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My daughter and I had not been back to that camp in the Tetons since she was a little girl, like five years old. We stayed there as a family way back then, because our good friends from college ran the camp. There she struck up a friendship with their five-year-old who's named Holly. Well, the camp has grown a lot over the years, and so have our daughters who are speeding through their lives.
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My wife was like a human camera. She was able to record in her mind life experiences in living color and in full detail. I wish I could do it! And growing up on a little farm in the hills gave her a childhood full of memorable memories.
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I used to sing this little song in Sunday school. Actually, all of the kids sang it: "Be careful little eyes what you see." That was the first verse. And then we went on to "Be careful little ears what you hear." And then "Be careful little hands what you do." Of course, "Be careful little feet where you go," and so on. Actually, there is a practical truth hidden in that little song. It's about this thing called sin, which isn't just a church word or a preacher's word. I mean, it's real. I mean, your hands sin, your eyes sin, your ears sin; it's not just a concept.
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It was quite a few years ago when I heard about this young man on Long Island who took his sister for a ride in the family car. You say, "Oh, big deal." Well, it's no big deal except that the boy was five years old. Yes, it's true! His mother was sick in bed and his little sister said, "I want to go to New York City." So he crawled up on top of the refrigerator, got his mother's car keys out of her purse, took his sister out, belted her in, put on his seat belt, and turned on the car. It's crazy but it's true! He drove to a stop light and stopped. Then he moved forward when he was supposed to.
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I'll always remember, it was Friday in August. All of us who were landing at O'Hare Airport in Chicago that day had plans, and schedules, and things we had to do, and places we had to be. But as far as I know, none of us made it. That day Chicago had a record-breaking rain storm followed by massive flooding. And since there's only one viaduct that goes into O'Hare Airport and out, it had four feet of water. O'Hare became an island. Welcome to Camp O'Hare! It was flooded closed.
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There are lots of people digging into their family tree these days. In fact, we've done some of our own. A lot of digging around to find out where your roots are. You know, where my grandfather came from and my great grandfather, and which king or famous person I'm descended from. Of course I would be descended from someone famous, right?
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So, our whole family had to go for blood tests. It was time to check everyone's cholesterol levels, we were told. Now, as our son's blood was being drawn, he suddenly said, "I'm feeling a little weak." Well, that's unusual, because this son was probably the strongest member of the family.
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Stranded on the highest mountain on earth. Or buried beneath the rubble of a shattered hotel.
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Every New York television station you turned to had the same bold graphic, "Blizzard of '96." I still remember it. It was barely 1996; we were only six days into the new year when anywhere between 20-30 inches of snow unloaded on the Metropolitan New York area. It was like a mega-ton snow bomb hit the area, and it literally drove the Big Apple to its knees.
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We were trying to teach some young leaders the importance of teamwork. One of the exercises I used was to have them put together a puzzle. (I thought it was a bright idea.) You tear off a page of a magazine, tear it into pieces, dump it into the middle of each small group, and see who could put their pictures together first. It didn't work too well. See, I forgot one little thing. I forgot to give them a copy of the complete picture so they could see what it should look like when it was all together. Duh! Now, I've tried to work on one of those big, many-pieces puzzles myself, and I've had the same frustration because I didn't know where the top of the puzzle box was. It was really hard to put the pieces together when the complete picture wasn't there.
