Chapter1

In God’s Hands

In a lot of the ways that you measure life, I am a pretty average person. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1959, I grew up in Houston, the fourth and youngest child in a middle class family. I had two good parents, my mom stayed at home and my dad had a good job with Exxon. We lived on the west side of town and my siblings and I all attended our local publicschool.

I was a church girl. I mean, my dad was an elder at a large Presbyterian church, and on several committees, so we were there every single Sunday. I went to service on Sunday mornings, choir practice on Sunday afternoons, and youth group during the middle of the week. I really spent a lot of my time atchurch.

I never played sports of any kind. I wasn’t a cheerleader, I wasn’t on the drill team, I wasn’t in the band. I was always kind of an art nerd. I did well in most of my classes and had a reputation for being a teacher’s pet, mainly because I studied hard, but art class is where I really shined. There was never a question that I would go to college after graduating high school, it was just expected in my family. My parents were supportive and they didn’t have a fit when I said I wanted to major in art. It was the late ‘70s, so they probably thought college for me was just a bridge between their house and my husband’s houseanyway.

College Life

I loved college and I loved my classes. I was accepted into University of Texas’s BFA program, and it was the first time I had lived away from my parents. I enjoyed the freedom to make my own choices about some things. Without Dad there to wake me up every Sunday, I stopped going to church. I didn’t really know how to go about finding a church in Austin anyway. But I was there to get a degree. I was still my high-achieving teacher’s pet self, and was determined to finish a five-year degree plan in only four years, so I didn’t exactly have a lot of extra time for church on myhands.

I was into photorealistic painting at the time, and threw myself into learning that articulate, controlled technique. One of my pieces, a painting of a camera, was selected for an art show in Austin and was so realistic looking that people at the show thought it was an actual camera attached to a canvas until they got close enough to see that it was justpaint.