As he completes his first week on Congress, Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX, 19th District) said his family and faith are two of the most important mainstays in his life.
The day he was sworn in, close friends and family joined him in his new office for a moment of prayer.
“We shared tears in our prayer dedication service,” Arrington said.
“A guy who led this happened to be from Albany, and was someone I met on the campaign trail,” he explained. “With friends and family and others throughout the district, we came here and we all kneeled, and we all prayed and asked for God’s forgiveness and his wisdom and for the courage to lead and lead well for our people.”
“We spent time with Jodey in his office, a group of folks, a group of men, and laid hands on him and prayed for him,” said his brother Kally.
Arrington’s other brother, Yancey, is a pastor in the Houston area. Intertwining power of prayer into personal and political life is something Arrington said was valuable to him, and he planned to pass it along to his children.
“I had my son (Nate) with me on the House Floor, for the swearing in. He held a stack of bibles that were gifts that I’m going to hand out to my children,” Arrington said.
“[My son’s] hand on the bible, my hand over it, and raised it and swore my oath to uphold the constitution, and it just doesn’t get any better than that,” Arrington mentioned.
Kally Arrington said his family backed Jodey from the beginning.
“When somebody asks you to jump, you say, ‘how high?’ That’s what I did with my brother, and my family did. We did what we had to do to get him across the finish line,” he said.
The freshman congressman said his faith and his family both motivate him to be the best representative he can be for West Texans.
“That’s the way that our family and I think West Texas would want to kick off their 19th District, with prayer,” Kally Arrington said.
