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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!
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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.
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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!
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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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There's one kind of nice trait that seems to have infected every member of our family. It's how much we enjoy trying to just get the right gift for each other. So over the years you'd often hear the question, "What would you like for your birthday, or your anniversary, or for graduation, or Christmas?" And the least appreciated answer goes something like this, "I don't know. Anything is fine." That's usually what I would say. Great! I was hoping for something a little more specific. I need some guidance.
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Okay, word association test! Fruit salad. What did you think of? Well, it depends on whether or not you've been in the military. You see, if you haven't been in the military, you probably thought of some little pieces of apple, or melon in a bowl together. But if you've been in the military, maybe you think of something less edible than that kind of fruit salad. I heard from a Desert Storm veteran. I said, "What do you think of when I say "fruit salad"? He said, "Oh, ribbons and medals."
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It had been a long ministry weekend in Chicago, and as I settled into my seat on the airplane. I was looking forward to being back home in New Jersey. The going home part of the trip is always the best part. I was quite surprised, needless to say, when the pilot addressed the passengers and said, "Some of you folks may have noticed we've been going north for a while." Now, you don't have to be a geography whiz to know New Jersey is not north of Chicago. We should have been flying east all the time! Great, we've got a rookie navigator.
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For several years, we had a Latin American outreach base in Mexico where our Latin American version of a youth broadcast was recorded. My limited Spanish didn't get me very far in Mexico. I mean, how much meaningful communication can you have when all you know are words like grande and mucho? "You look grande today." Well, the Director of our Latin American Ministry at the time was a wonderful translator and he was my best hope of communicating while I was there. Needless to say, I always lit up when someone was fluent in English there. I could converse unassisted!
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I don't know how long Presidential candidates have had campaign songs, but I'll bet George Washington even had one! Now, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's was pretty famous, as it represented the Great Depression "Happy Days Are Here Again." Bill Clinton had a song for his 1992 campaign. In fact, he reached back to 1977 for his song "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." They used it so much people wanted to sing, "Please Stop Singing About Tomorrow." Now I don't know how you felt about the candidate, and I don't even know if you liked the song...but it's not a bad theme for your campaign!
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When our daughter came into our family, she had Mom and Dad all to herself. It was a wonderful life! Life was a little more complicated for our next child. He got to do what every second-born gets to do. He competed with the first born for Mom's and Dad's attention! He also had someone to measure everything by. Obviously, at every age our daughter could have a few more privileges, a little more money, a little more freedom. So when our son wanted a little different response from us on something, we would often hear sentences that began with the same few words "How come she gets to...?" - sound familiar? When in doubt, compare yourself with a brother or sister.
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We were on vacation and just made some new friends, Bill and Darlene. They lived on this beautiful farm. But not always. When they first moved to the south, they lived in a fairly primitive cabin along a river.
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I'll sure never forget my Grandmother Irene. She was one funny lady. She laughed a lot, she gave me money a lot, and she was the life of the party. Some people in our family think she was a big influence on my personality. That's not a very nice thing to say about a woman who is no longer here to defend herself, right? But there's no doubt my grandmother did have a great impact on my life. I almost never got to meet her though, because she had a serious bout with cancer before I was even born. But she made it and I got an awesome grandma out of the deal. It took some radical action on the part of the doctor to save her though. He went in and totally removed the cancer and the areas around it. It was painful, it left some scars, but I'm sure thankful that he did what he had to do to keep her alive.
