic, almost familial tunnel vision in East Texas among a partially impoverished population — but let us not forget that Washington D.C. schools rank nearly last in the nation in effective teaching. Being in northern or western U.S. cultures does not guarantee ignorance is conquered. And East Texas accents can take some getting used to, but brush the easy bigotry aside and what remains is gold. There are a lot of intelligent, well-to-do and sharp people running around East Texas. The Mayor of Tyler, Barbara Bass, is one of them. This city that some outsiders like to ironically label backward or worse, elected her as the first woman mayor of the largest city in East Texas, which encompasses an area the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. Since she’s been in office, the city has done better during one the hardest economic times the nation has faced since the Great Depression, than many others in America.

The mayor has surrounded herself with sharp people who could hold their own in larger metropolitan areas but choose to live in East Texas. Why? Part of the reason could be found at the 20th annual Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast, where the most constant comment I heard was “I’m so glad I live in a town where the leaders are not afraid to pray.”

Praying is important to many East Texans because God is important to them. And God is important to them because they believe — believe he exists, hears, listens and responds in the lives of those who diligently seek him. That dynamic in this city makes it one of the most unique in America. The philanthropy in Tyler blows away much of the U.S. and Texas, as Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, discovered a couple of years ago when he said, “We found the heart of Texas right here in Tyler. Who knew?” Well, the people who live here did. Now we’re just waiting for the rest of America to discover it. Lucky Severson, of PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” show, told me he was surprised how forward thinking Tyler is. I just nodded my head as he spoke. One more who has found the jewel of East Texas.

If history is an indication of the future, times are coming to the U.S. that will require deep commitment and reliance on God for wisdom, direction, decision making and courses of action. All one has to do is look over the past, say, 50 years — to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba — and trace along the awkward, bad, mistaken and even horrible decisions we have made as a nation. We will need “depots of blessings” in America — cities where people of faith pray and anchor the country during times of confusion, doubt, discouragement and despair.

Tyler, Texas, is one of the places.

---