I could have attended a large university like many in my family did.\u00a0\u00a0I could have attended a medium sized university where I had a baseball scholarship offer.\u00a0\u00a0I chose to attend a small, Baptist college in a small west Texas town.\u00a0\u00a0Having grown up in Houston from the third grade through High School graduation, everything at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Texas was new to me, including my second semester roommate, who was a pre-Agriculture major from \u201cout of Lometa, Texas.\u201d From living in a dormitory, to eating in a dining hall, to making friends with students with whom I had almost nothing in common, I was on a steep learning curve.\u00a0\u00a0In my pre-college days, I had attended eight schools in twelve years, living in six towns.\u00a0\u00a0When I married my college sweetheart, only three non-family members, who were friends before college, attended the wedding. So, transition was not entirely new.\u00a0\u00a0What was new was making acquaintances who would become life-long friends.\u00a0\u00a0It was an unadvertised benefit of our small college, where \u201ceverybody was somebody.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0I thank God for men and women with whom I have been friends for six decades. If there are university reunions in heaven, ours will certainly not be the largest, but it might be the sweetest.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe Message\u201d paraphrases Proverbs 27:9 as, \u201cA sweet friendship refreshes the soul.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Give thanks today for long-time friends.<\/p>\n
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I could have attended a large university like many in my family did.\u00a0\u00a0I could have attended a medium sized university where I had a baseball scholarship offer.\u00a0\u00a0I chose to attend a small, Baptist college in a small west Texas town.\u00a0\u00a0Having grown up in Houston from the third grade through High School graduation, everything at Howard…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3125,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124\/revisions\/3125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}