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Easter night millions of Americans tuned in to Jesus, like they did two years ago with "The Bible" miniseries on cable TV. Except this time, "A.D. - The Bible Continues" was on a major network. I was one of those millions who was watching on Easter, plunged into the world-changing events of that first Good Friday and Easter.
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I checked my suitcase at the airport, and then I see it disappear as the conveyor belt carries it beyond the curtain into that black hole called the luggage zone. I sometimes wonder how my bag is going to be handled. Now, I don't know exactly what baggage handlers do, but I do know that Bertha, (that's the name I gave my suitcase since we spend so much time together) may get tossed or buried, or squished.
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I was 12 years old when I was baptized. And I thought getting in that baptismal tank at our church was hard! Well, my wife was nine years old when she was baptized, and she grew up in the Ozarks where they baptized folks the John the Baptist way - in the creek (or crick).
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Years ago in college, our son and a young lady friend of his decided they needed to have an RDT. I know it sounds like an injection or like bug spray. But it actually had to do with what was going on between them. See, men and women at the college that they attended often would have an RDT with someone. And I guess history does repeat itself, because I actually had one with my future wife one night many years ago. We didn't call it that, but that's what it was. I told her this: "I'm just sick and tired of just having a brother/sister relationship. I want it to be more." I risked it all that day.
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My schedule? Oh, forget it. It's ridiculous! So much so I often can't get to stores before they close. And banks just don't seem to have schedules that are made for guys like me. Here I am after banker's hours with nothing in my wallet but pictures of my family. But, listen, a great thing happened! The ATM was invented, the ATM card just for people like us. What a concept! Any time of the day or night I can go in with an empty wallet and use that card to instantly access my account and walk out with something in my wallet. Good deal.
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Hunting season has always been a pretty big deal for my friend, Stan. Actually, he was a young man the day that he and his cousin were on a trip that turned out to be one of their more memorable trips - all because of the rattlesnake. Yeah, they were deep in the woods turkey hunting when they heard that telltale rattle behind them. Stan turned, fired his gun, and I don't mean to be crude, but he actually shot the head off the rattlesnake.
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Velcro Man! That's what my wife and I nicknamed one of our good friends. And Jack, if you happen to be listening, I'm sorry you have to hear about this through the radio. Jack is Velcro Man! Everywhere we look in his house, his vehicle, his studio, we find a problem solved by Velcro; that special fabric tape that has hundreds of little hooks on one side and loops on the other side. Man, when you can connect them, they stick together!
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My thumb is not and probably never will be green, but I think my friend Mel was born with a green thumb. He has one of the most beautiful fruit and vegetable gardens I think I've ever seen. And more than once I've literally asked him to take me on a tour of his garden. Now, city boy always learns a lot in that garden. On the last time, I think, we toured (which was a while back) he showed me a garden spider at work, for example. Actually, it wasn't at work, it was at dinner. It was just finishing filet of grasshopper; the latest insect to be caught in his web.
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My wife and I knew we were going to be spending our lives together a long time before we announced it to the rest of the world. But our schooling demanded that we have a long courtship and a long engagement, which honestly we're grateful for unto this day. Except for the two summers we had to be apart a lot. They were tough! You know what helped though? The letters.
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Back in Kindergarten we all had to play a little instrument in this band our teacher put together. I got to feeling the kids with the musical ability got nice things to play. Looking back, I realize that those of us who were musically incompetent were assigned to "play the sticks." I got two drum sticks. All we had to do was hit the floor with them. See? Yeah, it didn't take a whole lot of ability.
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Sometimes I think my schedule looks like an episode of Mission Impossible. Some years ago, I was speaking for the Billy Graham Crusade Committee for two pre-crusade leadership rallies. They were in two completely different locations on the same Saturday morning. One was in the heart of Philadelphia and one was in an outlying suburb. They were scheduled back-to-back, and we had to make a very flying trip when I finished speaking in the city to get to the suburbs.
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My wife and I had a very long honeymoon; well, let's just say for a lot of years now. Our honeymoon was in its early years when we got some very scary news. The doctor said that my wife might have a very serious disease. She had a routine physical for her job, and the chest x-rays revealed some suspicious dark spots on her lung. We got that report on a Friday, and we had to wait until Monday to get the final results. It might have been one of the longest weekends of our lives!
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When your life moves as fast as mine does, your food has to often move pretty fast too. As in those drive-thru orders at fast food restaurants. Now, I know the menu pretty well, and this particular day my order was pretty predictable, including my drink, which was usually an iced tea.
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Patty's true love, Tom, was coming to visit in a few days. She was excited, but not excited enough to clean her room of course. See, Tom lives in Ohio. Patty's a friend of ours who lived down the street from us in New Jersey. All week long Mom had gotten on to Patty for not cleaning her room, at least so she could find the floor.
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I was going through the all too frequent ritual of standing by an airport luggage carousel waiting for Big Bertha. (No, that's not someone I was traveling with. That's what I've named my suitcase because we've spent so much time together.) And suddenly the monotony was broken for all of us by this really cute scene. Here comes one of those luggage carts that look sort of like a big grocery cart without the big basket. Pushing it was this very little boy, barely able to walk and about one-fourth the size of the cart.
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Back in the good old days my wife and I would go camping with our kids when they were young. We did some camping after they were grown up too. But it was actually easier without the kids. You know the routine. We'd get the three little Hutchcrafts ready for bed, make sure no bears were going to eat them during the night, and then we would snap all the snaps and tuck them into their sleeping bags, tied up all the flaps and zipped all the zippers on the tent door. Finally, able to settle into our sleeping bags, having found the most comfortable piece of ground underneath that we could.
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The longer I drive on given days the heavier my eyelids get. Like 99% of the men in the world, I like to do the driving. And once in a while I drive past my primetime alertness shall we say. That's when my wife starts to think of things to keep me awake longer, like turning on the radio.
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Some 16 million people saw Christopher Jones' skydive on YouTube. He bails out of the plane. Everything's going great...until the seizure. After four years of being seizure-free, he was cleared to jump.
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I know about tornadoes. We had one go through our backyard when I was a kid. And then we moved to the East Coast, so I also got the opportunity to get acquainted with hurricanes. But there's one natural disaster I don't know too much about, and that's just fine - earthquakes! What I do know, I've learned from people who have been through them. Like Mike, for example, the man in the seat next to me on a long airplane flight. He had lived in Northridge, California until recently. You might remember that was the epicenter of a major earthquake in 1994.
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When our oldest son was little he started a hobby that really helped him pay his way through college eventually - collecting baseball cards. He was doing pretty well collecting, when he asked me to start taking him to these shows on the baseball circuit. One summer I was scheduled to speak at Ocean City, New Jersey, and he wanted to go down a day early so we could catch the last day of this huge card show. He walked into a large hall with all the money the little guy could have saved from recent chores and allowances.
