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Friday, October 30, 2015

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If you come into my office, there'll be a hanging up on the wall there. It says, "Core Values." If you walk around our headquarters, many places you will see that same framed picture up there of "Core Values." You see, many years ago when we were first starting our ministry, I thought maybe we should take a look at how ministry was done in the Word of God. So I did some research, and within the best of our ability, that Bible study came down to about twelve core values. How many times we're in a meeting, "Well, what should we do?" We'll point and say, "Look at number 5. Look at number 10." And the decision was made years ago about what we should do, even though we hadn't faced this situation. Your core values - your non-negotiables - pre-made your decisions. It makes life a whole lot simpler.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

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I think I remember when I first heard the word "guru". That's g u r u. It was way back in the 1960's when the Beetles went to see that Hindu mystic. I think he was called the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Not someone I would want to trust with my future, but that's who they went to. Now the term is used a lot more broadly today of a spiritual leader that people listen to, and follow, and quote all the time. Guru - that's supposed to be a Hindu concept. Oh, Christians have theirs as well.

Friday, October 23, 2015

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Most young married couples make some purchases that turn out to be a transaction that they are not proud of. Remember something you bought back then that ended up being a mistake? My wife and I were marriage rookies when we bought that refrigerator. We were also pretty broke. We saw an ad in the paper for a cheap refrigerator. I was getting tired of just putting another block of ice in the sink in the kitchen. (Not really.) Well, we picked up the refrigerator, we sat it up in the kitchen and it worked!

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

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It's not uncommon for me to meet a truck driver who says, "Yeah, as I travel across the country I know what station you're on and we listen to that program. I listen to Christian radio across the country." Well, that's nice to hear. And so I've learned from truckers, of course, that CB radio is very important to them. Actually, a few years ago, there was a national craze of CB radio. And we actually picked up some words in our vocabulary from that time. The CB invasion left us with words like a policeman is called a "Smokey." Your name is your "handle." When everything's OK, you're supposed to say, "10/4 good buddy." I like the phrase that CB'ers use when they want to see if you're tuned in. They say something like this, "You got your ears on?"

Monday, October 19, 2015

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One Christmas our kids gave my wife and me a pretty great compliment. They let us know they wanted us to live longer. Isn't that nice? The way they made their point was to chip in and buy us a treadmill. They put Hebrew words on there, "L'chaim - to life!" They figured it was good for our longevity to have a means of exercise that was convenient, all weather, and time-efficient. So since then I've been trying to put in my time on that old treadmill. I know it's doing some good, but it is frustrating for a man like me. I'm a man of action! I like progress. There's lots of motion, a lot of energy exerted, a lot of sweat, but after all that, you're in the same spot you were before all that. It just seems like you're not going anywhere!

Friday, October 16, 2015

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There's nothing like a famous divorce to sell newspapers. You know, people put together the words fault and divorce, and an American public collectively says, "Oh, tell me more! Whose fault? Tell me more! Put it in the newspapers! Put it on the news!" So the press obliges us, and rumors become front page headlines, especially as you're checking out of the supermarket. There are speculations about every gory detail: financial, historical, interpersonal, and extramarital.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

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We were in a radio studio getting ready to tape a live youth broadcast. One of the things that made this program exciting is that we had a live studio audience of young people. This particular night a youth group was coming to be that audience.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

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Curtis and his Great Puppy Adventure. That was the lunch time talk around our office when one of our team members became the proud owner of eight new puppies – thanks to his trusty dog, Sister. Each day seemed to bring a new episode; especially as Curtis would compare the way of the puppy with the ways of people. He told us one day about trying to replenish their food. His intention was to load up their container with a lot of good things. But they really made it very difficult. See, the puppies were too busy fighting over two little pieces that were left in the corner.

Monday, October 12, 2015

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My story! Yeah, that's what made kids want to play with me when I was little. Wait a minute! Is this how "A Word With You" got started? No, I love to make up stories. I don't make them all up, you know, I do tell you true stories too. But I was giving my friends parts in a story that I would make up and they would act out. But I always left it at an exciting part that was this cliff-hanger so they'd want to come back tomorrow and see how it turned out. I also had some time, then, to figure out how to get out of the predicament I had just created.

Friday, October 9, 2015

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You'd think "teenager" is a disease instead of an age. I mean, the way parents talk about it when they suddenly have a teenager on their hands. You know, they get this apprehensive look on their face, and they say, "My daughter's about to be a teenager!" You can hear the pain in their voice; the fear. Thirteen is a tough year. Sometimes we want them to go away somewhere and come back like when they're fifteen or sixteen! Not really, we really do love them. But when kids navigate through junior high and those kind of years, parents often look at one another – my wife and I did – and say four letters which stand for four words, "T.T.S.P."

Thursday, October 8, 2015

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I was in mid-shave one morning, all lathered up, attacking my whiskers with my razor and I heard a little "bang" down the street, and the power went out. Now fortunately I was still able to find my face in the dark; it's about where it always was. But I knew the rest of the morning was going to be very interesting. See, it wasn't just a circuit breaker. No, no, the power was out on the whole block. Well, we won't be having a toasted bagel today! No hair dryer for my wife, no lamp to read my Bible by. Why? That grey cylinder that hangs on that telephone pole down the street. We had no power because the transformer had blown!

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

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That night our car was totaled in an accident, and thank God, we weren't. We were hit by a drunk driver, and I had no car to get around in for the month of December, which was a very busy month for the youth ministry that I worked for at that time. I received a call from a friend one day. Much to my surprise, he said, "Ron, could we lend you a car for the next few weeks while we're in Florida." This was like a huge answer to prayer. I said, "Well, bring me the oldest one you have."

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

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Michelle and Tara - they were the darlings of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Michelle Kwan was favored to leave Nagano with the coveted gold medal for women's figure skating. Fifteen-year-old Tara Lipinski was widely expected to win the silver as the second greatest female skater in the world. But, to the surprise of most of the world, Tara skated to the gold as the youngest skating gold medalist in Olympic history up to that time. Michelle Kwan went home with the silver. One morning afterwards, one commentator said of Tara Lipinski, "She was too young, too immature, too unrefined. It wasn't her turn. The reason Tara Lipinski couldn't win the gold medal is the reason it hangs around her neck today: She was a kid."

Friday, October 2, 2015

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There are five Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, John - and the Christian. Most people never read the first four. That observation, made a long time ago, could not be more true today.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

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Boom! Suddenly all the lights went out in the conference center where we were staying, just as we were all making our way out of our rooms and down this long hallway to breakfast. No windows. The hallway was longer than usual that morning because it was totally dark. Turns out the entire region experienced a power failure that morning. Because a squirrel got into a relay station and gnawed through a cable. That's fried squirrel and lights out.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

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If you've ever been in an athlete's locker room, because you were playing or because you were working with the team, you know there is something very distinctive about the aroma in a locker room. And I don't think there will ever be a best selling fragrance, for example, called Essence of Locker Room. No, see, athletes carry into that room all the accumulated odors of sweat and dirt from their exercising. Fortunately, they leave their odors there if they get a shower every day; which they had better. And you'll be able to tell if they haven't! That's even more important if you live in a locker room like you and I do.

Monday, September 21, 2015

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As a kid, I often rode my bike up to the old theater on 79th Street for the Saturday afternoon flick. But this day was different. They handed me this strange-looking pair of glasses made of cardboard with tinted plastic lenses. Those goofy-looking glasses opened up a whole new world where the events in a movie no longer just stayed flat on the screen. They leaped off the screen and right into your face. Hello, 3-D!

Thursday, September 24, 2015

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If you've driven across America much, you might have seen a sign at one point that says "Wall Drug Store". It's in Wall, South Dakota. They advertise all over the country. I was even in Singapore and I saw an arrow pointing West. It said something like "Wall Drug Store 10,000 miles." This once little drug store in an unknown town grew into a major tourist attraction. On some days I've heard they'll draw like 20,000 people! But it wasn't always that way.

Friday, September 18, 2015

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I think my mother imprinted this on my brain when I was very young, "Don't go out with a fever." That was sort of a definition of sick at our house, as in so sick you can't go to school. The decision was actually made by the thermometer. Now, just to show you how bright I was as a child (I hate to tell you this), there was one day I really wanted to stay home from school, so I sat on a hot radiator in our apartment to raise my temperature. You probably don't even want to listen any more. If any kids are listening, do not try this at home (if you could find a radiator). It will not give you a fever, but it will shall we say keep you from sitting down all day at school!

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

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I hope your world map, if you have one, is one you bought recently. Because the map is changing so rapidly! I remember when our daughter went on a Gospel music team a few years go - some years ago now - to Estonia, right after the breakup of the Soviet Republic. We didn't know a lot about it then. But it was one of the Baltic Republics that had become part of the Soviet Union and now was part of a great independents movement within the Soviet Union and then a country of their own. Well, then we were hearing about Estonians, and Latvians, and Lithuanians, and Palestinians, and Armenians, because the world isn't necessarily being defined any more by those national boundaries that somebody set up after a war sometime. The world is having an ethnic explosion! It's supposed to.

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