We drove further south to Lufkin, Texas where Diboll High School football coach Jimmy Davis attends a Bible study every Thursday morning at Starbuck’s Coffee Shop here. He told me, because of his Christianity, he will never “cuss out or berate a player.”… I then met with the mayor of Oak Grove, Texas who was in Lufkin visiting. Jerry Holder said his most recent political success had been getting a local environmental board to force the clean up of a local “informal junkyard” of cars that were leaking anti-freeze, oil, transmission fluid… I couldn’t help but think when he was talking, that: Cars all over the country leak this stuff on a regular basis, then it rains, and a significant amount of this hazardous fluid gets washed down storm drains — and into the nation’s waterways. In fact, I have several times read that this is a significant form of water pollution that doesn’t get talked about much. Why? Because we love our motor vehicles too much… Later in the day we stood in solidarity with members of “Lufkin for Life” who were picketing in front of a Planned Parenthood site. (They do it twice a week.) Lufkin for Life director Robert Dickmens told me: “Everyday more children are dying. As a Church, we can’t just say: ‘Oh, well.'” Covenant Presbyterian Church pastor Mark O’Neil, who was also out holding a sign this day, told me: “They (people in the abortion industry) are peddlers of death, immorality and promiscuity. Someone has to take a stand.” Later in the afternoon, I told a reporter at Lufkin’s daily newspaper that these protesters were, indeed, examples of “extra-mile Americans” who are willing to stand up vocally for their beliefs… Tonight we met with Paul and Rita O’Reilly. Rita grew up in the oppression of the Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia’s ‘Killing Fields.’ She told tragic stories of life in the work camps there in the early ’70s, and of the U.S. special forces who bravely helped her and some of her people escape. Her father was killed in the war, she lost a five-year-old brother in the escape, and her mother was shot in a refugee camp after the escape. She has since immigrated to the U.S., married Paul and they are both quite active Christians. In fact, Paul, 41, has given up a career and gone back to college to get a degree in Rehabilitation so he can help troubled youth. “I want to help inspire youth to think another way,” said Paul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We drove further south to Lufkin, Texas where Diboll High School football coach Jimmy Davis attends a Bible study every Thursday morning at Starbuck’s Coffee Shop here. He told me, because of his Christianity, he will never “cuss out or …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}