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Not long ago, someone told me about a pastor who stood at the pulpit one Sunday and announced this to his people, "Folks, I have some bad news, some good news, and some bad news." He had everyone's attention. "The bad news is that the roof on this church is shot. We have to replace it. But the good news is - we have the money. The bad news is - it's in your wallets!"
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"Wake up, kids!" We were in this campground - 3:30 in the morning. You ask, "What were you doing to your kids?" Well, I had planned a trip up Cadillac Mountain. I had been told this was the first place you could see the sunrise on the East Coast. I wanted to see this. I thought this would be a great adventure for my wife and my kids. Well, they weren't as enthused as I was, especially when I woke them up at 3:30. Oh, but I thought ahead. I bought donuts the night before, so when they woke up I stuffed a donut in each mouth so they wouldn't wake up the campground. Then we started my well-planned adventure up Cadillac Mountain.
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We had a home of our own! The ministry I was working with in the New York area that is. We rented a facility for many years, and then God provided this rambling old home that we called our headquarters and the home of our ministry finally. And, it was a great gift, but it took a lot of work to get it in shape, like most old homes do. So, a lot of friends came in to help us with painting, and wallpapering, and electrical work. And then we were in, but one big job remained. See, the outside looked kind of shabby. It very much needed a good paint job. The problem was that our staff didn't have the time, and I'm not sure they really had the ability to do it right. And we for sure didn't have the real equipment to do a big painting job.
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Centuries ago, Tyre was one of the great cities of the Middle East, strategically located on the Mediterranean Sea...until it was leveled by a foreign invader. Actually, there was an ancient Biblical prophecy that Tyre would not only be leveled, which was unimaginable at the time, but that the site would be so swept of Tyre's rubble that fishermen would one day lay their nets there to dry. The city was gone, but the rubble still remained until Alexander the Great came along. By that time, Tyre had moved to an island offshore, confident that they would now be unreachable by any future invader. They underestimated Alexander. He ordered his engineers to use the rubble of the old city to build a causeway to the island, and that's what they did. And Alexander and his army marched across the bridge that was made from rubble and won what seemed to be an impossible victory. So the site of ancient Tyre was, in fact, swept clean. And in modern times, fishermen have (Well, you guessed it.) dried their nets where the city once was.
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Because I travel so much, I watch the Weather Channel, or something like it, a lot. I just sat back, this one time, in amazement as I watched them track this monster low pressure system moving across the country. By the time it reached the Eastern United States, that low pressure system stretched on the Weather Channel map from the Maritime Provinces in Canada all the way to Mexico! I mean, it was massive! And everywhere it went, it left flooding rains or heavy snows or even violent weather. In Minnesota, for example, this low pressure system registered the lowest barometric pressure ever. All across the eastern half of the country, the news reported massive power outages, cancellations, delays. For millions of Americans, whatever they had planned just didn't happen.
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Well, I watched three of our children run on this track that they call "high school senior." Oh we know about the disease. It's a creeping disease called senioritis. I've seen it for years with other teenagers, and then finally we got to watch it in our own home. It begins with the sense of "Okay, I'm a senior now! High school is my past. I don't care about high school any more even though I have another year." At best a senior just sort of slacks off until graduation. Or at worst, he or she becomes irresponsible and maybe even destructive. Senioritis? It doesn't bring out the best in anybody at any age.
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Jerry and I were best friends in high school, and then we didn't see each other for several years. But we were able to get together again when we found out that he and his wife had moved to an apartment in New York City. He was training to become a 747 pilot for a major airline back when that was a brand new plane. Karen and I went in to have dinner at their apartment, and we realized that Jerry and Gail were making the big bucks. They had an exclusive apartment, expensive furniture and a brand new Cadillac. Jerry took us down to the high-security garage to show the Caddy to us with a lot of pride. A couple months later, they drove out to our little apartment in a New Jersey suburb. We didn't live in a fancy neighborhood, but you know, it wasn't a bad neighborhood. Jerry had to park his Cadillac where we parked our un-Cadillac - on the street. We prepared a nice dinner, but Jerry couldn't enjoy it. He couldn't enjoy the conversation we tried to have after dinner. The whole time he was a nervous wreck. Every five minutes or so he would leave the conversation, go over to the window, and check on his Cadillac! I assured him it would be OK, but no, no. He spent the whole night worrying about losing his expensive car. At first, I thought Jerry owned a Cadillac. It turned out that a Cadillac owned Jerry!
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It was one of the dumbest things I'd done in a long time. It was years ago. I was involved in this intense ministry on a Native American reservation. That was not the dumb thing. What was dumb was, I was missing a lot of sleep but I decided to drive. That was dumb.
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Few people captured the American imagination like America's first astronauts. That's why, for many of us, names like John Glenn are on a list of 20th Century heroes. John Glenn was, of course, one of the first men to ride a rocket into space. Then, as a "senior citizen" he amazed the world by doing it again. So when John Glenn gave advice to modern space shuttle astronauts, he's got credentials! I love what he is reported to have told the Columbia astronauts before what turned out to be their last flight. He said, "Hey, don't forget to look out the window!"
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My wife and I were out for a Sunday afternoon drive, and we saw a very strange contradiction. There was this church, and there were long stairs leading up to the entrance, and one lady, all alone, at the door. She was trying every door to get in that church and they were all locked. She was frustrated. Now, what was the contradiction? Well, the name of the church - Our Lady of Perpetual Help. My wife said, "You know, this reminds me of a scene I saw when I was in Haiti." She said, "I was right near a church and there was this very gaunt woman, maybe starving to death, and weeping at the door of this church. And she looked like she was desperate to get in and every door was locked. She literally was beating her fists bloody on the door and there was no response."
