Different in Texas

“When I die, I may not go to Heaven.  I don’t know if they let cowboys in.
If they don’t, then send me home to Texas, ‘cause Texas is as close as I been.”
(popular Country song)

What is it about Texas, anyway?  It ain’t the weather, and it sure ain’t the landscape, but Texans sure are proud to be from Texas. 

Let’s face it, there’s only two places I know of where people are so proud of where they’re from that they’re bustin’ out all over about it – New York City, and yep, Texas. (At least we got a flag here in Texas; all the New Yorkers have is their Yankees baseball caps and coffee mugs with “I love NY” on them.)

Let’s face it, have you ever seen anyone yellin’ or hollerin’ about being from Kalamazoo, MI or Hackensack, NJ?  Nope, me neither.

Ask anybody here and they’ll tell you, there’s just something different about Texas.  The funny thing is, it’s true.  And no, I don’t know what it is either, but whatever it is, it runs through the soil of this land and shows itself in an attitude and character that you just don’t find anywhere else.

It’s just different in Texas, that’s all.

Yeah, the picture we have in our minds is that cowboys are a little wild and crazy, with maybe a touch of rattlesnake eggs and barbed wire, and they don’t much care for the bridles that polite society would put on them, but there are a lot of guts in their character. Cowboys don’t care much about what anybody thinks of them, but when you’re down, there ain’t nobody better to count on.  Underneath all the wild and crazy stuff is a bedrock of something rare.  Integrity runs deep here.  Deals that are made on a napkin or with a handshake are more ironclad than any contract that a battery of New York lawyers could ever make.

As the song goes, “My heroes have always been cowboys”, and when I look in the Bible, the heroes that I see there were cowboys also. 

While Saul may have been an admirable choice for king, he measured himself against what everyone else thought of him.  With David, on the other hand, it was always about God.  He didn’t conform to what was supposed to be polite or correct and didn’t care what anybody thought.  He had the guts to stand up for what he believed was right.

David was a cowboy.  (Well, maybe he tended sheep, but you get the idea.)

So were Elijah, Phineas, Gideon, and on down the line.  Even Paul was a bit of a cowboy. These were guys that didn’t go with the flow, didn’t care if they were popular, and had the guts to stand for what they believed in. There was a little bit of Texas in all of these men that made them stand apart from the crowd. They were just different from than the rest.  They wouldn’t have cared if they were accepted around town, in any polite society, or even in the churches.  They were cowboys.

Now, I don’t expect to see God with a cowboy hat and boots, yellin’ “Yeehaw” while He lassos us up before Him, but I betcha there’s a whole herd of cowboys in Heaven whoopin’ and hollerin’.

Oh yeah, I reckon they let cowboys in up there.  I’ll betcha cowboys are God’s favorite kind of people.