This is hard on a native Texan.

This time of year, I’ve learned to open Instagram and Facebook trepidatiously, since many of my friends and family in Texas are publishing their garden growth or their day at the lake or their front porch afternoon in shorts and flip-flops. I grow homesick and angry and sometimes sad. We’ll get there, too, I tell myself—come July, we’ll enjoy a magical summer (the equivalent of a Texas spring) for six weeks before the leaves start changing and we’re back to our highs in the 50s. During this short-lived season of ours, my comrades down in Texas are holing up in their air-conditioned houses, hunkering down for the slippery, sticky heat that lasts from May to September. While we are doing the lake thing, albeit often in cardigans, and even rarer if we’re swimming.

I tell myself these things—that summer is coming and that it’s lovely—because I realize it really could be so much worse. Central Oregon is not the Yukon, or Alaska, or Siberia, or Scandinavia. There are places around the world that are frigid year-round, and this topography where our nomadic family has currently plopped down is gratifyingly easy on the eyes. The Cascade mountains say good morning in my windshield whenever I turn the corner to return home after dropping off my daughter at school. Sunday drives are ambles through lava rocks and river roads more than they are drive-bys past stripmalls. And I never stop audibly gasping in the fall when I drive up a particular mountain to take my son to speech therapy—the leaves are so shockingly yellow they look fake to my Austinite eyes.

But none of these swathes of beauty change the fact that it’s darn cold for eights months per year, which is hard on someone who thrives in flip-flops more than snow pants. And it continually surprises me how much environment, climate, and weather affect my attitude.

By late April, I get to the point where I start brainstorming ways we can get the heck out of Dodge during the spring, because quite frankly, I start to go a little crazy. I start needing more sleep. My work quality lessens. I swear. I go into survival mode, hunkering down in my bunker, wondering how much longer I have to wait out cabin fever to start digging my fingernails in the backyard dirt. I ponder and pray over my favorite benefit of homeschooling—its flexibility—and ask God whether it’s what we need to do to thrive here, since both Kyle and I can work from anywhere in the world. In essence, I start asking, “Why, of all places, are we here?”

I know that come June, I’ll be reminded of the high desert beauty, and I’ll gladly enjoy our backyard fire pit until September. And I’ll do my best to savor the summer moments, as fleeing as they are (because, after all, it can still be in the 50s and 60s during June and July). And I’ll ask God for grace, grace, and more grace to endure the long winter months, with perhaps a smattering sunshine on the side. And for remembrance of what suffering really is, because come on, compared to the world’s woes, a Southerner’s long winter is a first-world problem.

But I’ll shout and leap for joy when the snow finally thaws on Black Butte in June, the hill the locals watch to know when it’s time to finally plant their gardens. And I’ll drink a mojito or three, because for this Texan, the summer is the best thing about living here. I need to soak it up all I can to make the long winters worth it.

I am, indeed, a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ. This makes me a Christian in the plainest sense, “a person who exemplifies in his or her life the teachings of Christ.”

• For me, this means that anything Jesus taught (both in word and deed) trumps everything else, including other stuff in the Bible. I believe that Jesus came to fulfill the Old Testament law, not to abolish it. (source)

• I know that God is love, and because of that, I can love, too. (source)

• I know that Jesus came to the world to save sinners, and I can agree with Paul—I am the foremost. (source)

• I believe that all Scripture is breathed out by God. (source)

• I know that Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. And also, on these two commandments are what all the Law and Prophets depend. (source)

I also know that I am not God, nor the Holy Spirit, which means that as an imperfect human, I tend to have a lot more questions than answers. The older I get, the fewer things there are of which I’m absolutely certain.

I know that I’m saved from the punishments of my sins by grace, which is poured on me because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who lived on Earth as the only perfect human because He is God’s Son. And that because of this grace, I can live in grace, showing others the same love first bestowed on me.

The rest? I’m called to live in this grace.

This means that my main job on Earth is to love. I like what Billy Graham once said—”It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, God’s job to judge, and my job to love.” Yes. That.

This means I do my best to love babies and old people, goth teenagers and soccer moms, the poor, the rich, the middle-class, those in suburbs and those on farms and those in slums and those in urban high-rises, gay people, straight people, trolls on the Internet or crafty bloggers on Pinterest, men, women, educated or confused, those who love me and those who hate me, my family, my neighbors, and my readers. And this love hopefully manifests itself in both word and deed, though I’m nowhere near perfect, and am convinced that this is one of God’s great workings in my life on earth.

I’m not perfect at this. But this is my main call in life. I’m not very good at convicting or judging, and thank God for that. My call is to believe, to rest in grace, and to love.

I know I can rest in this: this book is ME enough. God made me the writer that I am. He gave me my voice, my words, my experiences. Not someone else’s, as eloquent a writer they are. He is whispering in my ear as I write, telling me the words to share and the style in which to share it. I only need be available and present, doing the work of tap-tapping on the keyboard.

This book is His. He can do with it what He will.

Those of us arriving from Norfolk had already redeemed our boarding passes, and since this was Southwest Airlines, we no longer had them. So they allowed us to return to the aircraft using our personal IDs.

I laugh, but it doesn’t register as a joke, because I’ve heard it a million and a half times throughout my life. No one can pronounce my name.

It’s funny in some ways—that part where my parents more or less invented my name, and that my brother, Josh, was given one of the most popular names of our generation. That part is funny. (I recall one Easter when I wrote “Jsh” with a paint pen on all his plastic eggs.)

But it honestly doesn’t bother me… my weird name. It did for awhile as a child, and when I was in fourth grade I swore that when I turned 18 I would change my name to either Tish or Nicole, my middle name. That way, I at least would have an “i” to dot with a heart.

But people do consistently wonder why my name is spelled how it’s spelled, how it’s pronounced, and the whereabouts of its origin. So I thought I’d use my first post, here at Babble, to explain. It’s really not that interesting.

1. Story goes when my mom was pregnant with me in the 70s, my dad was reading a novel about a pilot who crash landed in the USSR. He meets a girl, and her name is Tsh. This, presumably, means that my name is Russian. However, I was in both Russia and Latvia in the early 90s, and nobody had ever heard of my name there.

2. It’s pronounced “Tish.” Really. Nothing exciting.

3. See number one. I truly don’t know, though.

The first time I heard my name was unusual was in the second grade. I was following my class out to recess when my first grade teacher from last year pops her head out the door. “Tsh? Could you come in here for a minute?” I look up at my current teacher, and she nods me in.

“Class, this is the student I was telling you about,” Mrs. Hull begins as I enter her classroom. “You know how we’ve been learning how every word has a vowel? Well, here’s the exception.”

I curtsied a la Pollyanna, and then jolted out the door to join my class on the monkey bars.