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On the Sunday before Easter, my pastor was talking about the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And my mind wandered, (not the pastor's fault) to a horse that I met one day in Texas.
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I grew up around Lake Michigan. And when I was little, I used to go in it. Now I mostly just look at it when I'm in Chicago or in the Great Lakes area. Part of that is because of what happened to me when I was ten years old. My memories of that lake are memories of a struggle I will never forget. I was out with my friends. I didn't know how to swim and I was too proud to tell them. Well, I started to go under. No one took me seriously. I mean, I'm yelling. I'm trying to get some help. I'm drinking the lake! I'm in a panic, flailing around, and my friends are going, "Oh, Ron, you know him. He's such a clown!" Great! Finally, just in the nick of time, someone came. They grabbed me and they literally saved my life.
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I had a mountain of work to do to prepare for some radio programs that I was scheduled to record, and the way things worked out I ended up doing it on the road. I was traveling by van about 12 hours with two of our team members. Now, let me make one thing clear. I like to drive; a guy thing maybe. I'm not the greatest passenger. I don't really like to ride, but I had so much work to do, I needed all the time we were driving on the trip to get it done. So they actually set up this little office for me in the back of the van, and they brought along a little power pack that would allow me to use my computer all the way. Very reluctantly, I climbed into the back of the van and settled in to work and watch someone else drive. At first it drove me nuts. But by the end of the trip, I realized how much creative work I'd gotten done in my office on wheels. What a productive day I had! All because I let someone else drive.
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Jenny's only two years old, but she's already teaching her parents. She often announces, "Let's pray." She doesn't always pick her times real well. Dad might be studying or Mom might be involved in her housework or trying to get ready for something. That doesn't stop Jenny from saying, "Let's pray." She grabs your hand, closes her eyes and she expects you to do the same. She's fully expecting Mom or Dad to drop whatever they're doing. Mom told me, "I don't dare tell Jenny, 'Oh, later honey, I'm too busy now.'" Jenny's only two, but you know what? I think she's got the right idea.
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Our youngest son was one week away from his sixteenth birthday, and we had surprised his older brother and sister. It was going to be tough to surprise this one for his sixteenth. So I picked him up from his friend's house and we went out to eat. I said, "Hey, you know what, we've got to go over to the next town." He asked why, and I said, "Well, I've got to check out this stable over there. We're thinking about having a Campus Life activity there and I need to find out what it will cost."
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Someone said to me, "Don't forget to tell your wife!" I said, "Wait a minute. I'd better write it down. I'm Mr. No Gig." They looked at me kind of funny. See, computers have gigabytes of memory. And I think sometimes I've reached mine, so I am like "Mr. No Gig". Look, I'm too young to be losing my memory. I think I've just used it up, that's all. There's not room to put anything else in there.
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I was in Georgia when a friend said to me, "Do you know which team is one of the best football teams in our state?" When I said I didn't know, he said, "The Georgia School for the Deaf." I've got to tell you that kind of caught me by surprise. I wasn't expecting a school for the deaf to be like football champions. He said, "Man, we played them when I was in high school and you always had to get up for that game. They were always the toughest."
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When you think of a name that goes with magic, you'll probably think of Houdini. Harry Houdini was the master of illusions, of incredible escapes, which makes it almost ironic how he died. He defied all kinds of dangers in his life. Like the time they tied him in a straight jacket, hung him upside down from the eves of a tall building and he got out. Then there was the time he escaped from an air-tight tank filled with water.
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Those of us who lived in the New York area at that time added a frightening new word to our vocabulary. It was called "wilding". In fact, that word was the entire front page headline on one newspaper after this brutal attack in Central Park. A 28-year-old jogger was raped and viciously beaten by this gang of 10 - 15 teenage attackers. Besides an ugly sexual assault, she was beaten with rocks, and a foot long pipe, and then left for dead in a puddle on a 40-degree night.
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Often when I speak at a church, there is like a question and answer time at the end of my talk. There was this one time when the questions ranged from things about our ministry, to questions about how to reach lost people, to my family; it was a little bit of everything. Well, one man in the back asked an amusing question. He said, "Where do you get all this energy?" Well, I have been accused of being the Energizer Bunny.
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Peter and Shirley were members of our ministry team, and their daughter was kind enough during her last semester of college to buy a dog. That meant that when she finished college, the dog moved in with Peter and Shirley. They inherited Starbuck. No that's not coffee! That's a black Labrador retriever.
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Over the years I've been accused of having a case of technophobia. Well, that's probably true. I remember the first time somebody got me a computer, which was very nice. That's how they got me into the computer age. I have to say it scared me to death. Now, look, I'm living in a world of computers, and so I grudgingly at that time said, "I've got to make friends with this computer by learning a little more about it. Some of my non-technophobic friends were explaining computer installation to me and one of them said, "Ron, I guess we'll have to install a dedicated line." Wait a minute! Wait, that's a word I understood - dedicated line. Sure! In fact, I understand it even better now thanks to, yep, computers.
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Maybe it's somewhere during your senior year of high school you begin to develop this priceless trait called perspective. I know that Chris did. One day just before a football game, he stopped me and he said, "You know, Ron, you told me something when I was a freshman and I didn't believe it then. And now I do. You said, 'You're going to blink, and suddenly you're going to be a senior.'" And I told him at the time, "You know, Chris, it looks like high school is going to be forever. You're only a freshmen. But believe me, it will be gone so fast!"
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Back when I was flying a great deal, people would often ask me where I lived, and I would frequently answer with the name of the airline I flew on the most. Now, when I hear of airplane crashes and disasters, it kind of hits me personally. I think it does anybody who has been a frequent flyer. Whether you're a flyer or not, though, there are images of certain airline tragedies that kind of forever imprint on your memory. One of those for me was the ValuJet crash in the everglades. It's been a number of years now, but the entire plane and all its passengers just vanished in the swamp.
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The best time to go to Long Beach Island is off season. It's this beautiful stretch of land off the New Jersey coast about 12 miles long, not very wide. In fact you can see the ocean on one side and the bay on the other side. It just has this one, long main street. During peak season, which of course is during the summer, it's very slow going on that street; bumper-to-bumper people, cars and red lights. I hope you're not in a hurry to get to the beach or to get back to your house. It's going to take you a while. But when you're there during the off season, which we've had the privilege to be, you see this long string of traffic lights as far as the eye can see. When you're driving you can hit this string of green lights and never stop.
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I had the opportunity some years ago to speak for some pilots organizations, and I've never piloted a plane. I'm always a passenger. But they wanted me to talk about peace and stress. And it was something I wrote a book about, so it worked out pretty well. In the process I met some guys who deal with FFA safety seminars. They told me some interesting things about what happens with some of the crashes that we might see in the news. They said that when a private pilot crashes, there's usually a study of that, and they start to compile case studies to help other pilots fly more safely.
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I was with two friends returning from some Native American ministry in the Southwest, and we had a rental car and a four-hour drive to the airport in Phoenix. So we really needed every minute to make our connection, which made the lurch in our car pretty annoying. See, every time the driver would get the speed up to about 60, the car would start shuttering and lurching. Now, there was a 75mph speed limit, and that's frustrating. We weren't sure we'd even make it with that "shake, rattle, and roll" mobile we had.
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Well, I guess all of us began our training for public speaking back in Kindergarten or maybe First Grade. Remember when the teacher had you do Show and Tell? You had to bring some object to school and tell about it or what it represented. I can still remember the scramble around our house a lot of mornings as one of our three children would remember, of course, with one foot out the door, "Oh boy, I've got Show and Tell today." So we'd race around the house trying to find something they could show. See, the teacher wasn't interested in us just showing up with a story that day. No, you had to have something concrete. Telling was not enough to make it. If you showed up with your show, you had to tell about it too
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Honestly, I don't mind waking up in the morning. What I really don't like is waking up in the early morning to a very cold house during the winter. Those first few minutes in the bathroom, no fun at all! Teenagers, you know, kind of tell you to kind of "chill". Well, I got that opportunity one morning not long ago. I chilled! I tried everything to get some heat. I pushed up the thermostat, I hit the emergency button on the furnace, and I hit the furnace. I pulled on some clothes to go outside and check the gauge on the fuel tank, which read one-eighth of a tank.
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You know McDonald's, the hamburger people? Over the years they have built quite a juggernaut. They have had some of the most brilliant marketers in history I think. I mean, they have advertised McDonald's as a warm, friendly, fun place. And they kind of make every child in America want to eat there. Sometimes it has seemed like we were lousy parents if you didn't take them to Ronald's place to get a Happy Meal. You know, to pick up the toys, the cups from the hottest new movie, to play under the Golden Arches.
