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One sure way to finally be successful is to write a book about success. It doesn't have to be a book about your success. You can just study what made major corporations or some other leaders successful, and you can write about their success. It probably would be a bestseller.
In the days we live in, we are surrounded by angry people who are one provocation away from an explosion. It's apparent at times, by how they're enraged about seemingly small things. You know they already had to have a very full glass for it to take just a single drop to make them spill all over everybody. Our easily-triggered and quickly-provoked anger should scare us. Because rage crushes reason and makes us blind to the expensive consequences of our eruption.
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In ongoing attempts to establish more regular exercise in our lives, my wife and I had moved into this walking kick. And, you know, that was a good idea. Actually, my wife took the research approach, including reading books on walking, which I wasn't sure was necessary since I've been walking since I was about a year old. One of those books was by a man who literally walked across America. I was hoping that was not one of my wife's goals for our exercise program. I was intrigued, though, by an observation made by this super-walker. When someone asked him what the greatest obstacle was in his long hike across the country, (You want to guess?) he gave a pretty surprising answer. He said, "The little pebbles I got in my shoes."
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It just sounds weird: "Mount Everest is closed." Well, at the time, that was the headline. No one was going to climb that most iconic of all mountaineering quests, because 16 Sherpa guides were lost on the mountain, as blocks of ice as big as automobiles cascaded down on them.
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I invented this little game years ago to play with our two young grandsons. I call it Bible Charades. We tried it one Sunday afternoon during a visit to our house, and then they wanted to do it every time. It's pretty simple. Just write a brief description of several Bible stories on cards, and then the boys would take turns drawing a card and acting out the story with either their Daddy or me as their teammate. Whoever isn't playing is supposed to be guessing. My favorite was when the younger boy - who was three years old - was David and his tall Daddy was Goliath. Yeah. The little guy pretended that this dishtowel was his slingshot, and he spun it around his head - followed by Daddy holding his forehead and crashing dramatically to the living room floor. No talking is allowed. You can only act it out. One problem: our five-year-old grandson knew a lot more Bible stories than his three-year-old brother, which made the game pretty challenging and sometimes kind of frustrating for the little guy. The story that we hoped that he'd guess by our actions might be a story he doesn't even know!
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If you want to make friends fast in an airport sometime and fast, just stand there with a big Welcome Home banner. Yeah, we were contacted by a young woman who had been part of our Native American work in the past. She was going through a time of severe struggle and she really wanted to turn things around. So she asked us if she could come and spend some recovery time with our team in New Jersey at that time. We'd been praying for her, so we were wide open to her coming.
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My wife always said I usually try to cram in one more thing before I leave for an appointment. No, she was right. Yeah, she'd say that I usually try to make it up on the road, and sometimes I do have to plead guilty I guess. And it usually works okay if the weather's on my side. And then there are those very rainy days when it's a little tougher to hurry. You know, you're zipping down the highway at top speed, and suddenly you feel yourself losing control of the rear wheels. You ever had that happen to you? Yeah, it's what they call hydroplaning. The water builds up under those tires so that well, you're suddenly skiing. You're skimming along on water rather than on the pavement and the rear of your car starts to go somewhere you don't want it to go. Now, if that's ever happened to you, you know it is a scary feeling to start hydroplaning because, well, you're going so fast and you're starting to start losing control.
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Pete came to me with this very unusual request when we were freshmen in college together. He asked me who I thought were the five best girls to date in our class. (Just call me Dr. Love.) Well, I gave him my top five list; four of whom I had actually been out with on my mad "date them all" freshman rush.
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For years, Haiti's had a special place in the hearts of my wife and myself. We've been there sometimes. My wife went down there on a photography mission. It's always touched our hearts. And when it's in the news, like earthquakes etc. it really gets to us. You know, I remember some years ago when my wife brought back a strange souvenir from her visit. She came home with I guess you'd call it a bacterial souvenir from a mission trip there.
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I guess it might be nice to own a copy of the Declaration of Independence. It's not on my top ten list of things I'd like to have, but if it's cheap, why not? That's what Michael Sparks thought when he bought a copy of the Declaration in a thrift store. Yeah, he spent a whopping $2.48. What a deal! It turns out what he bought for $2.48 is one of the 200 "official copies" commissioned by John Quincy Adams in 1820. So, the man who bought it for $2.48, sold it for almost half a million dollars!
