When he was young, our grandson had a rainbow of interests, including drawing. In fact, he came away from a local art show with several awards for art for kids his age. Now that didn't come from his grandfather, I can tell you that. I think the lines are down somewhere between my brain and my hand. Something happened there; there's a malfunction! They make it from my brain to my mouth, but I can't… Well, I can't even draw a recognizable stick figure. Now, our grandson apparently had been watching how cartoonists and some caricaturists draw people. Because he really liked to draw some folks the same way they do-very little bodies and very big heads!
Jack Phillips was a senior radioman on the maiden voyage of the ill-fated Titanic. On that fatal night when two-thirds of her passengers and crew would die, Phillips actually received a message from a ship called the Masaba. That ship was reporting on a major ice field ahead and the message gave the coordinates where the Titanic could expect to encounter those icebergs. It was the place where just two hours later, the Titanic would, in fact, hit one of those icebergs; the one that would sink what was supposed to be the unsinkable ship. The message with the warning of what was ahead-would you believe it-didn't get delivered. Jack Phillips was really busy at the time - a lot of radio traffic - and he stuck the message on a spindle to be delivered sometime later, and it never was. That one decision would cost the lives of 1,500 people and the life of the radioman himself.
Beslan-it's a Russian town that joined the ranks of places known for the terror that happened there. Some have called that three-day terrorist takeover of a school in Beslan, and the violent deaths of hundreds of school children and adults there, Russia's equivalent to America's September 11. In the midst of Beslan's horror, there emerged a photo that embodied hope in the middle of death. It showed a girl's bloodied hand clutching a golden cross. Viktoria was hospitalized with shrapnel in her brain, but she was still a survivor. The fourteen-year-old said that she prayed every day while she was being held captive, always clinging to her cross even after being wounded in the violent ending of that awful siege that killed more than 330 hostages. Even as she lost consciousness, she never let go of the cross. In Viktoria's own words, "I felt that if I had that cross in my hand, then everything would be fine."
Some friends are involved in a ministry whose offices are out in the country. The setting is beautiful and far enough out that it even has some interesting four-legged neighbors. Like the mountain lion that several workers and neighbors say they've spotted. There's not supposed to be a mountain lion in their area, but someone forgot to tell the mountain lion. (He didn't get the memo.) I understand this has caused the folks who work there – especially if they're there after dark – just a little more vigilance when they're coming or going from their car. Personally, I think it's better for the person to see the lion before the lion sees the person. Right?
Each generation has its unforgettable events and photographs that sort of sear those events into our memories. So often, those images are tragedies: the falling towers, of course, of September 11, the bombed out Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. Before either of those, came the images of the sudden explosion of the Challenger shuttle over Cape Canaveral-those horrible trails of smoke against the sky, reminding us of the deaths of all those heroic astronauts aboard. After an extensive investigation, that cataclysmic explosion was traced to a simple O-ring that malfunctioned in cold weather and started a chain of events that doomed the shuttle and its crew. Then came the more recent explosion of the shuttle Columbia; this time apparently traceable to a loose piece of foam that came off during liftoff and ended up causing the loss of everyone aboard.
Oh, it was a happy day for our then one-year-old granddaughter! It was a milestone day. I mean, ever since she started riding in the car with her parents, she had been in the back seat in her infant seat, facing backward – just like the safety folks recommend you should do. Her Mom and Dad travel a lot of miles, and so even as a little girl, she saw a lot of country as it was going by. But not then! No, not anymore! Not after she got twenty pounds. Yeah, she weighed twenty pounds, the magic threshold. When you get to twenty pounds, you reach that great milestone. Mom and Dad turn your seat around and you get to see where you're going instead of where you've been.
Our daughter-in-law grew up in the desert. So, the first time she saw the ocean, and the seashells that are all over the beach at low tide, she said, "Can you keep them?" She did! I mean, the good news is, "Yes, you can." And we've loved collecting seashells when we've had opportunity to spend time along the coast. Some of those shells make it to the shore totally intact. Others, well you know, are broken, sometimes by the surf, sometimes by seagulls who've peck them open to get at their yummy tenants. Occasionally, I've found a particularly striking treasure, though, like the conch shell that I picked up a few years ago. It was badly broken. But inside there was some amazing beauty-beautiful swirls in white and blue and pearl, and it made an incredible design to behold. Outside, that shell was just like rough and plain-just another shell-but not on the inside. I never would have seen its unforgettable beauty if it hadn't been broken.
I was teaching at a training school for people entering youth ministry when I learned about a call home that must have been heartbreaking for the dad who made it. The school was three weeks long, and dad had already been gone for over two weeks. He was seriously missing his wife and a two-year-old son, and they were missing him. Well, he waited patiently in this long line that formed every day after classes in the lobby to get to the pay phone. (Let's hear it for cell phones today!) He finally got to talk to his wife. When he asked how his son was doing, she said, "Not too well, honey. Yesterday he came up to me and said, ‘Mommy, is Daddy dead?'" Ouch!
Larry Walters was just tired of sitting in his backyard, watching the same old folks in the same old neighborhood do the same old thing. He was ready for a change. So he decided to do something different - really different! He went out and bought 45 six-foot helium balloons and attached them to his lawn chair, which was tethered to a car to keep it from taking off. Then, he donned a parachute. (Yeah, you know where this is going?) He packed a bottle of soda pop, a CB radio, and a BB gun to shoot out the balloons so he could come down. (This is the real deal.) So, he thought he'd get this great view of his neighborhood. Oh, he got a little more than that. When his friends cut his lawn chair loose, he shot a thousand feet into the air in a minute. Before long, Larry and his flying lawn chair were 16,000 feet over the Los Angeles area. That's like three miles up, man! A pilot radioed the tower and said, "We've spotted a man in a lawn chair at 16,000 feet." I can't even guess what the tower must have said back to that pilot. Well, meanwhile, Larry is yelling into his CB radio, "Mayday! Mayday!" (Yeah, I guess!) He eventually managed to shoot out enough balloons to come down, where he landed in some wires and caused a power outage in Long Beach, California. He got down OK, he even got some TV appearances, and an FAA fine. Not bad for an ordinary guy in a lawn chair, huh?
As each of our kids has fallen in love, I have had what sounded like maybe strange advice for them. I've said, "Make sure you make a good 200-year choice." Now, needless to say, that's been greeted with an expression that says, "You doin' okay, Dad?" It turns out none of our kids expects to ever celebrate their 200th wedding anniversary. But that's not what I'm talking about anyway. I'm talking about the impact the choice of a mate will have for a long, long time – along with a lot of other family choices.
You never know what your kid's memories are going to be. You know? Our son was like 20 years old, he was in college, and they asked him to write about a childhood memory. You know that's when they are in these family classes and you get to pay for them analyzing you and their family relationships. Great! Well he picked the day that he and I played wiffle ball together for the first time. He couldn't have been more than 4 or 5 years old. You know wiffle ball, it's that little plastic ball. It's got enough holes in it to keep it from going far, and he had this little plastic yellow bat, and I was pitching to him from a few feet away in the backyard. The first time he ever tried to hit a ball, and strike 1 - he chopped it instead of hitting right and he missed it. I threw it again real gently - strike 2. So I stopped and I went over and I reviewed with him, you know, keep your eye on the ball - don't chop - swing evenly. And then I said one more thing that I hadn't said the first two times. I said, "I really believe you can do it." The next time, BAM! He hit that thing way over Daddy's head.
Over the years we've lived near the ocean, and we were blessed to have a friend who was a veteran sailor. He'd been sailing the East Coast since he was a boy. And he was generous enough to allow us to go sailing with him sometimes and to watch a master at work. I tried to apply for "first mate," but he always said, "Don't call us, we'll call you." Which he never did. But I was a grateful and curious passenger. He told me some great stories of sailing adventures. He showed us how to do some of what he did, and he related times that he had seen one sailboat after another fall over as they were unprepared for a shift in the wind across the bay there. You don't have to be a seasoned seaman to understand a fundamental law of a successful voyage: It's the set of the sail, not the force of the gale, that determines the way you go.
Well, we're not going to forget for a long time, even as the years pass, the images of the World Trade Center attacks and those heroic rescue efforts that followed them. One moment still sticks with me. It hit me. It was this interview with a big guy who was helping the rescuers. He was sitting on a curb at Ground Zero, talking with a reporter from a cable news network. He told how he had been delivering food to the rescuers, and then he was making his way back through the rubble when he decided to reach into that rubble just on the chance someone might be there. Unbelievably he suddenly felt this warm hand grabbing his arm. Immediately, he went and got helpers who pulled a firefighter out of there alive! And then that's when he lost it in that interview, and he choked out these words, "He touched me first."
Power-that's what mattered most to Napoleon. He wanted power, and he got it. Under his leadership, the armies of France won some stunning victories. They extended control well beyond their borders, but that wasn't enough for Napoleon. It is said that one day he gathered all the top officers together around this large table. Laid across that table was a map of Europe with a big red spot on it. That spot was England. He pounded his fist on the table, and he raged: "If it weren't for that red spot, I could have it all!"
Lots and lots of marble steps – that's one thing I remember from our family trip to Washington D.C. when the kids were little. In fact, our youngest was about two years old the first time we went there. In fact, he told me that at that time he was very interested in seeing the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the government firsthand. Yeah, he said that to me. Oh, but those steps! Have you ever been to the U. S. Capitol building or the Lincoln Memorial? Maybe you remember feeling new feelings in your legs by the time you reached the top. Imagine our little guy. He looked up at those stairs and he knew there was no way with those short little legs. So he was stuck at the bottom with no hope of reaching the top of the steps. No, wait a minute. That's not true. He had me! And I had one of those child carriers on my back which he got in. And he made it where he never could have gone himself, because someone bigger carried him.
"Y'all come see us!" You hear that pretty often in the South. It's called southern hospitality; sort of an open invitation to stop by, as they say, and "visit." That's why I was surprised at the welcome mat they had at a cabin we recently stayed in. I was speaking at a conference in the south, and my wife and I were wonderfully given a picturesque log cabin to stay in. But then there was the welcome mat. Well, it was sort of a welcome mat-maybe more of an unwelcome mat. You walk up to the door, you look down at the mat, and you're greeted with these wonderful words, "Oh no! Not you again!"
Some dear friends of ours lost their 19-year-old son. Because of the way it happened, his death was a sudden, gut-wrenching tragedy. With Jesus as their anchor, even through this, they made this incredible faith statement, his mom and dad. They said, "God wants life to come from his death.” One way that's happened is through their decision to donate his organs to help save and improve some other lives. Not long after their son's death, the word came back that someone in a neighboring state had received their son's heart. That's been a source of comfort and encouragement to them. As they say, "Our son's heart is giving life to someone else.”
Chaco Culture National Historical Park-it's situated in a remote corner of New Mexico. It's a place where a thousand years ago, the ancient ancestors of some of today's Indian tribes enjoyed this thriving civilization. They were, as an article in USA Today reported, "astronomically observant." For modern observers, it's still a great spot to be astronomically observant; a place where you can see the heavens without the interference of the artificial light that's all around us much of the time. Several years ago, a woman came to the visitor's center desk to report something remarkable she'd seen in the sky. The ranger held his breath for another "UFO sighting," only to be surprised by the woman's excited description of a "lane of white powder" she said that she had seen spanning the heavens above her campsite. The ranger had the great pleasure of informing this lady that, for the first time in her life, she had actually seen the Milky Way.
And now once again it's time for another of my science guy experiments. Let's say I'm looking at this beautiful scene on a calendar. It's a picture of snow-capped mountains in the background with stately evergreen trees in the foreground and a azure-blue sky. In the upper left-hand corner, an eagle is soaring majestically over the trees. I love eagles, so I decide that's the thing in the picture that most catches my attention. In fact, forget the rest of the picture, I'll just take a closer look at the eagle. So I bring him closer to my eyes and closer and now my nose is touching the calendar. I am totally focused on the eagle and I am suddenly cross-eyed!
I was speaking at a Bible conference, set right near the shore of a beautiful lake. I was responsible for speaking about eighteen times in six days, literally, so I was a pretty busy boy. But I did something that would have made my wife proud, even in spite of how busy I was. I took time to smell the flowers; well, at least to admire the flowers. I have to admit, I'm partially colorblind, but even I was struck by these rich purple flowers blooming all over this sprawling vine in the garden outside my window. The flowers seemed to be everywhere in the garden. I asked someone from the conference what I was looking at. He told me it's a Vinca vine. He said they had transplanted that vine from a pot to the soil of this garden. And I was told a Vinca vine doesn't produce any flowers when it's in a pot-only when you plant it in the ground. Well, what do you know?
