Editor’s note: Our Guest Blogger is David Byler, writing on the controversy at Lakewood Church during Hurricane Harvey. Please see his brief bio at the end of this post.

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I have murdered a man. I have most surely maliciously murdered him. My heart was filled with malice. even with malice aforethought. You will have likely never read such a confession on Facebook nor are you likely to ever read one such as this ever again.

The particulars of my malicious deed:

Hardly any of you who knew me in Wharton High School, or Crosby High School, where I spent my senior year, knew anything about me after I left those towns. I attended a bit of college, joined the Air Force, and wound up selling lumber and helping manage truck, rail, barge, and ocean-going transportation for what was once the largest Yellow Pine sawmill in the world. I wish some of the folks I ran with in those years were still alive so they could tell you, too, about the fellow who owned a big honkin’ Chevy C10 pickup truck with oversized bracing and shocks and tires so big that the whole rig stood right near four feet off the pavement. That’s me. No, I was not a “mudder,” but I needed that rig to get in to see about my parents’ little farm over next to David and Gayla Neel’s place on County Road 743 in western Brazoria County. I also lived on the high ground in a subdivision out on old highway 90 which tended to flood anytime there was any sort of tropical storm. Several of my co-workers lived out there too. We were all on high ground, and we all had big honkin’ trucks to get around in when the water got up. When the water receded, we old swamp rat types, my buddies from places like Votaw over in the Trinity swamps, and me from Wharton/Matagorda/Brazoria county lowlands, we picked our way through the water into Lakewood Church which was on our side of town in those days on what was more or less an island in these flood times. We’d carry some of our neighbors who needed to get their feet dry over there, and then, like as not, we’d be commandeered to take in some loads of water bottles and other provisions. We’d pick up people and stuff and carry them in there until our fuel started running low, and then we’d go home having done what we could. No, we were not no heroes, neither. If we let our neighbors down too much, they’d sell out after the flood, and our property values would go down. It was in our own interests that we done what we done so don’t go trying to say we did something good. I do remember several times thinking that Lakewood had a population equivalent to a small town inside their facilities during the floods.

Years went by, and I became more of an outlaw redneck than just a redneck, but we won’t go into all that. I wound up in college again, and then in Seminary, so I could take up a career that paid me less than ten percent of what I’d made before. One of the first things that happened in my first parish up in Paris, Tennessee, was that the Henry County Emergency Management people contacted me. That wasn’t hurricane country; it was tornado country. It was virtually impossible to plan shelters for people against tornadoes, because when one happened, you had seconds to get in a basement or other low place. We could and did plan what to do with people AFTER the tornado had taken down their house or such.