Your Annual Growth
The greatest gift you can give yourself is the development of your own character. Think: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). You may or may not have a New Year’s resolution for 2020, but they typically rely on willpower. And willpower is like a battery with limited energy—it wears out and needs frequent recharging. That’s why resolutions so often fail. But if we use our willpower to develop simple habits that we do every day, the habits pave the way to…
A Tale of 3 Cities, #3: The City Not Called Terminus
In 1836 the State of Georgia built a railroad from Savannah toward the Midwest. In the middle of the woods in northern Georgia, they decided to stop construction. And they unceremoniously called the spot “Terminus.” That was its name, Terminus, and its only distinction was being the end of the line, where they placed the “Zero Mile Post.” The chief engineer said the place was “a good location for one tavern, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, and nothing else.” It was in the middle of nowhere. Stay with me—and stay with Terminus. Terminus outgrew the man’s prediction,…
A Tale of 3 Cities, #2a: Jefferson Revisited
I previously wrote about Jefferson, Texas, as a town of people who thought riverboats would always keep them prosperous. They could not see the world changing, and they got left behind. Yet their story deserves a Part Two—and so might yours. When the 150-mile-long log jam, “The Great Raft,” was cleared downstream, the Red River water levels upstream, where Jefferson was, fell too low for riverboats to navigate. Finally they saw the need to adapt to the new development of railroads. But it was too late; they had previously turned down the offer of being a railroad center, and…
A Tale of 3 Cities: #2: Jefferson
East Texas is home to the delightful, historic town of Jefferson, once the sixth-biggest town in the state. The whole place is like a beautifully well-preserved museum and makes its money from tourism. From 1845 to 1872 Jefferson was the terminus for riverboats that carried people on the Red River from there to north Texas and Oklahoma. The place bustled and thrived with people traveling and doing business in this prominent Texas town on the edge of the expanding frontier. It is said that the railroad magnate Jason Gould wanted to build a railroad through Jefferson and make it a…
A Tale of 3 Cities, #1: Shreveport
For countless hundreds of years along the Red River, periodic flooding washed trees and brush from the soft soil along the banks and into the river. Eventually this formed the biggest logjam the world has ever seen. The native Caddo tribes said the wide river had always been covered with this logjam. They couldn’t imagine the river, or life, without it. At its peak in the 1830s, this heap of dead, tangled trees stretched off and on for more than 160 miles. They called it “The Great Raft.” To open navigation on the Red River, the US Army Corps of…
