The story goes that some years ago a cartoonist named Walt Disney - maybe you've heard of him - well, he went with his children to an amusement park, and he was disgusted! The park was covered with litter, bathrooms were filthy. And that day Walt Disney made up his mind that the park he wanted to build someday would always be clean. If you've ever been to Disneyland or to Disney World, you know Walt Disney got his way.
Hey, you could use a good fish story today, right? Once upon a time there were these beautiful fish who lived five miles under the ocean. How do I know? They were the subject of a PBS television special. So this is a for real fish story. Now, because these fish are really striking - I mean they are incredibly colorful - some folks thought they might look good in someone's tropical fish aquarium. So they tried to bring these fish to the surface. They didn't make it. They blew up when they got near the surface! They were designed to live under that pressure at the bottom. Well, no happy ending, except they're going to leave the rest of them where they belong - five miles under the ocean because that's where they were created to be!
At first, Rob's friends thought he was avoiding them. They'd ask him to go somewhere and he'd say, "Sorry, I can't." Eventually he told them why he couldn't go. He had something much more important to do. He would just say, "I've got to go to my meeting." Not too many teenagers would choose going to a meeting over going with their friends, but Rob made a good choice. See, Rob is a teenage drug addict, and he's being rehabilitated through a 12-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. One important key to fighting his problem is attending that support group meeting several times a week.
Disney World. The Magic Kingdom. How can a four-year-old girl be a little cranky in that dream destination for kids her age? Our granddaughter had been having a great day there with her mom and her cousins while her daddy was busy in meetings. She'd done all the princess stuff she loved, she'd gotten the autographs of Disney characters that she loved, she'd gone on rides she'd been looking forward to. But for some reason, by early afternoon she was just a little out of sorts. By that time, her dad was available, and he showed up to take her on some rides. And suddenly, it was like the clouds had blown away and the sun came out. She was the bouncy, happy little girl we all know again. In retrospect, I guess it was easy to diagnose why the clouds had rolled in. She was missing her Daddy!
Our daughter-in-law grew up in the desert. So, the first time she saw the ocean, and the seashells that are all over the beach at low tide, she said, "Can you keep them?" She did! I mean, the good news is, "Yes, you can." And we've loved collecting seashells when we've had opportunity to spend time along the coast. Some of those shells make it to the shore totally intact. Others, well you know, are broken, sometimes by the surf, sometimes by seagulls who've peck them open to get at their yummy tenants. Occasionally, I've found a particularly striking treasure, though, like the conch shell that I picked up a few years ago. It was badly broken. But inside there was some amazing beauty - beautiful swirls in white and blue and pearl, and it made an incredible design to behold. Outside, that shell was just like rough and plain - just another shell - but not on the inside. I never would have seen its unforgettable beauty if it hadn't been broken.
The Lakota Sioux call them the Paha Sapa. We call them the Black Hills. The people who live in Keystone, South Dakota, call them their backyard. If you have ever visited Mt. Rushmore and the Black Hills, you probably drove by or through Keystone. But the Keystone you drive through now isn't where Keystone used to be - not since the flood of 1972. It was devastating. Back then, Keystone was in the valley by a lazy little creek which suddenly became a raging flood one day in 1972, roaring through that valley, destroying the town, and claiming many lives in the area. Well, it was then that the folks of Keystone decided to make a change. When they rebuilt their business district and many of their homes, it wasn't on the ground they had always been on. No, the flood changed all that. They moved up the mountain to higher ground.
My wife, my son and I were walking across a parking lot talking. All of a sudden the people who were walking in front of us whirled around and the lady said, "I know that voice!" Well, I'm always afraid when somebody says that to me; I wonder if it's like somebody I like, you know, I owe money to. But this does happen every once in a while, and sometimes it's someone I do owe money to, but more often than not it's someone who somehow has come into contact with this particular voice over the radio, and usually on a lot of occasions.
There were only two words in the headline in USA Today, but most of us understand the urgency of those two words: "Blood needed!" They were talking about an alarming shortage of blood available in blood banks due to a severe winter, a holiday season, and a bad flu season. One spokesman for the Association of Blood Banks said, "If you've had a bad car accident or a couple of gunshot wounds, you're in a world of trouble." I guess so. There is no fact more basic to human life - without the blood you need, you die.
One of the temporary after effects of my wife's bout with hepatitis years ago was some memory loss. Now, I forget a lot of things and I don't have an excuse. Well, for a while, my wife had a great excuse for forgetting some things, because that memory loss had some real effects. Like the day she left the pot of water on the stove to boil. She promptly moved away from the kitchen and forgot all about it. She told me she even forgot about it after she smelled something burning. So, she went all through the house; checked the dryer, checked the furnace. "What in the world is that burning smell?" Well, when she finally decided to check the kitchen, you can probably guess what the scene was. Oh yeah, there was no more water left in that pot; it had boiled dry. The burner was red hot; the pan had become part of the burner. It was bonded to the burner. It literally had to be broken off. Yeah, she needed some heat to do her job, but not that much heat!
For any of us who were alive at the time, we'll never forget those images of the World Trade Center attacks and those heroic rescue efforts that followed them. One moment still sticks with me. It hit me. It was this interview with a big guy who was helping the rescuers. He was sitting on a curb at Ground Zero, talking with a reporter from a cable news network. He told how he had been delivering food to the rescuers, and then he was making his way back through the rubble when he decided to reach into that rubble just on the chance someone might be there. Unbelievably he suddenly felt this warm hand grabbing his arm. Immediately, he went and got helpers who pulled a firefighter out of there alive! And then that's when he lost it in that interview, and he choked out these words, "He touched me first."
I guess it's possible to get lost in a computer. There was an article I read a while ago that talked about how some business leaders were complaining about this emerging problem with some of their computer people. They were talking about computer technicians who just kept going deeper and deeper into programs, and spending lots of time on sophisticated functions that didn't really have anything to do with getting their job done. One of them had an interesting name for it - "the rapture of the deep" they called it; lost somewhere in that computer; making the computer an end in itself rather than what it's supposed to be, which I think is a means of getting a job done. You know, some people get lost in the Bible too.
It was very cold in our house. I was the first one awake that morning, and as I scampered through our personal Arctic I checked the thermometer. It said 50 degrees. I called Mr. Furnace to come. In the meantime, I turned on the kitchen stove, opened the door and sat in front of it to have some personal spiritual time. My kids told me that with my eyes closed it looked like I was praying to the stove! Great! Well, Mr. Furnace came and he finally figured it out. See, the problem was not the thermometer, it was the thermostat. Because the thermometer was just reflecting the temperature. It was the thermostat, which of course, controlled the temperature!
I got to thinking the other day about some of the close calls in my life - those moments that could have been my last, but obviously they weren't. There was the night that a drunk driver totaled our car with all of our family in it, but thank God it didn't total us. I was driving. We could have died; we didn't.
When I had to go for a new passport, it meant I had to dig out a document that I don't look at very often - my birth certificate. I had to prove to the State Department that I exist! Of course, I have to be careful with my birth certificate - one that's been around that long is about to disintegrate. It's interesting that when you have to produce the most authoritative proof of who you are, what do they ask for? Your birth certificate! And mine, like yours, clearly identifies who you are and exactly when and where you were born. I was a little nervous before I went for my passport because we had just moved and I couldn't find my birth certificate for a little while! That's very bad news!
Treasure Island, A Child's Garden of Verses - those are just some of the literary classics written by Robert Louis Stevenson. He must have had a way with words from the time he was a boy. Anne Graham Lotz tells of a night in his boyhood when his nanny just couldn't get him to bed. Young Robert just kept staring out the window, oblivious to her talking to him. Finally, she said, "Robert, what in the world are you looking at out there?" As she pulled back the curtain, she realized he was watching the lamplighter making his way down the street, lighting one street lamp after another. Young Robert Louis Stevenson saw something more. He said, "Look at that man! He's punching holes in the darkness!"
It turned out to be one of TV's biggest and most surprising hits of the time - "Touched By an Angel." Actually, CBS almost canceled it after its first season. But they responded to all this mail they got, encouraging them to give it another chance. And with that, it just took off. It was consistently one of the top 10 TV programs in America! It was about three angels who take on human form and assignments from God to bring His hope and His messages into certain people's lives. And in an age when angels had become an intriguing subject for a lot of people, this positive program was really a success. Who would have guessed that it would be a success? Stories of humans whose lives are "touched by an angel"? Of course, there's an even bigger surprise. Did you know that angels can be touched by a human?
My friend, Ed, thought he had the perfect hiding place, and he told me about it. Now, Ed's not really his name, but it is a true story. The incident happened this way. Some years ago when he was a teenager, and he came from a nice Christian family - nice Christian boy, except for some of his reading material. Now, it was before Internet days but there was a magazine called Playboy. He had a habit of going out and buying Playboy and some other magazines like it, and he hid them in an old, unused icebox where no one ever went. And he was sure no one knew the place. Well, when he went to get his dirty magazines one day, they were gone. But that's only part of it. In their place there was a Bible. He knew his dad had to leave it there. There was never any yelling, his dad never talked to him about it, but he bought no more magazines because of that little switch his dad had made.
There's this beautiful spot on the coast of Maine called Bar Harbor, because there's a bar in the harbor. It's a sandbar that's totally exposed at low tide and totally submerged at high tide. The bar goes from the mainland to a little island called (you'll never guess) Bar Island. The island's okay, but you wouldn't want to spend a lot of time there. Although some people do - a lot more time than they had planned to spend. When our family walked across the bar at low tide, we made sure to check that tide chart to see when the tide would be coming back. As we were walking back from the island, the tide had started coming in. Then there were those intelligent tourists who waited a little too long to start back, and suddenly there was no way back! Now, you know what? No one has to be stranded on that island. There is a way off, if you take it!
I think every kid loves a circus. And there's probably a kid inside of all of us. I still love the circus, too. I've always been personally fascinated by those death-defying artists from the high trapeze. They leap, perfect poise, have grace, from one trapeze to another, until they end up safe on that platform all the way across the arena from where they started. And I guess you could eventually get used to hanging onto a trapeze, and you'd feel comparatively secure as soon as you reached the next one. My problem would be the time between trapezes. Yeah, that would bother me. Actually, it bothers all of us.
If you consider yourself a religious person, boy, have I got good news for you! Recent research indicates that those who consider themselves religious tend to have lower blood pressure than the rest of the population, they are less likely to be obese, to have cancer, to be hospitalized, and they have a 29% greater chance to live longer! And religious people (it says) tend to have lower rates of depression, less suicide, greater sexual satisfaction in their marriage, and overall a greater sense of well-being. What do you know, Jesus was right when He said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness" and "Blessed are the pure in heart" (Matthew 5:6, 8). Lots of good news if you're a religious person, and some very disturbing bad news.
