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We were in the middle of a community-wide outreach event, sort of a non-traditional strategy for bringing Christ into a community. One of the committee leaders took me on a media marathon to help build awareness for it. So we raced to the local CBS TV affiliate.
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You hear a lot about plea bargaining in court cases these days, but plea bargaining... that's not a new idea. Every child learns the art of negotiating his way out of his disobedience. You might call it the art of "yeah, but." For example, "You don't have your homework" says the teacher. "Oh, yeah, but the dog ate it." Or, "My grandma died." For the sixth time? See, that art is first developed at home. "You didn't call," says dad. "Yeah, but there was no phone." "Yeah, but my watch blew up. I didn't know what time it was." See, children are experts at knowing what they should do and then finding ways to excuse not doing it. Well, father isn't impressed.
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In much of America, spring announces its arrival with an explosion of color. Those yellow forsythia flowers start popping out on bushes, the daffodils start to poke their heads through the ground, and the trees around our headquarters suddenly color the landscape with those delicate white flowers. Now, my wife, who I think was a certified plantologist, told me that those are ornamental pear trees. When I asked her about the "ornamental" part, she pointed out to me that they produce beautiful flowers, but these pear trees don't produce any pears. I guess that's why they're ornamental.
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There's at least one important principle of advertising we need to consider today, and that is you have to demonstrate the need for your product in order to sell it. I'll tell you someone who was good at it some years ago in one of the classic commercials. It was Alka-Seltzer, one of those old commercials I still remember. They would show some irresponsible eater who consumed some nightmare menu, and then the camera just made him look all distorted, like one of those trick mirrors.
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Sister is a dog. No, I didn't say my sister was a dog. My friend, Curtis, has a dog named Sister, which leads to some very amusing sentences. When Curtis' Sister first arrived in our area, Sister lived in this big, fenced-in area around the house. But Curtis got a nice dog house for Sister, the dog that is, and went to work making it a nice winter home for her. He installed two inches of insulation, put in a new floor, and even put a waterbed heater under the floor and some zip lock bags of water for the heater to heat. Sister basically had her own home with her own waterbed.
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It's the Super Bowl of the Skies! No ticket required.
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My wife and I got a late start for our drive to North Carolina this one particular trip, and we had a 12-hour drive from New Jersey to cover. So we thought we'd make a motel reservation somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. We got there pretty late and saw this disgruntled looking man leaving the lobby, heading for his car. And it was not the look of a man who had just received good news. When I walked up to the check-in desk - nobody home, just a sign that read, "Back in a few minutes."
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You sit there staring at the phone for 45 minutes. There's this girl you really want to ask out, but every time you try to pick up the phone to call her, you freeze. Finally, you realize she probably isn't going to call you, and the phone isn't going to call her all by itself. So, you punch in her number. Are you still afraid? Yes. But courage is not the absence of fear, it's the disregard of it! So here goes! Yes, that actually was my life at one time.
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Now it's always been my impression that the police like to have the element of surprise in their favor. Suddenly there's a police car coming up behind you, or appearing out of nowhere. That's why I was surprised by something I saw when I was meeting with some staff we had in Latin America in Guadalajara, Mexico. At night we were driving around with our Director, Timothy, and we saw a police car in front of us. Now, he was in no particular hurry, but his lights were flashing. Timothy said, "You know, the police cars here do that all the time. They leave their lights on whether they are on call or not." Now, that's an interesting approach to law enforcement - let them know you're coming.
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"We were closer when we were poorer." The lady who told me that was speaking about her marriage, and she wasn't poor any more. You could tell that by looking at her. She was very affluent. But she was telling me that she and her husband were closer in the early days of their relationship when they were pinching pennies, and scraping by, and wondering how they were going to pay the rent, and fighting the wolf at the door. But they were at least fighting the wolf together.
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You can always tell when Easter's on its way. All the Jesus shows start popping up on TV. And that's a good thing. I remember a few years ago there was one that was pretty good called A.D. - The Bible Continues. That's the sequel to a series called The Bible.
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It started with an almost unthinkable radio transmission to an emergency number.
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First, the forsythia exploded - those little yellow flowers that announced to our area where we were living that spring was finally springing. Then the dogwood explosion detonated. It was really hard to be in a bad mood when those beautiful pink and white blossoms suddenly appeared everywhere. Happens probably where you live too, maybe just at different times. Actually, the word "suddenly" needs a little work. The coming of the forsythia and the dogwood, and all the other stars of the Spring Extravaganza - they've been getting ready to happen for a long time. We couldn't see it, but there's been this invisible process of nourishing and growth, and those nubby little buds start to peek out. And then, one day you start down the street and it's blazing with color that wasn't even there the day before. But sudden? Not really.
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When my wife got a headache I would try to be sympathetic. But occasionally I'd just say, "Well, honey, you know pain always attacks at the weakest point." Sensitive guy, huh? Well, one time my wife was having headaches every day, and burning eyes, and stinging eyes and I really was sympathetic. And she attributed it to the long hours that she'd been working, and she had been. She barely even noticed that her vision was slowly becoming worse. Some time went by. She finally took the time to go to the optometrist, and he said, "Lady, you need glasses." She said that was the day her eyes stopped burning. The headaches stopped, and the road signs suddenly cleared up. She only had one regret. She said, "Why did I wait so long?"
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It was some years ago, but I remember when they closed our local airport. There was a violent storm at Newark airport, and thousands of people had their plans suddenly changed. Storms have a way of doing that, don't they? There's a snow storm, for example, and schools and businesses oh, they all had their plans made for the day, and suddenly all those plans are out the window. Meetings that had to be today are amazingly rescheduled. Planes and ships are diverted or blown off course. You see, a storm is a classic embodiment of that familiar phrase, "Due to circumstances beyond our control..." Maybe you're in the middle of a storm right now. Your life, your plans are being blown around, and it seems like everything is out of control. I've got good news for you today.
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Some years ago for my wife's birthday, she was given a gift of dinner at a restaurant that is themed to look like an Air Force base during World War II. So we went out to dinner because it was a gift and we had a great time, and everybody there kind of gets into the atmosphere.
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It was the biggest snowstorm of the year. Not the kind you dig out from very quickly. And the evening news showed one hazard of such a storm that was really out of the ordinary - a hazard that shouldn't have happened. The man in the news had started the challenging job of shoveling the sidewalk in front of his house, which happened to be on a main street. At the same time, of course, the city snowplows were doing what they should do. They were busily moving the snow that was clogging those main streets, and that's when it happened. Are you guessing? Somehow it was captured on video for all of us news watchers to see. The snowplow roared past the man on the sidewalk, showered him with this heavy shower of snow spraying out either side, and literally buried Mr. Shoveler in a sudden avalanche from the street and from the sky. The snowplow plowed onward, and the operator never even knew what he had done. Thankfully, the man on the sidewalk was able to dig out unharmed, but he was stunned. After all, snowplows are for unburying streets, not burying people. Right?
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There's a mountain in northern New Jersey that has the most intriguing view in the area. It's called Garrett Mountain - it's right over the city of Paterson, New Jersey. At the time that we lived there, Paterson happened to be the fourth poorest, middle-sized city in America. Now, if you just drove around Paterson - that's all you saw - you would think that that whole area of north Jersey is poor. But just beyond Paterson on the horizon, you can see Bergen County, New Jersey - some of the bedroom communities of New York City - some of the wealthiest communities in America.
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A lot of times the evening news will end with something like, "And now, we have some good news for today." They have to announce that because that's news - that there's good news! And you know what, it's pretty scary watching the news sometimes isn't it?
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Now it's been a while since it was a primetime television show. You might catch it every once in a while in the odd hours of the morning. But there was a time when it was a block-buster on television, and then it became some block-buster movies. When it was on TV, I tried never to miss it. It was called Mission Impossible.
