Download Local Color - St. Hyacinth | Amarillo, Texas

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THE HIGH PLAINS PREACHER
Welcome to the High Plains Preacher! Stories about the Bible, high wind, fast horses, lack of
moisture and other elements of life in the Texas Panhandle.
Local Color
by Fr. Jim Schmitmeyer
I’m from the Midwest, but I like living in Texas. And one reason is that Texas has a lot of local
color. You got your Texas Barbeque. You got your Ranch Rodeo. You got the Austin City Limits.
Texas even has its own music called Texas Red Dirt. In fact, Amarillo has a country station that
reminds you, every half hour, that it plays only Texas country, no Nashville allowed!
I’m not a good judge of popular music but, as I said, I like the local color. So, I enjoy songs about
weeds in Wheeler County, Panhandle poor boys and Farm-to-Market roads.
You might not know this but those Farm-to-Market Roads, or FM Roads, are unique to Texas.
Back home, we just call them county roads or township roads. In fact, a Texas singer, Stoney LaRue, has a
song about Farm-to-Market roads that goes like this: “I just got to get off this FM road,” he sings. “I’m
going to follow this dust wherever it goes.”
That line, “following the dust wherever it goes” has a nice ring to it but, as a pastor, I don’t want
my people to be thinking that they can find the one true God just by “following the dust down some FM
road.” And that’s why the history and theology of our Church is so important. Take the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity, for an example. This central truth of the Christian faith is what keeps us from falling into
the notion that God, the one, true God, is not some cloud of gas, some impersonal magnetic force at the
edge of the universe a billion light years away.
Rather, the essence of the true God is a relationship of true love between Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. Or, as St. John the Apostle would put it, “God is Love. And those who abide in Love abide in God,
and God in them.”
The Holy Trinity: Endless Love between the Father and the Son, flowing out into world in the
overflowing love of the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit of God poured into our souls on the day of our
Baptism…and a far cry from dust blowing across some FM road!