Church Walk/Ride in Austin, Texas

We recently took a family trip to Austin, Texas. Oddly, I have spent nearly 30 years living in Texas and have only been to Austin once, to visit a BYU roommate en route back to BYU. So we headed out on a Wednesday and spent a few days in the capital city. We weren’t there on a Sunday and so didn’t actually GO to church there, but I took a lot of pictures of churches.

We spent one afternoon walking/driving around the UT campus because all of our kids–now that we’re living in Texas and we’ve told them that we will not be paying out-of-state tuition for them to attend LSU–are interested in going to college there. One thing I love about college campuses is all the churches that are nearby. This sounds cliche, but as a parent of a daughter who will be heading off to college in 4 more years, it feels good to know that there are so many church communities that want to embrace young people as they make the huge transition from high school to college, from living at home with their parents to living on their own. And so I love to be on a college campus and see a church on every corner; it’s like geographical/architectural evidence of these efforts to help kids through this transition.

After we drove around the UT campus, we drove under the interstate–just a short 1-2 mile drive–to a heavily Hispanic part of town.As we drove away from campus and towards the “other side of the tracks,” I was immediately struck by urban blight–lots of run-down houses, grocery stores, shuttered businesses, and churches.   Lots of churches–evidence of the religious devotion of many Hispanic people. Brent and I loved seeing all the Spanish signage and hearing people speak Spanish in the places we stopped.

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