In 1988 I moved from Austin to Houston to join Vinson & Elkins (“V&E”) as an associate. You could say I found my church home at St. Luke’s through V&E.  While I was a summer associate there, Randy and Ann Smith brought me to their St. Luke’s Sunday School class.  Judy Bolling, a long time St. Luke’s member, conducted orientation for V&E’s new associates. When I first met with her I expressed an interest in St. Luke’s and she also invited me to come to Sunday school. Because Christian community was, and is, central to all the members of the Gene Decker Study Class, I was welcomed warmly and immediately felt at home.  Through this amazing class and its yearly week-long visits to Mo Ranch, my husband Bob and I have been blessed with lifelong, loving friends.  When Bob and I started dating in 1992, although he would come to Sunday school parties with me, he did not attend church regularly. But after about a year, he started coming often and joined St. Luke’s shortly before we married in 1994.

 

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to serve on St. Luke’s administrative board several times and had the honor of chairing the Council For Adult Ministries and the Council on Women’s Ministries and serving on the steering committee for the Amazing Place.  Around 2005, Jim Moore asked me to be chair-elect of the Board of Stewards. Imagine my surprise (and dismay) when almost immediately Jim announced his retirement after serving St. Luke’s for over 20 years!  Although the retirement of a beloved, long term leader presented special challenges, I was incredibly fortunate to partner with Tom Pace to facilitate a smooth, seamless transition. I greatly appreciated Tom’s thoughtful, incremental changes to enhance the efficiency of the church’s administration.

 

I have relished the opportunity to serve St. Luke’s in various roles because St. Luke’s has been invaluable to me and Bob. In recent years when he had health issues requiring a stem cell transplant, our fellow Sunday school class members were our lifeline. Unasked, they cheerfully offered both of us vital support and love: providing food, visiting, running errands, anything we needed. This is the essence of having a church family, a church home.