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Monday, May 2, 2016

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Your fortieth birthday! I understand it's one of those milestone birthdays, especially for women who don't necessarily welcome it I guess. They dread hitting that forty mark. That's what I understand. Now, when my wife hit her fortieth, no big deal, man. She was cool. No trauma, no counseling, no plastic surgery, no sobbing. I just hope I can handle my fortieth birthday that well. (It's a good thing I'm not talking about integrity today.) Well, it was our son who threw the curve ball. Yeah, he was about 12, and a few weeks after Mom's big 4-0, he announced a calculation that he had, for some reason, just concocted. He said, "Hey Ma, did you know you've been alive for 14,686 days?" What! Forty years? She could handle that, but 14,686 days? That sounds prehistoric!

Friday, April 29, 2016

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Okay, it's Wild Kingdom trivia quiz time. What is an emu? If you guessed a big old Australian bird that can't fly, you're right. They can't fly, but they can produce oil. Yeah! Boy, my wife, she was glad they do. She had been having some severe pain in her back and arm. We decided to go ahead with our plans to spend a few days away with our family. The place we were staying at had bottles of emu oil for sale, of all things, at the cash register. I'd never heard of emu oil. And I wasn't jumping up and down to buy some, actually. But the owners said it might help give my wife a little relief. So, "Hello, emu oil." Now it wasn't a miracle cure, but we do think it helped. I would just put a blob of it on her back and gently rub it into her back and arm. Actually, that blob of emu oil wouldn't have done much good just sitting on her back. You had to rub it in for it to really help.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

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There's no greater gift our daughter and son-in-law have ever given my wife and me than the little guy that was our first grandchild and the ones that have come since. From the night he was born, our hearts were all wrapped around that precious new life and they still are even though he's grown up. We would jump at the chance to babysit, and believe me; our rates were well below the market. But eventually, we took him home, and it was our turn to relax. That's the cycle of life. I had my chance to be the father of a child when my children were born. A grandchild is grand, but he's really not your child.

Monday, April 25, 2016

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Valentine's Day! That's the season when all of us think about the love we found, or the love we lost, or the love we're looking for. And, man, people are looking! Did you know there are over 5,000 dating websites, including Match.com, OKCupid, along with SeniorPeopleMeet, Farmers Only and DateACowboy.com?

Friday, April 22, 2016

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It was always nice when we got to spend a little time at the little country place we inherited from my wife's grandparents. It's a pretty big treat for a city boy like me, and a real education. Now we don't have any cows ourselves, but that place is surrounded by cows on all sides. It made me feel all peaceful when I could sit on the porch and see the cows inside the fence across the road, just quietly grazing or sitting in the shade. It didn't make me feel peaceful when I got up one morning and saw one of our neighbor's cows in our front yard grazing and leaving like souvenirs of her visit.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

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Well, I'm happy to report to you that I have no problem with the paparazzi. Those celebrity photographers have been very respectful of my privacy. In fact, they could care less about anything I do. But, in reality, these freelance celebrity photographers have been the object of some big-time criticism. I mean, think of their pursuit of Princess Diana which some think contributed to the circumstances of her tragic death.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

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I got this wonderful and unusual invitation. Gail, one of our ministry's most dedicated volunteers, invited us to attend her baptism. Now Gail has known and served Jesus for many years, but somehow she had never followed her Lord in His example of being baptized. Part of that might be because she always felt very self-conscious of being in front of a group of people. But when she felt her Lord's urging to take this step, she went for it.

Monday, April 18, 2016

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As our family was growing up and we were driving somewhere for vacation, my travel philosophy was very simple and very male. The purpose of the trip is to get there! Why waste unnecessary time getting there, right? So we would drive along some long stretches and we'd have gas, rest, and food stops down to a well timed drill. We called it "the drill". But, during the busy vacation seasons there was a down side to this and it came at the end of when your body's saying, "Put me down, now!" See, since I didn't know exactly how far we'd be able to make it, I couldn't make a motel reservation. So, I got off where there were some choices of reasonable motels and I drove in hoping I could be horizontal within say fifteen minutes. "No chance." I hate words like these. "Sorry, we're full." Or those dreaded words, "No Vacancy." Or the slightly more comforting sign, "Sorry." They all mean the same thing – no room, I'm not getting in.

Friday, April 15, 2016

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You remember the first day of school when you were little? New crayons, new pencils with sharp points, a new notebook with nothing written in it, maybe even some clothes you'd never worn before. Then as you got older, that first day of school meant there were no grades in the teacher's book yet, no absences, no tardies. It's a nice feeling. You know what? You have a lifetime of those first days!

Thursday, April 14, 2016

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I was out of the country, and my wife was visiting her father, along with our daughter and son-in-law. My wife convinced her Dad to hike with them back into the woods to see the spring where they used to go to get water when she was a little girl. Eventually, they came upon a scene that was imprinted on her memory like a photograph – that spring gushing from the rocks, just beneath a cave above it.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

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When we lived in New Jersey, twelve straight days of rain was pretty unusual. But I remember this time when we got to take our turn at almost two weeks without sunshine. For most of us, it was just a soggy nuisance. But for some people across town, it meant trading in their car for a rowboat. I turned on the news one night as they were talking about a roof that had caved in on a store in our town. It was the pharmacy I went to all the time. Apparently, water had collected until it just broke through the ceiling, and it literally washed one customer out the door like a raging river! I was in the pharmacy prior to the roof caving in and I noticed that they had put out a couple of buckets on the floor, catching drips from some leaks in the ceiling. First, some little leaks – then suddenly the roof caved in!

Monday, April 11, 2016

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It's always a good idea to lock your luggage when you're flying commercially. It's especially a good idea if you're going out of the country. It's an even better idea if you know where the keys for your suitcase locks are before you try to lock them! I was packing in a rush for my flight to Mexico. I had my padlocks ready to go. I couldn't find the keys. Now with only minutes left before I had to leave, we launched this all out desperate search. We checked drawers – no keys. We looked in creative places – no keys! So I was resigned to leaving with unlocked suitcases and a garment bag, when I zipped this garment bag shut and I found the keys. Someone had been wise enough to attach them to the zipper that we use to lock...right there! What I had been looking for everywhere, it had been right in front of me all along!

Friday, April 8, 2016

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As many of us northerners know, the beginning of Spring does not necessarily coincide with the official date on the calendar, unfortunately! For some of us it's Spring when we see the first Robin, or the first blossom, or green grass. For me, it's Spring the day the forsythia comes out. They appear suddenly. I'm driving along the highway one day, they're not there, and then the next day there's yellow everywhere! I want to yell out the window, "Hey everybody! It's Spring today!" Actually none of this Spring explosion of color is really sudden. Those flowers have been getting ready to bloom for weeks; it's just that I couldn't see them until now.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

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If you think all American history is boring, you need to check out the greatest American adven¬ture ever – the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Just as America bought the Louisiana Purchase and suddenly owned much of the West, President Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis to put together an expedition to explore this unknown territory. Imagine 30 men, going where no non-Native Americans had ever gone, see¬ing what no non-Native American had ever seen – like the Rocky Mountains, animals like antelope and prairie dogs, tribes that had never been contacted.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

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Look, you can't study all the time when you're in college; you need a little diversion, right? For me it was that little social action group that I put together. It's called The Vigilantes. Yeah, our social action consisted of very strategic maneuvers – otherwise known as practical jokes. One of them turned out to be very impractical, actually.

Monday, April 4, 2016

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Governors' desks were vacant. Senators' offices were empty. They might as well have just put a sign on the door – "Gone to Iowa." Yep! The election season had begun a few months ago. Then they went to New Hampshire and South Carolina and on and on in the wild and crazy 2016 Presidential election year.

Friday, April 1, 2016

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Our grandson loves to take home souvenirs from visits to our house: Rocks, shiny rocks, colorful rocks. So why not a rock tumbler for him for Christmas? Today, it's running full speed ahead tumbling rocks. For three weeks! For goodness sake, how long does it take to turn a blah rock into a beautiful rock anyway?

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

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Denise moved to New Jersey to join our ministry team from Florida. Hello, climate shock! Now she grew up in Detroit, so winter wasn't exactly a new idea to her. But her last years in Florida showed her there was another way to live, like not having winter. It was in the early days of April when she came into a team meeting with this big smile on her face because of something she had seen over the weekend – a robin.

Friday, March 25, 2016

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Thirty-three years. That's how long my wife and I had been married when a friend asked her how she had put up with me for 33 years and she said, "I've only seen him for four of them!" Maybe that's a secret of a happy marriage. Actually, I know another secret for every husband: remember your anniversary.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

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Part of our ministry team works on a remote Native American reservation in the Southwest. In fact, our sons launched this ground-breaking outreach to Native young people many years ago now. The ministry at that reservation is now part of our bigger initiative, "On Eagles Wings".

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