Thursday, January 3, 2019

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Goodbye, Chicago! Hello, New Jersey! It was time for our first major move as a young family. Our ministry was pretty consuming, even back then, so we looked for the most inexpensive moving help we could find. We found a private moving company owned by a friend. Tom showed up with one other guy and they did a great job navigating our earthly possessions down this narrow apartment staircase. Some days later, we met them on the other end. The problem was that we were facing an even more challenging staircase to get to our new second-floor apartment. Probably the greatest challenge of all was our refrigerator. It was a heavy old bear...I mean, even to try to move it across the floor let alone up those stairs. But Tom said, "I'll take care of it." He proceeded to strap that refrigerator on his muscular back and carry it up that narrow staircase all by himself. All I could do was lamely yell, "Go, Tom, go!"

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

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Every once in a while as you're cruising down the highway, you'll see one of those trucks—the ones that are carrying a truckload of smashed cars. We're talking, you know like, steel pancakes. Sometimes you'll drive by the scrap yard where these junkers end up, and there you'll see row after row with stacks of these flattened old vehicles. "Junk," you say. Today it is, but there was a day when that hunk of steel was someone's dream come true. It was the new wheels they'd hoped for and saved for; a prize they wouldn't let anyone touch…now flattened. 

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

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When you’re taking a team of Native young people to nine different reservations—a lot of them in pretty remote places—you need a combination command post/prayer room/counseling room/supply room on wheels. So we got this rented RV; it served all those purposes. Now I’m still getting used to this RV thing. Some of them are like entire civilizations on wheels. They’re like living two zip codes everywhere they go. Ours was a lot simpler, but it did the job. One challenge for me was the distance from the RV to the ground. I think that there may have been some mix-up at the factory and some NBA player got part of my legs maybe. I don’t know. All I know is it looked like a long way to the ground for Mr. Vertically Challenged. But the RV had a cool feature. As I stepped out, a step automatically came up under my dangling foot and helped me land safely every time.  

Monday, December 31, 2018

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Ted's an ex-Marine. I guess once a Marine, always a Marine. Right? You know - halls of Montezuma, shores of Tripoli, and semper fi. Since his days in the Corps, Ted's gone on to become very successful in business, but he keeps getting invited back to talk to Marine recruits as an inspirational speaker. And in the process, he tells them about a rescuer who came for him in the Marines and saved him - Jesus Christ. And I love what he tells them - "One thing about Marines - we always go back for our own, and that's why I'm here today. I'm going back for my own."

Friday, December 28, 2018

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When our daughter and son-in-law became parents the first time, they also became an aunt and uncle. Their niece was a little younger than their first son, but you can imagine that both sets of parents enjoyed swapping stories about their first child. For example, he would set out a toy or a puzzle on the floor. He'd select one of us adults as his designated playmate. It sounds like this - now, he called me "Dada" because he couldn't say "Granddad" - he would go, "Dada pay." That's "play" for those requiring translation. And he patted the floor exactly where he wanted me to sit and "pay." Apparently, their niece was issuing similar invitations to the adults in her world, like her Daddy, for example. He was moving around the living room doing whatever, and she would look up at him with big eyes and asks a simple question, "Papa down?" She really wanted her father to come to her level. And he did.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

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My friend, Bill, was talking to me about his son's expectations. He called them microwave expectations. Bill was in his early 50s, and his son Ken had been married for about a year, and his son wanted everything fast-like a microwave. Bill said, "I can't believe it. They want all this stuff immediately! They've been married one year and they want a home, they want furniture, and they want a new car. They want in a year what it took us 20 years to get!" That's not unusual; the child expects more than the father had.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

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Maybe it's a guy thing. Maybe it's just a Ron thing. But I hate to waste time or waste effort. You know? Here's what that it looks like when I've just returned from the grocery store to restock our empty refrigerator and shelves. I basically look like a mule – yeah, with bags all over my body, carried on almost every appendage. I don't want to make any more trips to the car than absolutely necessary, oh no, no! So I'm willing to try whatever calisthenics, to tolerate whatever overload will enable me to get everything in the house in one trip. This approach has been known to have its problems. Sometimes I drop a bag or two or one of them rips open; thus, making more work. And I've got this shoulder. Yeah, wrecked it pretty well. You think it might be traceable to carrying too much too many times?

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

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One Christmas, a friend gave us one of the most unique ornaments I'd ever seen. As soon as you see it, you think how beautifully and exquisitely this glass decoration is painted. But what's amazing is that none of that artwork is on the outside of the ornament. It's been painted entirely on the inside! For centuries, I guess the Chinese have perfected this "inside painting." Through a small opening in that ornament, the artist repeatedly inserts a miniature brush to paint the artwork. Of course, the process is painstaking and time consuming. It takes two days just to paint one ornament, but the result is a beautiful, one-of-a-kind miniature masterpiece.

Monday, December 24, 2018

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It was World War I. It was Christmas Eve. The German and British soldiers were dug in just hundreds of yards apart. But it turned out to be much more than just another tense and violent night on the battlefield. There had been so many of those. It actually began when one German soldier began singing "Silent Night" from his trench. Pretty soon he was joined in German by many more of his fellow soldiers. Amazingly, the voices of hundreds of British soldiers began to join in the carol from their trenches, sung in two languages - same carol. Now that has to have been a moment those soldiers never forgot. Just think, opposing armies singing "Sleep in heavenly peace" in the middle of a battlefield.

Friday, December 21, 2018

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It's the king of all the classic TV Christmas specials: "A Charlie Brown Christmas" of course. We know those familiar scenes of Charlie Brown sadly looking for the meaning of Christmas, Snoopy's Christmas decorations on his doghouse, Lucy's Christmas pageant, Charlie's pitiful little Christmas tree, and Linus' appearance on center stage to answer Charlie's question about what it all means. Linus quotes straight from Luke's account of Jesus' birth. Those are all things we know about that special. What I just learned recently is contained in an interview with one of the co-creators of that show. When Charlie Brown creator, Charles Schulz, first suggested including the mention of Jesus in the special, he met with some pretty serious objections from the network. They almost tubed the project because they feared they wouldn't be able to sell advertising on a show that talked about Jesus. You know what Charles Schulz did? He stood his ground and he simply said, "If we don't do it, who will? We're going to do it." The rest is history.

Thursday, December 20, 2018

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This is crazy. Suddenly I'm all excited about a plant. I can't remember ever taking care of a plant in my life. That was always my wife's department. But this Christmas I actually ordered a special plant, and it's getting my special care because of what it represents to me about Christmas. And about the "long winter" that began the day the love of my life was suddenly gone.

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

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It's the Christmas season, and everywhere you go these days you see those brown trucks-it's UPS running everywhere, delivering Christmas surprises to people. Those UPS drivers work really hard this time of year. I mean, they get a lot of long hours to get everything where it's supposed to be in time for Christmas. I expect they sleep pretty well at night. Even though they have a big job, at least they don't have to go out and buy all those packages. Their job is just to deliver what someone else has paid for.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

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"Avalanche." "Tsunami." "A cultural watershed moment." "A day of reckoning." Those are just some of the words the news used to describe the increasingly relentless accusations of sexual misconduct by powerful men. That quake has been shaking cultural epicenters of this country from Hollywood to corporate boardrooms to state capitals to the halls of Washington D.C.. And most observers believe this is only the tip of an iceberg.

The blizzard of revelations is new. Men using power to exploit someone sexually; sadly, that's not new. From athletes to politicians, from bosses to clergy sometimes. Tiger Woods outed an abuser's rationale when he went public with his extramarital relationships. He simply said, "Normal rules didn't apply...I felt like I was entitled."

Monday, December 17, 2018

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When you stand at the edge of the overlook, gazing across at the mighty Niagara Falls, listening to its liquid thunder, you can't help but be impressed with its majestic beauty and its tremendous power. But that's as close as I want to get. A person who somehow fell into those churning waters would have little chance of survival; maybe no chance. That didn't seem to bother the famous tightrope walker known as the Great Blondin. No, back in 1859, he made history. He crossed the gorge of the Niagara River on a tightrope. At one point, he executed a back somersault. His next tightrope trip across the Falls, Blondin crossed on a bicycle, he walked across blindfolded, then he pushed a wheelbarrow, and he cooked an omelet in the center. He made the trip with his hands and feet manacled at one point. Then came his ultimate performance. He announced he would carry a man across the Falls on his back. Most of the folks believed he could do it. No one wanted to be the one who went on his back, though, except his manager who climbed on the back of the Great Blondin, and to the amazement of all who watched, he arrived safely on the other side.

Friday, December 14, 2018

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I don't mind visiting people in the hospital. I just don't like to stay in hospitals myself. My medical value system sort of works like this: minor surgery is any operation on somebody else, and major surgery is any operation on me. I've actually learned there's something worse than being a hospital patient myself. It's having one of our grandchildren in the hospital, especially when the treatment means pain. I can take it when I'm the one hurting. It's just hard to take it when it's one of them. When our grandson was only ten months old he had to go to the emergency room in another town, and it wasn't a happy time for the little guy. They had to try multiple times to get a needle into a vein for a blood test. It was excruciating! He was increasingly traumatized by one injection after another and that big old oxygen mask they kept holding over his nose.

Thursday, December 13, 2018

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Narnia was a mythical land, created by C. S. Lewis, where the animals talk and where four children experience a series of incredible adventures. The seven-part series, The Chronicles of Narnia, have long fascinated children and adults alike. (I'm one of them.) And then came Disney's movie version of the first Narnia story, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," and it was a blockbuster. In the story, the wardrobe is the closet through which the children discover Narnia. The witch is the evil ruler of the land. She's creating an endless winter where it says it was "always winter but never Christmas." And the lion is Aslan, the great son of the Emperor from across the sea. He is, in C. S. Lewis' imagery, the Christ-figure of Narnia. As the children begin to experience the icy and dangerous world that Narnia has become under that evil ruler, one of the animals announces that there is hope on the horizon. Hope turns out to be five words: "Aslan is on the move." Indeed, he was, and Narnia would soon be set free.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

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We had been working on our college production for our Junior-Senior Banquet for months. It was an original musical drama, written and directed by my roommate and me, based on the book of Esther. The orchestra had rehearsed night after night, the chorus had rehearsed, the actors, the light crew, the sound crew; we had prepared as much as we could. The night before, we had the dress rehearsal. But all those months of preparation and practice came down to one evening-the night of the big performance, and it was show time!

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

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Christmas shopping is really fun for a while. But after a few stressful trips to the mall, after spending more time looking for a parking place than you do in the store, after battling the crowds and trying to find a store that still has what you're looking for, well Christmas shopping starts to lose some of its glitter. But then there's that golden moment when you walk in the house with your last installment of shopping bags, you collapse in the recliner, and you declare in a loud, triumphant voice, "I'm done with my shopping!" What a feeling!

Monday, December 10, 2018

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Every child's dream-Disney World! Our three-year-old granddaughter had counted down her visit there for weeks. And she was absolutely giddy as she finally entered the Magic Kingdom. One ride she really wanted to try was the flying elephants. Actually, the flying Dumbos, named after that elephant with the oversize ears that enabled him to be a flying elephant! Dumbo basically just goes around and around; he's a ride for little kids...kids like me. Now when you pull the bar in your Dumbo car, it starts to go up. Not super-high, but high enough to get a nice view of a lot of things in the park. And our granddaughter began making those Dumbo circles with her uncle, and he started to pull the bar up to help the flying elephant fly. It was not to be. Our little princess would have none of this going higher business...nope! Too scary! She made it no secret that Dumbo was to fly at the lowest possible level...and stay there.

Friday, December 7, 2018

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In just one year, a whole lot changed for my wife and me. We sold our home of 24 years, and we disposed of a quarter century of accumulated "stuff"! We relocated to a home way out in the country in another state after our Board decided to relocate the entire ministry to that part of the country. So, we got a new personal address, we got a new ministry address, we had all new phone numbers, and new license plates, and new co-workers. But with all the changes, there was one thing that didn't change - our email address. No matter where we are, our email address is always the same!