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Now there are happy video tape recordings. You know, audio recordings of our kids when they were little before their voices changed, Karen and I giving our vows to each other at our wedding.
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Years ago I had some friends who lived near a heavy industrial area where the mills filled the air with a shall we say very distinctive aroma; well, actually, smell would be a better word for it. It was sort of a sulfur-like, rotten eggs type of odor. When you first went there, you would sniff and you'd go, "What is that?" And the people who lived there would say, "What's what?" See, they'd lived around the stink so long, it didn't even register any more. Well, you know, there are some smells you should never get used to.
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I once spoke for a large youth conference at one of the East Coast's most popular vacation spots: Ocean City, Maryland. The boardwalk, the hotels, the restaurants, the amusements seem to stretch for miles there. My friend told me he'd been coming to Ocean City since the 1970s, when most of what I was seeing wasn't there. Not that many folks used to come to Ocean City at all. I asked my friend what changed that. He said, "Oh, the bridge." The building of what is called the Bay Bridge opened up this beautiful spot to many people who literally had never experienced it before.
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Back in my old school days, we used to do an experiment in science class. When I told my then teenage sons about this, they were very surprised to find out that there was a science class when I was in school! But there was and we used to dissect the triceratops and the tyrannosauruses.
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There was a young man we knew who was pretty distraught over a death in his family. He acted it out by deciding to just delete a bunch of Facebook friends. And think we all know someone that has been "deleted" or "canceled." It's just the world we live in today and it hurts! You can delete a relationship with a stroke of your finger. Sometimes it can be really brutal.
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Some people have wall-to-wall carpet. Me? I have a wall-to-wall schedule. Maybe you do too. It was like that even when I had to take my daughter to college years ago. She had just returned from a mission trip to Manila and so had I. We had one day to get her to Chicago for college. Not only did we have to get her to school that day, but on that particular Friday, I had to produce some of these radio programs.
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So there have been several Supermen, well, you know, men who have played Superman over the years. From TV to all the movies. The first one was George Reeves, on the TV show many years ago. Some supermen have had tragic lives. George Reeves who played Superman from 1951 to 1958 actually committed suicide after his career had stalled. He was forever typecast as Superman. Then another actor, Christopher Reeve, who played Superman in five films, became paralyzed in 1995 from an equestrian accident where he was thrown from his horse. These actors played the part of a man who was invincible, but "behind the role" was the awful reality.
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Hundreds of thousands of Kurdish people had fled Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, and they were spread over miles of mountainside on the Turkish border. Christian agencies were flooding in with food, medical help and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But most of the Christian workers connected with the people there only from trucks and distribution points, where they handed out food and blankets. But the missionaries from one particular mission organization really broke through the barrier that others were encountering when they tried to talk about Jesus. They had a unique way of getting close to the people and winning their respect and their trust. You ready to hear their radical outreach strategy? These missionaries picked up the garbage. See, it was everywhere on those mountainsides, and it was getting pretty gross. Nobody wanted to do the garbage, but those who were willing to were the ones those people listened to.
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If you've always been skinny, you can just give it up because you're not going to understand what I'm about to say. But if you're like me and you've battled over that scale your whole life, if you've ever been overweight, you'll probably understand this. Once you've battled that, you always tend to think of yourself as overweight even if you're not any more. Now, I've managed to lose some of it. Others may say you're okay, and the scale might even say you're okay. But there's this voice that keeps whispering, "Overweight!"
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If you've ever spent a lot of time in the city, you may have had the experience of waiting for a bus. You've got a couple of packages, it's cold, some weird people are starting to cruise by for the second time, and suddenly you see the dim outline of a bus on the horizon. Biblically "your heart leapeth within you" as you see the bus approaching. Finally it gets close enough for you to read the sign in the window, and there are three words "Out of Service." Oh! Three very discouraging words.
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My son was a shrewd and wise baseball card collector. There are certain ones he kept really really well in these plastic folders. He would let anybody get near them. Why? Well, he said, "Dad when they're in mint condition they're really the most valuable and then they're really rare. And rare means valuable."
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When you have three children, of course only one can be the first, and that one becomes to the others the measuring stick for all privileges, all fairness, and all comparisons.
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Throughout military history, the Army Rangers have been there in some of the most dramatic, most heroic combat events, like scaling the cliffs at Normandy Beach on D-Day. They were climbing right into the face of enemy fire. It's no surprise that the Rangers played a part, along with other Special Forces, in the rescue of that Iraqi prisoner of war years ago, Jessica Lynch, during Operation Iraqi Freedom. When you're fighting in the heat of battle, it's important to know that your comrades are going to go looking for you, no matter what. That's what happened then. That POW rescue was one example of a commitment that is expressed in the Army Ranger Creed; a commitment that's echoed in other branches of the military as well. Here's what the creed says: "I shall never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." That's good stuff!
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When my grandson was playing Upward basketball as a boy I told him about Jeremy Lin who at that time was lighting up the scoreboard for the New York Knicks. Now, he was not your typical professional basketball star, that's for sure. He was a Harvard grad. He was Asian-American. He was refreshingly humble. Oh, and you could tell that he unashamedly loved Jesus.
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There was a miracle in the wildfire that night on an Indian reservation where we have many dear friends. We watched the news with growing concern that summer - and with intensifying prayer - as the path of that fire's destruction grew steadily. We learned that some of our kind of unofficial "family" there had their church and some loved ones in a town that was surrounded by the flames. And they told us about the miracle.
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When my son was a teenager he used to read the Sunday cartoons, and I heard him laughing out loud one day. He called out to me, "Hey, Dad, come here. They got this one right!" He could really relate to this particular cartoon, and knowing that this was something that would help my intellectual development, he let me read it.
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It's interesting when your kids become parents they start to tell you how you parented. You get a review whether you solicited it or not. Sometimes Karen and I found it hilarious. Sometimes convicting. Sometimes affirming. Sometimes even touching.
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It was a 2004 American League Championship Series. I remember it because my Yankees were in it. One big reason the Boston Red Sox triumphed over my New York Yankees (Boo!) was a veteran pitcher named Curt Schilling. He was selected to pitch the opening game in the New York series, and although he had torn an ankle tendon in his previous start, he thought he could gut it out. He was wrong. Losing that game actually started the Red Sox into a 3-0 deficit in the best of seven series. They started to come back, and amazingly, Curt Schilling had a chance to try again. Later he would tell the press that the first game showed what he could do. He said the second outing showed what God can do. Although Curt had been named "Good Guy of the Year" by Sporting News, he had never talked publicly about the commitment to Jesus Christ that he'd made several years before.
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Oh sure, Mom and Dad thought it was just another excuse to stay awake longer. Adults don't believe what kids know to be the awful truth - that there are monsters in your closet at night. And they expect you to close your eyes and just start having sweet dreams? Come on!
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The passenger across the aisle from me wasn't very happy. He was complaining to his seatmate on the plane about everything and complaining with a lot of profanity inserted, oh I'd say maybe like every third word. The man next to him was mostly listening as this, shall we say, colorfully spoken speaker cussed out his favorite baseball team, then the service on the plane and the clients he was working with.
