The right attitude, according to Carl, is having a level head. As he defined it, a person with a level head is “someone who is faced with a situation where there is a lot of volatility involved and keeps a calm head while thinking on their feet. There are always multiple routes to take when dealing with people, and when you can de-escalate a situation by talking to someone, then you have a well-rounded approach to dealing with conflict. On the rare occasion where we have to use force to make an arrest or intervene in a fight, you still want that level head prevailing.”

Fortunately, Lauren realizes her future was not in the hands of a few judges from one television show. She had been singing before audiences at church since her middle school years but never gave thought to a career in music. She began school choral music during her sophomore year by adding a cappella choir to her track and cheerleading pursuits.

Jason Exley, pastor of Life Church in Midlothian, and his congregation have constructed a slice of history in their Real Life Christmas production. “We want to make them feel like they are in the middle of all of this commotion in Bethlehem,” Jason said.

Written by Betty Tryon.

“But I can’t imagine doing anything else,” said Deputy Chief Dale McCaskill. Both McCaskill and Chief David Schrodt have seen tremendous changes within the department. As recently as 1987, there were only six members to the department. Today, the Midlothian Fire Department is now being called a leader in fire-base, pre-hospital care. In fact, due to the extensive training and demands on the paramedics and firefighters, Midlothian is the only fire department within Ellis County that offers ambulance transport to hospitals.

New to tutu making, Crystal started in October 2010. “I was making tutus for my two little girls for Halloween,” she explained. “While making them I was thinking and praying and just felt the Lord was telling me to do it as a ministry and business. I thought I could make one for a little girl who has been abused, for every tutu I sell.”

Reaching out to abused children is not a topic Crystal just picked out of the blue. “I grew up in a bad situation,” she shared. “I was a victim of abuse from a very young age, so that has always been a big part of who I am and where my heart is.” In college, her misery continued with the bad choices she was making personally.

One very wonderful choice came in the form of her husband, Bobby, whom she met in college. Bobby is an ordained pastor. Crystal now feels very blessed to have a husband who is loving and caring and three beautiful children. She counts it as a miracle that she has a ministry like this. “My heart is so ministry oriented, with both of us being youth pastors, and our home is their home,” she said. Crystal is still in counseling for what she has been through in her life, but has strong faith. “I went through everything I did for a reason, and I know God has a divine purpose for me,” she shared.

Crystal remembers the night she made the decision to start making tutus. “I was thinking, I don’t want to do this as a business, but I have to have some sort of funding to bless these girls. I talked to my counselors about it and my friends who are counselors. They thought that would be amazing. They see victims of abuse daily, and this would give the little girls a small bit of hope or freedom for just a little bit. I feel very strongly about it. I feel like a little kid at Christmas every time someone orders one because, yay! I have another order, and I can make one to give away.

For me it is not about the business but about the blessing behind each one I can give away.”

Crystal knows how the young girls she is trying to help feel. “You feel as if everything has been stripped away, like you’re not a whole person,” she stated. “With the tutus, it’s something very simple — some strips of tulle [a type of fabric with very fine netting] and an elastic band. But, my vision for the little girls is that they can put this on for a few minutes and feel like a little princess, like they are not in a bad situation or haunted by memories of horrible things. They can feel normal and run around like a little princess or butterfly or whatever for a moment of time when they’re not constantly surrounded by the negative things that have happened to them.”

Eventually, Crystal would like to do a little super hero cape with goggles for boys. The premise would be the same — to make one and give one. “I want little boys to be empowered, as well.” Although Crystal enjoyed doing crafts, making tutus was something she had not attempted before but felt as if it was something she could do. “I started researching online, put a few things together, testing things out and figuring out what I liked the best. I taught myself how to do it. It was a fun and definitely learning process.” So far, Crystal has been able to donate 15 tutus since December. She has not met any of the young girls who received the tutus and prefers to keep it that way for a while. “I would like to eventually have a few of my teenage youth girls be ‘tutus angels.’ I would like to have them pass out the tutus [and] interact with the little girls so they can see good role models.”

Since Crystal does not know the little girls receiving the tutus, she works with a couple of local counselors in the area and is in contact with the Dallas Advocacy Center. The center works to help abused children and provides leadership on child abuse issues. Crystal stated, “They are very interested in getting tutus to pass out.”

Everyone knows that simply putting on a cute outfit will not erase the sins of others or the sorrow of an individual. However, in life, even one filled with grief, there can be moments of pure joy. If a tutu coupled with imagination can bring a touch of innocence to an abused little girl — that is a wonderful thing. Crystal remarked, “For every one that I make, I pray over it that this little girl will have a different life, and it [the tutu] can bring her a little piece of hope.”

Written by Betty Tryon.

Helen’s talent and skill with art was hard won, with many lessons behind her. Born and reared in a small town in northern Oklahoma, Helen has lived all over the country. She got into art when the family moved to Lubbock, Texas, from Los Angeles. “One of my neighbors encouraged me to take an art class with her. That was in 1980, and I have been taking classes ever since.

I had never done any artwork in my life. It was very intimidating, at first, because the other people in class knew how to paint. My neighbor was very encouraging, so I stuck with it. As we moved around the country again, I tried to take lessons wherever I was. I am still taking lessons.”

Although Helen did not grow up painting or creating art, she still has a very important ingredient any artist must have. “I think one of the major factors in being able to do artwork is being able to see it,” she explained. “For example, to see a tree and not just see an object, but to look at it and say, ‘Oh, the tree is round. It has leaves on it. It has holes in it where you can see the sky.’ You can look at it and think it is a beautiful tree with the shapes of the leaves and of the branches. You look for those things when you are doing a painting. You have to be observant.” Helen learned to be more observant, with the assistance of her art classes. Another key point she learned was how to make a flat piece of paper look three-dimensional. “You do that with different colors and your light,” she said. “If you are working in pencil, then you do it with shading.”

When Helen first learned to paint, she started out with oil painting and then learned the other different ways to paint. “My favorite is pastels. I’ve been doing pastels since 1990.” Laughing, she explained why she enjoyed pastels so much. “You get in and get your hands dirty. It just seemed like a fun thing to do. I enjoy it a lot. I can do watercolors and acrylics — it just depends on the painting and what I want to accomplish. I’ve gotten a little back into oil, with water-based oil paint. I get bored with one thing, so I move on to the other mediums.” Helen’s art studio is a testament to her style of creating, with a different project going on in just about every corner. Implements for woodcutting are set up on one table. On another, she works on completing a painting of the Texas flag for her
son’s office. Helen also enjoys pastels because that style “lends itself very well to portraits of people and object paintings where you have one subject in the painting.” This has proven to be very effective with one of the ways in which she derives inspiration for painting. Many people collect postcards of different places they have visited. Bringing home a picture she took during a trip, to be painted later, is Helen’s forte. “I’ve traveled extensively, and I take pictures in many places.” Those pictures are the impetus for many of her paintings. One such example from her trip to Morocco is a painting of a man riding a donkey. From Peru, a pastel painting titled, The Care Giver, is of a striking little girl, holding a goat, dressed in a wide-brimmed green hat and a garment of vivid red, green and purple, who is holding a goat.

One of Helen’s more creative works of art is a water-based oil painting of a buffalo on handmade paper and mounted on Egyptian papyrus (an ancient form of paper-like material made from the papyrus plant). Each corner embellished with block printing adds another dimension to the painting. “I made the blocks out of wood that I dipped in paint and then stamped it onto the material,” she stated.
One very interesting painting with a three-dimensional element is of a woman in the evacuation of New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “I saw this black and white picture in the newspaper of a lady misplaced from Katrina, and she was wearing this cap with all of these items pinned on it.” In Helen’s rendition of the picture, she painted the lady with her knitted cap and placed various miniature items, such as a guitar, duck, elaborate pins and buttons, onto the painting.

Not all of Helen’s work is of photos from different places. “I am not fond of doing landscapes, so I tend to do things in series. Maybe I’ll do a bunch of people or a series on Mardi Gras masks. I’ve done a lot of fish.” In addition to the beautiful peacock bass displayed in her home, there are several different paintings of brightly colored fish. One koi fish grabs your attention, with its glitzy accents. Koi are naturally beautiful, just as they are, but Helen added grandeur to her artwork by painting the fish swimming to the bottom leaving a trail of swirling blue and gold. To achieve the multitude of rich colors in the painting, she used mixed media of watercolors, pastels and gold leafing.

Helen has also painted florals. One room in her home is brought to life with the painting of a flower in brilliant red, highlighted with bright yellow. The combination of yellow meeting red could be interpreted as a flower ablaze, but unconsumed by flames.

Helen stresses that she is not a professional artist. “I do this for fun,” she said. “I don’t try to sell them.” Smiling, she pointed out that “her family has an obligation to hang her paintings.” No doubt, that is a beautiful obligation to have.

Written by Betty Tryon.

MIDLOTHIAN, TX — Belting out a country western song in his usual nightclub, everything felt familiar and routine. Corby LaCroix did not know that by the end of his song nothing would feel familiar or routine. As a young musician, this was what he wanted to do, what he was trained to do, and country music was his pleasure. “I was right in the middle of a song, and all of a sudden, I knew that I was done with that,” he said. “Every fiber of my being hated what I was doing, where I was, what I was singing and the place I was singing in. It was like God got inside and flipped a switch. I told the club owner that I was not going to be coming back.”

The roots of Corby’s dilemma began long ago. Playing the piano as a young boy seemed to be the outlet for his musical talent. However, the piano did not appeal to him as much as the guitar. He remembered the first time he picked up the guitar, at age 10. “At my grandmother’s house, I was messing around with a guitar and managed to eke out a song, playing by ear.” By trial and error, he discovered that he could indeed play a song on the guitar just by listening to the tune and figuring out where the notes were on the guitar. His playing by ear style extended to piano playing and caused his teacher some consternation. “I would frustrate my piano teachers. They would put the music in front of me, and I would act like I was reading it because I knew where to turn the page, but I was playing by ear. My teachers were fooled for a while, but then they caught on,” he admitted smiling.

Even though Corby’s teachers were distressed at his lack of knowledge regarding note reading, Corby knew his way of expressing music was

playing by ear. He acknowledged, “Reading music was never a gift of mine. I can read it, but it takes me a while. It is so much more efficient for me to hear the song and play.”

Though his interest in the guitar began at age 10, Corby did not seriously pursue it until his senior year in high school. “I was really into country music at the time. I listened to songs on the radio to try and figure out what they were doing and how the chords fit together. After a while, I thought, Maybe I should sit down with someone who has been doing this for a while and shave some time off of my learning curve.” During this time, Corby was a part of an organization called Young Life. The guitarist who played for their club meetings agreed to teach him some of the finer points of guitar playing. After high school, Corby followed Cari, his girlfriend and now wife, to Waco to attend McLennan Community College (MCC). “I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I stumbled upon their commercial music program. It turns out there were only two programs like it in the whole state.” In the program, the students could study the music business, music production, audio tech and commercial vocal and instrument performance.

Corby had found the perfect program for his needs. “It was everything from vocal training, ear training, music business, copyright, publishing to management. It was just how to make it in the music business,” he stated. An integral part of the program consisted of students who formed bands together within the program. Elaborating, Corby stated, “They had a rock band, a Christian band and a country band to play gigs on campus.”

Corby graduated with an Associate of Applied Science in commercial music performance. After graduation, he formed a band named Corby LaCroix and Cuttin’ Loose. The band became popular and started opening for Nashville acts such as the Dixie Chicks, Tracy Lawrence and Diamond Rio. Corby enjoyed a degree of success with his band singing country music, until that night, right in the middle of a song. He felt God was saying that was not where He wanted him to be. Corby remembers telling his band members that night that he could no longer continue. “My band members got mad at me, and the club owner got really mad, and rightly so, because we were supposed to play three nights, and that was just the first night. That was a mistake. I should’ve honored that commitment. But at the time, I couldn’t. I could hardly make it through the first night. This was in November. I did play the rest of the gigs on the calendar, and that was it.”

After Corby quit the band, playing the guitar was not a priority again for almost two years. It wasn’t until he joined Midlothian Bible Church (MBC) that he again picked up his guitar. “I recognized the call to do Christian music and wanted to participate in worship,” he said. “Six or seven months into my job here [at MBC], I went to a worship conference in Kansas City where I was in a songwriter’s forum with Matt Maher. He was talking about his approach to writing songs. It started opening my eyes. Before the forum, I looked at Scripture and noticed that certain songs came out of this verse or that verse. But after that forum, writing songs from Scripture was brought into perspective. I started writing songs and realized God was allowing me to see the Scriptures lyrically and to see patterns, especially in the Psalms and in some of

David’s writings. So I started writing with Brady Goodwin.”

With a collection of songs written, the CD named Declaration took shape. Eight of the songs in the album are original, with two of those co-written with Brady. The other two are “re- worked” hymns. “The CD was done in a way to cause people to seek the Lord,” Corby explained. “My songwriting style right now is to take Scripture and write songs out of them. I have Scripture references for all of the songs, and Layne Mershimer (pastor of MBC) wrote a devotion for each song. I want it to be not just a music CD but a study guide kind of thing, too — a way to sit down and worship the Lord in music and then to go to His word.”

Corby now believes “we are to use our gifts, our resources, our time and our efforts to bring praise and honor to the name Jesus.” Doing just that, he has moved from country music and clubs to Christian music and church, using his talent in a way that brings fulfillment to his life.

Written by Betty Tryon.