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Tuesday, August 1, 2017

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Spring was planting time on the little farm my wife, Karen, grew up on. And in her early years, that was no small job. Her Granddad actually would hitch up Betsy and Jack-who I thought might have been her cousins but actually Betsy and Jack are mules-and they would start plowing that hard, Ozark ground. Karen would follow behind in her bare feet as Granddad and his team turned up that dirt, broke up those big dirt clods, and smoothed out that broken soil. Then came the seeding…and then the waiting. At that point, it was pretty much up to God-the weather, the warmth, the moisture, and the sunlight. Then, when the corn finally matured, Granddad swung into action again with the big work of harvesting what God had grown. It was really a neat balance of what a man could do and what only God could do.

Monday, July 31, 2017

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For a long time, I have been fascinated with the story of the Titanic. The sinking of that seemingly "unsinkable" ship after a collision with an iceberg is filled with so much human drama that has inspired endless movies, books, and documentaries. Finding the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic fueled even greater interest and greater information than ever before. Some of the drama of those discoveries has been within our reach as the Titanic artifacts exhibit went across the country in some of America's leading museums. You could see many personal items recovered from the Titanic's debris field along with displays that recreated the feeling of being a passenger on that doomed ship. And now there's at least one permanent Titanic museum in the country. When I went into this one on the early tour, I was given a boarding pass with the name of a real person who'd been aboard that awful night. At the end of the exhibit, there's this big wall with the names of everyone aboard – first class, second class, third class, crew. Every person is either on the list that says "saved" or "lost." I looked hard for my name, and I discovered that I was one of the few crewmen who was "saved."

Friday, July 28, 2017

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Back in the day, millions of Americans visited the emergency room once a week - well, on television. That was a blockbuster TV hit called "ER" and it very convincingly took its viewers into the tension and crisis environment of a hospital emergency room. They kind of made you feel like you were there. Of course, they're not the only medical personnel involved in a crisis care situation. I was reminded of that the other day on the interstate as this ambulance passed us. Of course, the back has those big red letters: "AMBULANCE." But this particular ambulance had sort of a subtitle - the one that raised my eyebrows and made me smile. The whole sign on the back said, "ambulance - the real emergency room." OK!

Thursday, July 27, 2017

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When our oldest child was born, they didn't even let fathers go into the labor room. That was nice. Then when our second one was born, fathers must have gotten a little smarter. They let us go into the labor room, but not the delivery room. And by the time our third one was born, hey, fathers had really gotten smart! I was actively involved with the doctor in the delivery. But, of course, I couldn't just walk right into the delivery room. No! First, I had to do what the doctor and nurse had to do – scrub up! Oh yeah, they made sure I washed thoroughly with disinfectant. Then they covered every part of me but my hands and my eyes and my nose – and they put a mask over my mouth, a thoroughly ugly cap on my head and this goofy smock over my clothes. My only consolation was the doctor looked as geeky as I did. They gave me paper booties (That was cool! I still wear those.) to wear over my shoes, but I understood. They can't allow any dirt to infect that environment. You've to be clean to get in.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

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About every five years or so, I run into my scrapbook while I'm going through this closet. Oh, yeah, there's the geeky-looking, eighth-grader there, holding his county spelling bee trophy. Yea! And there's the chubby little Ronnie in his Indian outfit on a vacation in Minnesota. Yeah. And, the picture of our championship Bible Quiz Team. Now it's also a lot of fun when we pull out the old photos of our family. Decades of Christmas eves, scenes from scores and scores of vacation adventures, sons in football uniforms, a daughter all dressed up for her first recital. Ah, the memories. Now it isn't that we haven't had some not-so-great things happen. There was the automobile accident, the painful injuries, the bouts with various sicknesses. You know what? Somehow they just didn't make it into the memory book.

Monday, July 24, 2017

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I first noticed it one day when I was mowing the lawn-a little dent in the ground. Over a few weeks, that little dent became a growing sinkhole. The ground was literally collapsing. I asked a neighbor, who was an amateur "sinkholeologist" what caused this phenomenon. He told me it was the drought of rainfall that we'd been having. He said an underground spring had probably dried up. And that dried up the ground, and the roots above it-and my yard went boom.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

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Two words, but a valuable reminder about how important Mom is and why she is. Recently, I had occasion to stay at my son and daughter-in-law's house while I recovered from a painful injury. They set me up with a wonderful little "apartment" in their basement – recliner, remotes (of course), kitchenette. And like all the babies in our family, a night monitor. Now, I needed some help in the middle of the night, but I hadn't touched the pager. Suddenly, I hear my daughter-in-law's feet coming down the stairs. In my 3:00 AM haze, I said, "But how did you know?" She smiled and gave those two little words: "Mom ears".

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

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I felt kind of bad for our friend Peter. My wife, Karen, wanted him to raid the garbage for her. See, I've been there many times myself, believe me. But this time, they were driving around, Karen turned to Peter and his wife for help. They were driving past a gas station where Karen saw it-a big, green, silk plant, upside down in the dumpster. Too big for Karen to fetch, and too good, she thought, to leave there. So, my garbage picking honey turned to poor Peter, in his suit and tie, and asked him if he would make his way over to that dumpster. Well, he did, looking both directions, desperately hoping he could be invisible for a couple minutes. Sure enough, he pulled the thing out of the trash and put it in the back of our station wagon. This is a very secure man. And about that trashed plant...well, very soon it began to greet us day after day as we entered the reception area at our office. It's a classy-looking, silk Ficus plant, or that's what my wife told me. Karen saw something in it, even though it had been thrown away; something I can tell you I would have missed.

Monday, July 17, 2017

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I was with several members of our Team in the relentless evangelism schedule of what we called our "Make A Difference" Weekends. We were getting pretty tired and our minds were totally focused on our outreaches. In fact, so tired and so focused, that I forgot about a radio station that was calling me for a live interview that afternoon. Now, I had just awakened from a brief nap and the phone rang. Thinking it was one of our Team members, I jokingly answered, "Good morning"-at 4:00 in the afternoon. Somehow, I was able to rebound immediately and go enthusiastically into that interview and I don't think the folks on the other end knew I was even surprised by their call.

Friday, July 14, 2017

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Look, a lot of toys come and go with this year's fads. But there are a few classic toys that just keep showing up in generation after generation-like Play-Doh, for example. I mean, who hasn't either owned some Play-Doh or bought some for a child or tried to get it out of the carpet? I mean, look, it's great stuff! You take it out of its' can and it's in the shape of the can it came in. But that changes quickly, depending on what you want to make of it. You can make that colored clay round like a ball, or you can make it into a pancake, or you can make it into two or three objects with different shapes. Play-Doh just takes on whatever shape you want it to be.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

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There were a lot of dramatic images from the military action known as Operation Iraqi Freedom – but I think few were more dramatic than the middle-of-the-night rescue of a prisoner of war, Jessica Lynch. If you were around at the time, you probably remember it. As Coalition forces advanced quickly from the Kuwaiti border to the capital of Baghdad, Pfc. Lynch's unit of Army maintenance troops made a wrong turn, ended up in the middle of an enemy ambush, and no one knew Jessie Lynch's fate. She was listed as missing in action. But acting on the tip of Iraqi sympathizers, a Special Operations Force fought their way into the hospital where she was imprisoned, found her, and quickly carried her to a waiting helicopter. And then, they had to fight their way out, too. But Private Lynch was safe – saved by rescuers who risked it all to bring her out.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

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We have some wonderful Native American friends in the Northwest, and during one of our reservation outreaches, they honored us by inviting us to stay in their home. We had a great stay, but I did have to learn a custom that was new to me. When you walk in their front door, you are greeted with a pile of shoes. Now, in many Native American homes in that area, it's expected that your shoes won't make it past the door. Which makes you think about what socks you're going to wear that day for sure; probably not the ones that look like Swiss cheese. Actually, to come into the house with your shoes on is to really dishonor your hosts. And anyone who has had to sweep or vacuum the trail left behind by dirty shoes knows it's not just about honor. It really makes sense to not track dirt into a clean house!

Monday, July 10, 2017

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Allison and her daughter and two friends were out for a trail ride in a remote area. They were to rendezvous later, actually, in the afternoon with other family members at their overnight campsite. When it came time to head back, they were somewhere on the side of a mountain, picking their way through very rocky ground. No matter which way they went, they couldn't find the main trail that would take them back down the mountain. They could see where they needed to be, but the terrain was too rugged to get down any other way. The hours wore on, dark began to fall, and Allison's two friends finally made an attempt to get to a cabin they could see. Well after dark, Allison and her daughter finally saw flashlights moving up the mountain. Her friends returned with the man from that cabin. He helped them pick their way to a point where they could actually get right back on the trail. Much to their surprise, while they had been lost, they had been very close to the trail all along!

Friday, July 7, 2017

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When you're little, your parents seem immortal. They're not. Sooner or later, most of us get the kind of call that I got, and maybe you've gotten – a parent is gone. In my case, the hospital called to say my Mom had been admitted due to a medical emergency, but her body gave out and she was gone. No matter what the circumstances, the death of someone you love is always a shock, even if you knew maybe it was coming. When you're the only living child and your other parent is already gone, there's this numbing list of arrangements that you suddenly have to make. Thankfully, that wasn't the case with my Mom. Mercifully, funeral arrangements had been made and paid for years in advance.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

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When you grow up in the city like I did, your neighborhood usually has a neighborhood bully. Ours did. His name? Boomer! For the little kids on our block, Boomer was like the original terrorist. He'd beat us up for nothing, he'd take our stuff and generally intimidate us. One day I got tired of it! Yep! See, he took my White Sox cap. I was just a little guy. I was no match for him. But I walked boldly down our street to where no kid dared to go - to the corner apartment building where Boomer lived. I can picture it to this day. I went to the back porch, I knocked on the door, and I asked for my hat back. You say, "What a brave little boy you were." There is one detail I left out - my father went with me. And that made all the difference. See, Boomer was bigger than I was. But my father was bigger than Boomer was!

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

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Years ago I heard a friend tell about a scene from his childhood that he never forgot. My friend was around on that black day in 1929 that marked the beginning of the Great Depression. One of the great traumas of America's financial collapse, of course, was that many banks just went under almost overnight. Well, my friend literally remembered seeing a neighbor at the locked gates of his bank, and he was literally pounding his fists bloody on those gates, screaming at the top of his lungs, "Give me my money! Give me my money!" There was no money to give.

Monday, July 3, 2017

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Mr. Mom! That's what I became when my wife, Karen, was sick with a serious case of Hepatitis some years ago. She was confined to bed for a few months, actually, and we all realized as never before of course the difference that she made in our lives. Now, one little visible evidence of that was our kitchen sink, which seemed to take on a life of its own during those months. Oh yeah, we continued to do our usual good job of getting dishes dirty, but somehow no one was getting around to getting them clean! I remember going into the kitchen for what should have been a simple exercise - getting a drink of water, right? How hard is that? Well, fat chance! I looked everywhere for a glass. Oh, there were plenty of glasses - dirty ones in the sink. I mean a clean glass – not to be found. It was a frustrating search. I was searching for something clean to use and I couldn't find anything.

Friday, June 30, 2017

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Hey, you could use a good fish story today, right? Once upon a time there were these beautiful fish who lived five miles under the ocean. How do I know? They were the subject of a PBS television special. So this is a for real fish story. Now, because these fish are really striking – I mean they are incredibly colorful – some folks thought they might look good in someone's tropical fish aquarium. So they tried to bring these fish to the surface. They didn't make it. They blew up when they got near the surface! They were designed to live under that pressure at the bottom. Well, no happy ending, except they're going to leave the rest of them where they belong – five miles under the ocean because that's where they were created to be!

Thursday, June 29, 2017

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If you've got a tie that's gone out of style, hang onto it. It will probably be back in style eventually and you can be cool again. In fact, a lot of clothes are in, then out, then eventually back in again. But it's not just clothes - it can happen to toys, too. Like that classic toy - the yo-yo! They were popular when I was a kid! But I heard that yo-yo's, you know, have made a comeback in the past. In this age of computers and high-tech video games, you know what? Kids are still interested in that little round toy at the end of the string. It's great. And you learn the same old tricks: "walk the dog" and "around the world". I feel like I'm in a time warp! I never could master all that fancy stuff. But there was always one thing I could count on with my trusty yo-yo. When it got to the end of the string, it always started coming back to me! Unless, of course, it wasn't attached; which case it kept on going.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

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Now, here was a bothersome headline a while back from USA Today, "Old Faithful Gets Fickle." What? They were referring to that famous geyser in Yellowstone National Park. As long as any of us tourists could remember, that 140 foot tower of steam erupted faithfully about every 66 minutes. But, something was not right all of a sudden this report said. There was a day that the eruption predicted for 12:11 p.m. didn't occur until 12:18 p.m. One predicted for 2:46 p.m. jumped the gun at 2:38 p.m. So "Tommy tourist" who was counting on "Old Faithful" faithfulness might go for a hot dog and say "Hey! I've still got ten minutes," and miss the whole thing. The problem - underground shifts caused by minor earthquakes, and vandalism by visitors who threw everything from chicken bones to underwear into the geysers hole! One Yellowstone geologist actually said this "There's a good chance that five years from now, or five days, or five hundred years, "Old Faithful" is going to be totally unpredictable, or it's not going to erupt anymore altogether." Wow! So, "Old Faithful" becomes "Old Unpredictable."

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