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I remember one time years ago when our area had a garbage strike. (It's not a great memory!) The garbage piled up in our garage while the sanitation folks figured out their deal, and it took a while. And it took awhile to get the smell out of our garage.
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Since we're not all military types, it's probably good to explain what a beachhead is before we talk about one. A beachhead is not where the beach begins. And it's not a guy who just thinks about getting to the beach all the time. In wartime, a beachhead is pretty serious business. It's a small piece of ground that you try to take as your first step in taking all the ground that your enemy holds.
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My friend Jim loves to wear this shirt that says, "I've been to the wilderness". That's what it says on the front. On the back it says, "I can handle anything." Sounds a little cocky maybe, but he did earn the right to wear the shirt. He went out on a two-week wilderness program where they pushed him, and all those on the trip, to go way beyond their limitations. Running for miles, climbing for hours with a heavy backpack, living off the land, blazing trails, enduring the heat, going solo for two days with almost nothing to live on. Hard? Yes. Fun? Not particularly. Worth it? Ask Jim. Or, better yet, read his shirt. "I've been to the wilderness. I can handle anything!"
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Man, did my wife and I grow up in two different worlds! While I was growing up in a little apartment on the South Side of Chicago, my future wife was living in the Ozarks in a tarpaper cabin, wallpapered with Montgomery Ward catalog pages to keep out the winter wind. They called that area "Trail's End", and it was. When her Dad got out of the service, his parents gave him some land where he literally bulldozed a road and then a lot out of the woods. I think my wife's early years sound a little like something out of Laura Ingalls Wilder or the Waltons, the old TV show.
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It used to be a lot simpler to take out the garbage. The only decision we had to make that day was to take it to the curb. Not so much anymore! Now you've got to make sure you don't put out any grass clippings or limbs with your regular trash. We recycle everything! And those items are supposed to be separated. When we lived in the Metropolitan New York area their rules about garbage disposal were even more complicated. My friend Craig had recently moved there and wasn't familiar with the regulations. He let his garbage pile up for the first few weeks with odoriferous results. He finally found the instructions on handling trash and he told me, "It wasn't that I didn't want to get rid of that garbage, I just didn't know how to."
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Sherry's family, who she loves very much, they live in Minnesota, and that's where Sherry lived. She had a home church and a place to work until she decided to move to Arizona. Why, you ask? Why would a young woman to-tally relocate her life to a place where she doesn't have a job and doesn't know many people? One reason: my youngest son. She was about to be his serious girlfriend. And Arizona would just happen to be where our son lived. He worked with Native American young people there. And it should come as no surprise that she wanted to be where the man she loves was. She rearrang-ed her whole life to be with him, and now she's our daughter-in-law!
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When Princess Diana died no one could have ever predicted the massive public outpouring of love and grief that came from the British people in the week following her death. Maybe you remember that sea of flowers that enveloped the front of Buckingham Palace and Diana's personal residence at Kensington Palace. You couldn't get anywhere near the gates. The flowers seemed to stretch out endlessly! Someone who had been close to the Princess said, "Diana had no idea she was loved like this." That's sad but not unique.
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All right, let's start with a little magic trick today. I need your imagination if you don't mind. Sitting on this table in front of me is this a paper bag, okay? Next to it is a glove. Here's the trick. My glove is going to pick up the paper bag. I have laid down the glove right next to the paper bag. Okay, "Glove, pick up the paper bag! Ah, Glove! Pick up the paper bag!" Are you surprised? Nothing is happening. Now it doesn't matter what I do, doesn't matter if I baptize this glove, get it confirmed or dedicated or rededicated. It's not ever going to pick up the paper bag!
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Driving in Mexico? Oh, that's an adventure. Actually, riding with someone who's driving is an adventure!
Some years ago when we had an office in Latin America, I was with our director of Latin American outreach. He was very skillfully and amazingly navigating the challenges of the traffic in his city. Don's little boy, John, was in the back seat and at one point our back seat helper reminded Daddy that he was supposed to be getting in the next lane for an upcoming tunnel! It took a little doing, but Don managed to get over there somehow, at which point little John in the back seat had a word for his father. This little voice said from the back seat, "Good job, Daddy!" See, John says that pretty often. He likes what his father does, and he tells him.
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I've had the privilege to being on a lot of Native American reservations. And somewhere along the way, I heard the story of that little boy. A missionary was visiting a series of villages and he came on this little boy who was actually taking care of a large flock of sheep. The missionary learned that the boy's dad had died and left him and his mother with the care of the sheep. The little guy was doing his best to be a lot more grown up than you'd expect a boy his age to be.
