Tuesday, August 30, 2011

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Now, there's one good way to recognize the places that folks think are important—the guards. Yeah. I mean, they obviously think the White House is important; there are guards all around it. The bank usually has a guard. There are some club communities that I've seen where you don't get to even go into the neighborhood until the guard says, "Yes, somebody left a name here at the booth. You can go in."

Monday, August 29, 2011

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Okay, I wasn't expecting a goat to be my teacher. But something kind of special happened. A good friend of ours helped a new baby goat come into the world. You might say he was "kidding" around. But you shouldn't say that.

Friday, August 26, 2011

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You can find it at a football game. You can find it in a concert. There are thousands of people drawn to a gathering, and they're talking excitedly about some star that they've come to see or hear. Hands and voices are raised in praise and all eyes are on the star, or the stars. In fact, if you want to get people really agitated, use the name of their favorite musician in vain. Or say something negative about their favorite athlete. Uh-huh. I mean, people who might be relatively passive about minor issues like nuclear war, or abortion, or people starving to death are majorly aggressive about their heroes. I mean, we're excited about our favorite musician, our favorite sports star, even our favorite spiritual celebrity...maybe too excited.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

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I used to work with our high school football team quite a bit, and their practices were in full swing. And I was talking with one of the soon to be freshman football players, and he said, "Ron, it seems like just yesterday we were having our first practices back in the summer." And I talked to some seniors, and then they said, "Ron, weren't we just freshmen? How did we get here so fast?"

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

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Oh, it was a great time to be traveling out East! I got to be there at cherry blossom time this year. I was where those pink beauties were popping out everywhere we were traveling. One of the gals on the Weather Channel was broadcasting from Washington, DC, and she had this beautiful backdrop of these exploding cherry blossoms at the Jefferson Memorial.

Friday, August 19, 2011

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I remember the night I was asked to speak at an adult couples thing at our church. And they did this auction sort of deal; in fact it was sort of a "Let's Make a Deal" game. I think some people call it a White Elephant Auction or something. It's the kind of game where you go to your garage and you get something you really want to throw away, and then you wrap it up in real pretty paper and you bring it to the auction. And what happens is this: One person goes up and has to pick one of those packages, and they open it and then they have it. From that point on everyone can either take an unwrapped package and take their chances on that, or they can trade for something that's already been unwrapped that looks interesting.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

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Every four years the Winter Olympics roll around, and every time I see them, this memory keeps flashing back in my brain. I'm not sure which looms larger to me, the Olympic memory or the lesson I learned from it.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

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Sometimes if you're a commercial flyer, it's probably best if you don't watch the news. There was that whole string of plane incidents that where suddenly one had a hole in the roof, and then they found cracks in other planes like it after that. Oh yeah, and then there was the plane with the bullet hole in it. Yeah, that was right about that time.

Monday, August 15, 2011

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I was on an airplane flight and I overheard a conversation in the seats behind me. Okay, I eavesdropped on the conversation behind me. All right! In any case, there was this little boy flying with his Dad and he was full of questions...the little boy that is. He said, "Daddy, what are all those lights for? Daddy, why did part of the wing go down? Daddy, why is it called Lake Erie?" See, the pilot told us the name of it, but he didn't necessarily tell us why.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

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One severe weather system behind us, another one coming. Yeah, well, that's like spring living in Tornado Alley. Uh-huh... You know, I can look at our children and know that they are going to have, when those warnings go up, probably young children in bed with them before the night is over. And I can probably count on the fact that l will be waking up during the night to the annoying alarm on our weather radio and that robotic voice of NOAA radio. But that's OK. There's a reason all those weather guys strongly urge you to have one of those life-saving radios. And why I strongly urge me to respond when the warning comes!

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

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Over the years in campus ministry, I always put on a special push to reach football players, because, you know, they're pretty strategic people on campus. And there was one event that football players always enjoyed. We called it "The Great Cheerleader Put-On." What we would do is we'd invite in four cheerleaders and then four football players to be their coaches. You say, "What? Coaches for what?" Well, we brought in most of the pieces of football gear: shoulder pads, knee pads, hip pads, helmet. And then we wanted to see which cheerleader could get fully dressed in a football uniform first.

Monday, August 8, 2011

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A lot of people I know of have friends in Joplin, Missouri. So you can imagine that they have been feeling the unimaginable devastation and loss from that huge tornado there on a personal level. And it's always that way when a disaster has a face; it's not just a story on the news.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

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Twice in a little over a year we were stunned by news of major earthquakes, and the images we won't soon forget. But they were in two very different parts of the world. The first one was in Haiti. When the ground was finished shaking...well, you remember. The homes, the businesses, even their President's palace were in total rubble. The second quake hit Japan, and for those areas that didn't get the tsunami—just got hit by the quake—most of their homes and businesses were left standing. What's the difference? The materials their structures were made of. You know, a quake has a way of exposing the strength or the weakness of what you're building on.

Friday, July 29, 2011

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Teenage boys aren't known primarily for their neatness and organization, as you probably know. When my oldest son was that creature called "a teenage boy," he had one area that defied the messy stereotype. I said just one area, right? It was his baseball card collection.

Oh, everything else may have been in a state of total chaos, but oh not the baseball cards. They were neatly put away in plastic holders, filed in notebooks, categorized. Why? Well, as he said, "Dad, they're only valuable if they're in mint condition. I want to keep these cards in mint condition."

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

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This body that you and I move around in is pretty amazing. One of the amazing qualities it has might be called "compensation." In other words, when one part breaks down, it seems as if another part gets stronger in order to help make up the difference.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

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In all the years we were raising our family, we didn't have a dog at our house. One big reason is that dogs have a non-negotiable need to be walked. We've had some fish. Our fish never needed to be taken for a walk. We had a parrot. It's very hard to walk a parrot.

Friday, July 22, 2011

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Some years ago our family got to sample an extended period without Mom's touch. Mom had a prolonged illness, and that left a lot of work not being done around the house. So, our three children and I divided up the chores, which is why not a lot of work was not done around the house. But somehow the kitchen sink always seemed to go unattended. Those dirty dishes took on a life of their own!

Thursday, July 21, 2011

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With the era of space shuttle flights coming to an end, I was thinking back to some of those original pioneering flights to the moon - the Apollo missions. It was mind-blowing to think that we had reached the point where men like us could actually walk on that moon that had just been that distant light in the night for millennia. It really was a big deal!

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

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We couldn't figure it out. For some reason, the mice suddenly liked our house so much. All I know is after not having had that problem, we suddenly were invaded. Well, I planned very strategically to be gone, of course, when they invaded the house. In fact the reason we know that they were there is because my wife found, well let's just say some signs of them in the silverware drawer of all places.

Monday, July 18, 2011

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I've never been a mother. You probably guessed that, but I have talked to a lot of them. In fact, one of my very best friends on earth is a mother; in fact a couple of them. And I understand that the nine months of waiting for a baby...I guess it's fun at the beginning, but it gets a little long about the eighth or ninth month.