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Missionary pilots are some of my greatest heroes. See, missionary pilots fly around the world and land places where you think a plane could never land. They know how to take their plane apart; they know how to put it back together again.
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There are certain occupations where I think you need a particularly strong self image. For example, I would think a dentist needs a strong self image. I mean, he's a professional, he's helping people, but it's just hard to have so many people dreading what you do. Or in the world of sports, like a baseball umpire? Everybody thinks they can see better than the umpire can. You can tell because they keep yelling, "Hey, are you blind?" Because they don't agree with your call. Everybody thinks they have a higher IQ than you do. They keep commenting on the intelligence of an umpire negatively just because they don't agree with him.
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I remember when our local pizza joint got new owners. We were living on the East Coast then and the new owners really turned that place into something pretty impressive. It was a fairly large restaurant. And their menu had more than just pizza on it, although pizza was fine with me.
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My wife and I were on a ministry trip to Phoenix, and much to my surprise she decided to have her gall bladder out there. Actually, it was much of a surprise to her, too. You don't plan these things. I remember that night she left dinner early, and I found her about an hour later in unbearable pain. Nothing was making a dent in that pain. Finally we went to the emergency room and they said, "Time for this gall bladder to come out."
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Rwanda - It was the centerpiece of a lot of news attention back in 1994. Bloody civil war; tens of thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered there. There were nightly images of emaciated refugees, dying of disease, dying of starvation. And children; oh, you just couldn't forget the children. Many of those kids had lost everything in the carnage.
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I opened the refrigerator and there it was again - the pig! Yes, years ago someone bought it, put it in the refrigerator for a while and then it disappeared. I thought maybe he'd gone to the bacon factory, but then the pig was back. See, this pig was actually plastic, and whenever you would open the door, the plastic pig started oinking at you. It's annoying, but it does make you think about what you're about to do to yourself.
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When I visited the Gulf Coast of Florida, I got to see a couple of glorious earth turns. The sky was ablaze with color and the sun disappeared on the horizon. You say, "Excuse me, Ron, that's a sunset." Hey, wait a minute. Are you from the 14th century or something? The sun doesn't set; it doesn't move! The earth moves! As it makes its revolution, your point on earth turns away from the sun every 24 hours. So that would be an earth turn, right? And we say the sun sets. Well, the earth is turning and you can see how mankind got it wrong for so many centuries. I mean, it looks as if the sun is revolving around the earth. It revolutionized a lot of thinking when people finally understood what was revolving around what.
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I don't like to perform a wedding unless I can first have several premarital counseling sessions with the couple. I remember when I told my youngest son (he was very young at that time) that I was going to be performing a wedding ceremony for one of the women on our staff. But the way I said it was this: "Hey, guess what? I'm going to be marrying Margaret." He burst into tears. He said, "What about Mommy?"
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Our dog, Missy, had just ridden with us on a 1,600-mile round trip to Chicago and back. That was the first for her. It was a first for me to do it, too, with a dog and we both survived! Miracles still happen. Missy had been through a lot of upheavals in her routine as a result of that trip, and she'd had an exhausting two days. I can't believe now I was empathizing with our dog!
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Let's talk about a goat. "You wouldn't kid us, would you Ron?" No, I'm serious, and that's terrible. It's not a goat I've ever met. I mean, I lived in the New York area most of my life. Where would I meet a goat? But there's this college student who told me about this goat that he met in Israel on a college-sponsored trip. Now, Bill and his buddies were hiking in this desert-like area that's between Jerusalem and Jericho. It's the area actually where Jesus said that man was attacked by thieves. You know the one who was helped by the Good Samaritan?
