We keep traveling north for our Deep in the Heart of Texas Tour…   I was interviewed by the Plainview Herald newspaper.   Reporter Haley Anderson asked me about the astronomical national debt.   I said I gave a talk in Ohio one time, including a quite  astute and  complex (I thought) answer to solving the national debt situation (now at some $12 trillion).   An Amish man in the audience said that my answer sounded good and everything, but he thought he had a better idea.   “We need someone in D.C. with a calculator, that works,” he said.   Since then I’ve scrapped my complex, long-winded answer, and adopted his…   We then stopped in Happy, Texas (pop. 632 and home of: “The town without a frown.”)   I talked with the town judge  there about Hispanic immigration issues, played some sandlot baseball with our kids at a local park, then stopped for lunch at My Happy Place Cafe.   As you pull into the restaurant’s driveway, there’s a sign that says:   No Trespassing! (Honest.)   Then the first thing we were greeted with inside the restaurant was waitress Billy Jo who had on a t-shirt that read:   “I’m not mean, I just don’t like you.”   Then Billy Jo greets the next customer in with:   “Hey, ornery!”   What about My Happy Place Cafe   am I not understanding?   …Then it was on to Amarillo, ‘by morning.’   (Sorry.)   Actually we were late, getting there in mid-afternoon.   It was high school commencement weekend and we met Dave Davidson who comes here from Newman, Georgia, every year at this time.   Davidson, 76, is a graduate of nearby Vega High School.   He said he played point guard on the basketball team at Vega, averaging three points a game.   “We had a couple really big guys underneath,” Davidson smiled.   Davidson said he and fellow classmate Harold Dillehay played basketball and football together, but both struggled coming from “the other side of the tracks.”   Later in life, both made it in the business world and decided to set up a scholarship fund to help those who might be struggling at Vega, like they had.   For the past 20 years, the pair have given out 61 scholarships for $6,000 a piece.   He said of those who have gotten the scholarships, 90% have graduated from college.   (The fund was set up through the school and started with a mere $2,000.)…   While in Amarillo, we attended the Holy Cross High School Graduation.   The featured speaker was Hal Leedy, who owns a quite successful  local Chick-fil-A franchise.   He told the students to beware of simply chasing “success,” the way much of the world looks at success.   That is, we can be so driven in chasing the quintessential “American Dream” for ourselves, at the expense of not being “useful” and a servant to others.   Which is what the gospel message calls us to, said Leedy.   He also said we so often frame challenges and things that go wrong as “problems,” when we should be looking at these as “opportunities.”   In fact, he said his employees are told they are not allowed to come to him saying, for instance:   “We have a problem   in the kitchen.”   Rather, they are to approach him saying:   “We have an opportunity   in the kitchen.”   Afterward I joked with Hal that maybe we could get NASA to follow suit.   That is, the next time something on a spacecraft goes  haywire in deep space, maybe we’ll hear the astronaut say:   “Houston, we have an opportunity .”   Note:   Leedy also exhorted the students to:   “Be yourselves.”   I told him we were once at a motivational seminar where the speaker said to those in the audience:   “Be yourself.   Everyone else is taken.”