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February 4, 2020

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Flowers are always special. They just seem kind of more special in the winter. There was a lady who worked in our ministry offices and she had some flowers on her desk. I stopped by to pick up some work, and there I saw these beautiful flowers in a vase. That's pretty significant. I mean, after all, how many times do the words "man" and "notice" ever go together in the same sentence, right? Actually, I noticed a few more times as I hustled down the hall past her door. Then I actually put on the brakes for a moment and I stuck my head in to smell the flowers on her desk. It wasn't worth the stop. There was no smell. They're fake!

February 3, 2020

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Helen Roseveare was a veteran missionary, and I heard a true story from her life and it really touched me. And it reminded me of why I can face some huge needs with perfect peace. I thought it would be an encouragement to you today, too. Maybe you need this. Helen was a medical missionary in Zaire, and she told about the night she had tried to save a mother in the labor ward. And those efforts did not succeed. The mother died, left the missionaries with a crying two-year-old daughter and this tiny, premature baby. Now, they didn't have an incubator. They didn't have electricity to run an incubator, and they didn't have any special feeding facilities. And even though they lived on the equator where the nights got pretty chilly. So they wrapped the baby in cotton wool, put him in a box then, and they stoked up a fire. What they really needed was a good, old fashioned hot water bottle for the tiny newborn, but they discovered that the last one they had was burst and there was no way to get one. So they put the baby as near the fire as they could safely and they hoped it would be enough. But it was a touch-and-go fight for that little life. And then came the little girl's prayer.

January 31, 2020

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I guess every generation has its surprising music hits. Like a song by a Mississippi truck driver about a hound dog - Elvis something - or a song by some longhaired British quartet about wanting to hold your hand. I think they were called The Beatles. Now, in more recent years, there was a very surprising song that skyrocketed to number one for several weeks and to a Grammy nomination. It's been a while, but it was a pretty provocative song. The singer was not well known, but the song asked some questions that I never thought I'd hear in a popular song. It had a haunting melody that was pretty hard to forget. Years ago, as I played a portion of that song for 11,000 teenagers I was speaking to, virtually everyone in the room sang the lyrics. "What if God was one of us, what would His name be? If God was one of us, what would His face look like?" You know what? The questions were provocative. The answers are shocking!

January 30, 2020

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A local pastor told me about an incident that reportedly happened when a world-famous professional golfer was playing in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, the King was so impressed with this man's playing that he said to him, "I'd like to give you a gift of appreciation." This renowned golfer told the King that no gift was necessary; he just appreciated the opportunity to play in his country. But the King was insistent, not only that the golfer receive a gift, but that he could name any gift he wanted.

January 29, 2020

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I was in my office, trying to crawl out of an avalanche of papers on my desk. Suddenly, there was a knock on my door and in came one of our team members with his wife and their bright-eyed eight-month-old little boy, Zachary. My wife joined our little Zachary party back then and proceeded to plop this animated little bundle right in the middle of my desk, in the middle of a mountain of paperwork, right where I couldn't ignore him. Oh, great! And you know something, I didn't actually mind. Little Zachary and I had a great conversation, which means I did all the talking. We played, we laughed, and Zachary creatively reorganized (shall we say) the project I was working on. It was one of the best things that happened that day. It took me a while to reconstruct my project, but it was sure fun having that little guy right in the middle of everything!

January 28, 2020

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It was one of those days I stopped by our local post office - sort of notorious there I guess. Not because my picture was on a poster there, but because I kid around with the workers a lot. I wasn't kidding them when I complimented them on their new uniforms. They had just at that point premiered a redesigned uniform, and I actually noticed. One of the women there seemed pleasantly surprised. I said, "Can you believe it? An observant male!" She smiled and said, "I thought that was an oxymoron." Oh boy! Unfortunately, it would be all too many times.

January 27, 2019

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It's a good thing that out of our three children we had only one daughter. I could only afford one wedding! Now my wife did all kinds of resourceful things to keep the costs way down. It was so nice of those guests to bring a sack lunch, I'll tell you. You know? The only time they'd been to a reception like it. No, no, I'm only kidding. It was modest, but it was beautiful. But it certainly wasn't free! We like watching the video of the wedding once in a while, but we won't have to do the wedding again! No, can you imagine if her husband kept saying every few months, "I think we need to have another wedding. I want to make sure we're married." They haven't needed to do that! Neither have her mother and I because we know we got married that day.

January 24, 2019

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You know something's up when a friend offers you a piece of candy and then stands there to watch you eat it. Yeah, it happened in our office when my administrative assistant then offered me a piece of sour apple candy with the interesting name "Warheads." I didn't know what that was then. That should have been my second clue, besides her standing and watching me eat it. The third clue should have been the drawing on the wrapper. It's this cartoon guy with his head sort of blowing up. Well, being the good sport that I am, I went for it. The first minute was awful. Bitter doesn't begin to describe the taste. It was just bad bitter! I mean, my mouth puckered. It even made my eyes water! And then, as suddenly as that sharp bitter taste had invaded my mouth, the taste changed to a really enjoyable sweet fruit taste. Which, I am happy to report, lasted considerably longer than the bad taste.

January 23, 2019

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It started on a family vacation in Southern California. The kids were asking about earthquakes which were not a part of our regular growing up years in New Jersey. We started this whimsical little exercise where I would yell, "Earthquake drill!" Now, invariably our older son would run over to his older sister and he would hug her. I would ask innocently, "What are you doing?" to which he would reply, "Dad, you told us to hang on to something heavy!" Oooh, she wasn't, but I'll tell you, that boy was lucky he lived to have a sixth birthday! Actually, when things are shaking, it's really a pretty good idea to hang on to something heavy!

January 22, 2019

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I really hate to be viewed as a typical tourist. But when I went to South Africa a few years ago, I was Tommy Tourist. Yeah, I had my camera clicking everywhere. My friend, Ted, was kind enough to take me between the conferences where I was speaking to Kruger National Park; probably the finest natural game park in all the world. Of course, I was seeing things I'd never seen before. I'd see a giraffe, or a rhinoceros out in the wild or in my dream. I just wanted to see wild elephants, and I did. And I'd yell at Ted like Tommy Tourist, "Stop! Pull over the car!" I'd promptly jump out and start shooting pictures. And he patiently said to me, "Ron, move quickly, and I'll watch your back." I said, "Why?" I didn't think my back was that much fun to watch. He said, "Ron, you have to understand that in this tall grass, there may be lions." Well, he went on to tell me about the tourist that had been mauled while taking pictures in Kruger National Park recently. It's amazing how fast I could get back in the car, and what great pictures you can take out the window. I learned to take a lot of pictures from the car. You know it's great to know that there's someone watching your back when there might be a lion ready to pounce on you.

January 21, 2019

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Graduation day was a suspenseful day for our younger son. He wasn't totally sure what was going to be inside that diploma that the college President handed him. See, he had been informed several days before graduation that no one would know for sure that they were actually going to receive their diploma until they returned to their seat and looked inside the cover. The seniors didn't know their final grades, and if there were any unpaid fees they weren't going to know that either, until they opened their diploma cover and found a bill instead of a diploma.

January 20, 2019

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Our friends, Dan and Ellen, were living in this beautiful farmhouse that became a little less beautiful one day. They'd been doing some heavy outdoor work and they were using a big old dump truck. Ellen was a city girl. She lived on a farm for so many years that there isn't much that she couldn't do though - including driving a dump truck! She'd learned to be a good farm girl. This particular night they had just started it up when she had to run in the house for something, maybe a phone call. (You getting ahead of me now?) She left it running for just a minute. I guess it was more minutes inside than she had anticipated. You know how phone calls can be. Something happened as the air pressure built up in the truck's air brakes and they somehow released! Yeah, that big old dump truck started rolling until something stopped it...Dan and Ellen's dining room and kitchen stopped it! That truck ploughed right through their dining room wall. The brakes on their vehicle failed and the result? Major damage to their home!

January 17, 2019

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Remember the old days? Yeah, with hotels, you know, and the keys? Yeah, the keys; not the little card they give you that opens the door. In those days I had a little problem. I don't remember when a guy asked me when I checked out of a hotel one day, "Ron did you turn in your key?" I thought somewhere along the way he talked to my wife, because see was the one who got to mail all those keys back. It's true, I have been known to own a hotel key collection. I mean, everybody needs a hobby, right? Some people collect stamps, coins, you get the idea! Well, actually it's never my intention to walk off with hotel keys, but sometimes I end up taking what I never meant to take. When I didn't even know I was taking it.

January 16, 2019

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Just a few years ago they had the battle of Little Big Horn again, and Custer lost again. Actually it was part of a movie on the life of the great Oglala Lakota, Chief Crazy Horse. My Lakota friend, Jerry, was asked to be one of Crazy Horse's warriors in the movie. Now, one challenge was riding bareback. They had to do that full speed in the battle scenes, and of course, the big scene was the portrayal of Custer's last stand. Interestingly enough, Jerry can't even find himself in those scenes because the warriors were going by so fast in a cloud of dust. Someone asked him how many warriors they needed to reenact a battle that involved so many Native Americans. He said, "Oh, about 80." Hollywood of course is all about illusion, so they just had these 80 guys keep charging up to the soldiers, turn their horses sharply and circle around again and again and again. There weren't nearly as many warriors on the other side as it looked like in the movie. Custer might have wished that the real odds might have been that even.

January 15, 2019

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I was supposed to be speaking for an event at the Rosemont Horizon. It's this massive arena near Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and it's surrounded by a "spaghetti bowl" of expressway ramps. My driver was unfamiliar with the roads around the arena, so we spent an exciting few minutes circling the Horizon on one ramp after another. We just couldn't seem to find the ramp or the exit that went to the destination we wanted. It wasn't that we couldn't see the auditorium the whole time. Oh, I saw it plenty of times. It was just because we didn't know how to get into it!

January 14, 2019

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Tom thought he had the perfect hiding place. In fact, he told me about it the other day. Actually, Tom isn't his real name, but the incident really happened about 20 years ago when he was a teenager. He was raised in a Christian family; he was a nice Christian boy - except for some of his reading material. Yeah, and this was before the Internet, and he got into buying "Playboy" and some other similar magazines. And he hid them where he was sure no one would ever find them - in his old, unused ice box where no one ever went. Well, one day, Tom went to get his dirty magazines and they were gone. But that wasn't the worst part. There was a Bible where the magazines had been! He knew it had to be his Dad. There was never a word spoken about it, but there were no more magazines after that. Great switch, huh?

January 13, 2019

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Metal mouth! Yeah, that's what they called my daughter in Junior High. Of course, there were plenty of kids you could call that. Those pre-teen and early teen years? Those are braces years a lot of times. All our kids got to take their turn at braces, and we were thankful, frankly, that we had a friend who was an orthodontist. The work was important, but the bills? They were challenging! Our friend allowed us to pay in installments, but even that was hard sometimes. We still had this large unpaid balance the day our latest bill arrived. We opened it and we couldn't believe the three beautiful words that were stamped across the bill - PAID IN FULL!

January 10, 2019

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Aunt Betty's wedding ring had been in the family for three generations, and it was passed down to my wife. There's probably no piece of jewelry that she treasured more than this one. But she couldn't wear it because Aunt Betty's ring size was a lot larger than my wife's little fingers. So Karen identified a jeweler whose craftsmanship she trusted and she entrusted this heirloom to him to be downsized. To be honest, she was a little nervous leaving it with anyone, but she did commit it to this jeweler. When he called that the ring was ready, she could hardly wait to see what he had done with it. Well, the diamonds were intact, the ring looked the same, but it fit her perfectly. He didn't make it into a necklace or a pendant. He didn't change the setting of the stones. Of course not. He took what was entrusted to him and just made it better.

January 9, 2019

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On some of my trips I can travel pretty light, but there have been some where I felt like a mule carrying the things I had to take. One trip I had to pack for three different seasons; professional settings, youth settings. Well, you get the idea. I was going to be gone for quite a while, of course, I had to basically take my office with me too. I had a lot of baggage! When I arrived, someone from the area met me at the gate and they said those magic words, "Let me help you with your bags." I did.

January 8, 2020

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One of the cities that symbolizes the charm of the Old South for me is Charleston, South Carolina. When you go down to the harbor and hire a carriage ride to go to the old part of the city, you feel like you're suddenly back in like "Gone With the Wind" or something. These antebellum homes and mansions are classic. I thought it was great that this historic part of the city had been so well preserved over the years, until the carriage driver told me what really happened. These old buildings had actually deteriorated terribly over the years and the area had become pretty shabby until some people took an interest in financing a renewal.

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