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Tim Tebow's been a rather fascinating young man on the American sports scene. I remember some years ago he was playing football, and it was the Broncos/Patriots playoff game. And it actually hurt to watch that. There were no last-quarter or last-minute miracles. Tim was quarterbacking and his team lost and they lost bad. Final score...45-10! They weren't just beaten, they were crushed.
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Our sons had always dreamed of playing high school football. When they finally got to realize that dream, they got to play for one of the winningest coaches in our area. He turned what was once a team known for losing into a team that was usually in a championship series. And because I worked with the team for several years as sort of a spiritual coach, I had an opportunity to observe one of the great secrets of his success. He was a genius at knowing what position each player could play best. A lot of times they disagreed with the coach; they saw themselves as being a star at some position they really wanted. But he could size up their capabilities like no coach I'd ever seen. And invariably, the guys who thought he was wrong about the position he gave them, well, they'd end up being all-conference and all-county in that spot.
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Our friend - we'll call her Diane - shocked her family years ago when she announced at the age of 17 that she was pregnant. Even with some folks urging her to have an abortion, she made the choice to have that child - a son. When her son was seven, Diane met a guy we'll call Gary, and she knew they were falling in love. So, with some fear and trembling, she told him about her son. Gary said, "Let's go meet him." And Diane's boy took to Gary immediately. Diane and Gary got married, and the boy grew up with a wonderful relationship with Gary. But something happened when he turned 17 - this unexplainable rebellion that ultimately made him decide to go live with his biological father. A few months later, he returned to the home he'd grown up in. He'd made a powerful discovery in those intervening months. He said to Gary, "You're the one I walk like, you're the one I talk like, and I do things the way you taught me. You are my father!"
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The saying is about as old as dirt, "While the cat's away, the mice will play." To the extent that's true, the mice don't usually announce that they're planning to exploit the cat's absence, but not so with one business in our town. Where we were living back then, I drove by there. I saw a new display on the big sign that was in front of the business. The sign said, "The boss is away, so we will play." Let's hope the boss didn't come back early. Or maybe we should hope he did.
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It was always pretty exciting traveling with my wife. Well, but my wife with her camera was really exciting, because she could see things that I didn't see. Oh, yeah, I'd have to stop the car for what appeared to be no reason because she'd go, "Stop! Quick!" And, you know, when I'd see the picture, then I'd realize why we had to stop back then.
Oh, sometimes it was a little sign that later told a powerful story, or she'd seen one face in the middle of a hundred faces, or that one face captured on film some very poignant human emotion. Or we all got to see that glorious sunset, or that bird she saw in flight, or some very interesting scene that she saw and I missed.
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For most of us it's rare to see an eagle, and so an event when you do see one of those majestic birds soaring overhead it goes something like this: "Look! An eagle!" If you're driving when you hear that, your passengers might be in serious danger. Of course, an eagle isn't born knowing how to fly. Just like us learning to walk, they need to learn to fly and it's actually I imagine a pretty traumatic experience. Mama Eagle takes you high for a ride on her back and then she dumps you. Suddenly, you are hurtling through the sky with the ground below racing toward you. All the while, Papa Eagle is circling overhead, just watching. In a panic, the little eagle remembers watching Mom and Dad use these feathery things at their sides, so he clumsily extends his wings and starts flapping them frantically. That's a good start, but it's not enough to save him from this rapidly approaching disaster below. At that moment, Papa Eagle suddenly swoops downward at eye-blurring speed, flying straight for his falling child. And in a perfectly timed rescue, the father swoops in under his baby, catches him on his back, and takes him back to the sky.
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I was getting pretty bored with our family fishing vacation in Minnesota. So my dad decided to take little nine-year-old Ronnie to see Paul Bunyan, the legendary giant lumberjack. Actually, it's this huge Paul Bunyan, sitting on a chair with his big ax and Babe the Blue Ox nearby. And there was this little log cabin at his feet. My dad went over to the ticket booth and came back with my ticket, which I eagerly gave to the ticket taker so I could go in and see big old Paul. As I walked in, I almost became the youngest heart attack victim in Minnesota history. Paul Bunyan's big old voice boomed out across the grounds and said, "Hello, Ronnie." I was blown away! How could I know that this was all a conspiracy? The ticket booth guy gets the kid's name, relays it to the little man with a microphone in Paul's log cabin, who then uses that information to welcome some unsuspecting little guy like me. All I knew was that that big guy knew my name!
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Jeff was the quarterback of our high school football team back when we lived in New Jersey. He always attended this little Bible study we had pre-game, but he never made a commitment to Christ. Well, I saw him on one of his breaks from college. He said, "You know, Ron, I have made a commitment to Christ now, but it was hard to do it in high school, especially because we were guys.
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Our daughter was gone for the morning and a friend had come to babysit our two grandsons. That was a brave lady! Actually, she had a relatively problem-free, crisis-free morning, except for one time when she just had to reprimand our three-year-old angel. Being a firstborn, he was very sensitive to being corrected. His later comment indicated that he had clearly recorded what was a very gentle reprimand - the kind you do with a smile on your face, not a snarl. When Mom returned and asked our little guy how his morning was with "Miss Wilma," he invented a new phrase to describe her correction. He said, "Miss Wilma got mad at me; she got happy mad."
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Okay, do the math! At one point in time, we had one grandchild. I couldn't believe my wife was old enough to be a grandmother! Can you believe that? Well, you know what? Within a matter of years, that one became nine grandchildren!
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You might look at these 50 Native American and First Nations young people from 30 different tribes and you may not see anything miraculous until you hear their stories. Like the young man who buried 14 friends and loved ones and got lost in a haze of drugs and suicidal thinking. The young woman raped by a trusted loved one and sexually abused by others. The young woman who felt reduced to nothing by a father who said, "You're a worthless mistake." She was crushed by her mother's suicide, and her father offered her a rope and said, "Why don't you just go out and do what your mother did."
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Okay, if you had been my next door neighbor, you could have pointed over to the yard and said, "Look at that grown man gathering sticks." Excuse me; I don't have the kind of a boring life where I just go around gathering sticks all the time. It's for a purpose. We put all those sticks into this kindling box in the garage, and then we happen to like having a fire in our fireplace. And I learned that the basic old Boy Scout law that you've got to have kindling to get a fire going. It's true!
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If you're a mayor, you're used to taking the heat, of course, but not the flames. Several years ago there was a story that was pretty amazing. It came from Newark, N. J. where Cory Booker was Mayor, and what he did to save his next door neighbor.
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The Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri are known for their rocks. They make for some hard farming, some beautiful views, and some challenging road building. Like this one stretch of highway from Branson, Missouri, to Springfield, Missouri, that they widened. As you slowed down through those construction zones, there were some pretty impressive changes that were taking place. Some places were nothing but solid-rock mountain, but somehow they managed to blast away at those mountains and they literally made a road where a mountain used to be!
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I've never been able to get this little four-year-old girl out of my mind. I never met her, but I'll tell you what, I saw her story and it really affected me.
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He was only supposed to be a minor character in what was then a new television series. It's called "Happy Days." It was a hit series about 1950s teenagers. And as it grew in popularity, so did the popularity of a character known as Arthur Fonzarelli, a.k.a., Fonzie or "The Fonz." With his motorcycle and his greased-back hair and his ability to have a girlfriend literally with the snap of his fingers, Fonzie became one of the best known sitcom characters ever. Fonzie was like the epitome of "cool," well, most of the time. He wasn't cool when he tried to say three little words. No, not "I love you." A strange paralysis seemed to take over his tongue whenever he tried to say, "I was wrong." Maybe you remember. It always came out something like, "I was wr-wr-wr-wr-wro-wro..." He never seemed to be able to get those words out.
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Wow! Talk about so near and yet so far. Poor Desmond Bishop. He missed what could have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to the White House and meet the President of the United States! Actually it was a few years ago.
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Sometimes when our son comes to visit, he comes with a box of doughnuts under his arm. Just what we need! Now these are not just any doughnuts. They're from a doughnut chain that has become very popular in America. I don't do ads, so you'll have to figure it out. But we were driving with our son through a tourist community a while back, and he suddenly exclaimed, "The hot light is on!" I thought my car was overheating. Nope! It was good news. He meant that the light in the window of this doughnut store was on, which is their signal that a hot batch of their delicious doughnuts has just come out of the oven. And I have to tell you, when you get them fresh like that, oh, can you say "irresistible"? Did I just make you hungry?
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When people ask me why I'm not going on some roller coaster that goes upside down and around and around at something like 200 miles per hour, I don't want to just tell them I'm chicken. So, I tell them I'm not tall enough. You know that picture they have of a little person? They have them at the entrance to rides that are a little more challenging. You're supposed to stand next to it, and if you're not as big as that person that they've drawn, you're not allowed on that ride. I've got grandsons, on the other hand, who would love to get on some of those rides. They don't have the wisdom of my years. They don't have the well-developed survival instincts that I have, but for a long time they weren't allowed on the ride. They just didn't measure up.
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It was a 911 call that alerted the first responders. A man was slowly wading out into San Francisco Bay, inching his way to ending his life there. Pretty soon a group of firefighters, and a crowd of about 75 people, were watching as this desperate man went a little deeper and a little deeper, and sadly occasionally glancing back at the shore. They stood there watching for an hour...and they watched him die, without anyone making a move to help him.
