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"We may never know why this happened." That's the usual reaction when another "senseless" shooting leaves its trail of death and heartbreak. Not this time.
This vengeful gunman in the horrific rampage near Santa Barbara, California left this hate-filled, 141-page manifesto to explain it. As one student's
self-described "day of retribution" he called it.
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Well our mail came today, and yesterday, and the day before yesterday. Big deal, right? It comes most days. It's a big deal. Yeah, the post office has this
motto and they try their best to follow through on it. It's a promise to keep, and it's not an easy one. You know, "Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor
darkness of night shall stay these couriers from their appointed rounds." Things that need to get through to you usually do. And these people do their best
to keep their promise to get it there no matter what's in the way.
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Some friends said, "How would you like to use our condominium down by the ocean in Florida?" It was a very hard decision, but it took us ten seconds. I'll tell you what, it was really a great place. I never thought I'd stay in a place like that. It had some very distinctive furnishings. Well, yeah, the mirrors! They were everywhere. And they were very strategically placed so you could see the ocean from almost any spot in the house.
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I was at the headquarters of an international missionary radio ministry, and I was looking into creating a radio project and I needed a little help. I was told that I should speak with, let's just call him Chuck. Okay?
This man that they wanted me to speak with was a very interesting fellow. While discussing a project he would begin brainstorming. But he wasn't very good about keeping in touch once he headed off to do the project. In fact he literally sometimes could not be found! He didn't call in. He didn't communicate at all! This is exactly what they told me, "You'd hear nothing from him, and then suddenly he would reappear and the video is completely done." The gentleman that recommended him said, "You know, he just about drives you crazy, but we love what the guy produces."
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The Mississippi River flood of 1993 was a nail-biter if you had a home or business near the river in St. Louis. The flood had already done unprecedented damage up river, and St. Louis was holding their breath as the crest on the Missouri River and Mississippi Rivers rose.
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I've got to tell you, it caught me off guard; tears as I was watching the news. It was all Kevin Durant's fault. The Oklahoma City Thunder star was accepting the NBA's MVP award. Nothing you'd expect to be a tear-jerker, until he dedicated his award to his mother who was in the audience. It turns out at 21, she was a single mother, on her own with two young sons. This mountain of a man said to his Mom at that ceremony, "You made us believe. You kept us off the street, you put clothes on our backs, food on our table. When you didn't eat, you made sure we ate. You went to sleep hungry. You sacrificed for us."
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Well, as usual, during our summers with Native Americans, we had a memorable time with some of our ministry team on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico that particular year. We had a very busy time of reaching people. We did have one break, so we packed as many of us into a van as we could and drove to see this spectacular canyon.
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Sports is such an emotional thing! It's a lot of thrills, but then there's an occasional tragedy. This happened some years ago, but I still remember the death of the captain of the Boston Celtics basketball team, Reggie Lewis. He collapsed in a basketball playoff game. A team of doctors said that he had a potentially deadly heart condition and he couldn't play any more. Well, they went for a second opinion and those doctors said it wasn't so serious and he could gradually return to play. He died doing practice shooting in a gym a few months later, maybe trying to make a come back. One newscaster I heard reported it this way, "He heard what he wanted to hear."
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I love high tide! It's when you can see and hear the ocean at its maximum power. It just takes over everything. I distinctly remember one powerful moment at the Jersey shore during a summer visit. It happened to be high tide and I walked out on a jetty; these huge boulders. What an experience! Everything in front of me and behind me was just covered by this surging surf, but I was standing in the middle of those rocks and in the middle of that high tide. And something fascinating occurred to me, that the tide and the ocean and the storms had beat on that for centuries, but the rocks never moved.
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I'll tell you, even the hard-core reporters were having a hard time talking about it. Apparently, that Ground Zero Museum where the Twin Towers once stood is one powerful experience. As you walk in, you hear the last "I love you" messages people sent from the towers or from the doomed planes. It's a heart-rending walk through this nation's darkest hour I guess, and the heroism and hope that lit up that darkness.
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There's one sure way to gather a crowd at our house. In fact it just happened last night. You just walk slowly through the house with a flat, white, large, square box – "Pizza!" And you will get that Pied Piper feeling. We've noticed that these pizza boxes all say the same thing. I don't know if you've noticed that. You can go to 10 different pizza places, and they all seem to have the same slogan. "You've tried the rest; now try the best." Somebody's got to be wrong about that.
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I don't know whether or not your town has a big water tank. But if it does, I bet I can guess what it says. It probably has the name of your town on it, right? I don't have some kind of gift. I've just seen a lot of water tanks, and they all look basically the same, you know, with the name of the town or something on them.
But I saw a particular water tank on one trip that really got my attention. Actually, I saw two of them. We were driving through Virginia, and all of a sudden I looked up and here are two water tanks on a mountain overlooking this town. You can't miss them. Two tanks; each one has one word on it. One says "HOT." I'll bet you can guess what the other one says – "COLD."
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Most Americans weren't around on that D-Day 70 years ago. And even though we weren't, we should be very glad they succeeded when they hit those Normandy beaches. They stopped one of the most powerful threats to freedom in history – Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Steven Spielberg used his cinematic genius to help this generation get a little taste of what that victory cost. The movie "Saving Private Ryan" carried a pretty strong "R" rating because of the brutal D-Day violence it portrayed. I'll tell you this: Hollywood has no rating for how awful it really was.
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We have three children. My wife has had four pregnancies. At the end of the third month of her first pregnancy, she had a miscarriage. It was tough but God gave us grace to deal with it. That might be an experience you've had. We were all geared up for this new life to come, and suddenly there wasn't going to be one. When people heard that we'd experienced a miscarriage, it seemed like women came from every direction basically saying, "Me too."
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We met this couple at a conference we were attending. They were telling us about how just the day before, a storm had blown in across the lake while they were down at the beach.
All of a sudden they noticed all these Monarch butterflies that were unable to go against that wind.
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Bart Simpson has been around now for 25 years. He still looks like a kid, but he's been around for 25 years on TV. Maybe you've managed to avoid the Simpson family. You've probably been doing more important things, and it's perfectly fine, maybe even good if you've avoided them. But just in case you've been occupied in other ways, the Simpsons are this cartoon family that soared to popularity through their primetime TV show. And their lovely son? Oh, man, as they came on, he was all over posters, shirts, and mugs. You can still find him all over the place.
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As 1986 ended, a lot of commentators were looking back at the greatest moments of the year, and some of the most tragic moments too. And they all mentioned a player named Len Bias. At 22 years old, he was the number one college basketball star in the United States. He'd been drafted by the then champions Boston Celtics. He had a 1.6 million dollar deal to do commercials. Newsweek Magazine said, "They were the best days of his life."
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There's no joy quite so joyful as that of an expectant mother. She talks all the time about this new life she's carrying, and she tells everyone about "my baby." That is unless she doesn't want to carry the child any more. If she happens to be considering an abortion, she and all those involved in the process suddenly demote "my baby" to "the fetus."
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Well, Spring is tornado time, and in this past Spring there were some that just missed our area –killer tornadoes. The lives and places devastated hit a little close to home this time.
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Okay, I've got to admit this. When something's wrong with our car, you're not going to usually find me under the hood. I'm not really that good at that, so I head for the gas station. Now, Dave has worked on our car for years, and he does a very good job. So I would tell Dave the symptoms of what seems to be wrong with the car; the noise, the starting problem, or the loss of power. And then Dave talks back to me. He tells me what he thinks it might be, what he thinks it might cost and how long it might take to fix it. What do I do? Do I say, "Thanks, Dave!" and then chug away in my ailing car? Well, duh, no! I leave it there.
