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When I spoke at a winter conference in Canada, the word cold took on a whole new meaning to me. It was 40 degrees below—that's Fahrenheit, not wind chill temperature! We added the wind chill in just to make it a little more exciting. It was the coldest, sustained temperature I have ever been in.
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During two visits to South Africa, I grew to love the people of that troubled country and its history too. It used to be British turf, except for the tribal lands of the great Zulu Warriors. And in 1879 the British army moved in under Lord Chelmsford, invaded Zulu land to claim it as a property for The Crown.
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Wait! I thought Humpty Dumpty was just a nursery rhyme. You know, the big egg who sat on a wall, but had a great fall. Turns out he's got a lot of company these days—sitting on a high wall, and smashed by a big fall.
Take one of the world's most powerful financial figures, for example, in a $3,000-a-night Manhattan hotel suite one night, and then the next night, in a tough New York jail. He stood accused of serious sexual violation of a hotel maid. Now, those accusations had to be proven in court, but they did resonate with a reputation for mixing power with sexual aggression.
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It was some years ago, but I remember when they closed our local airport. Yeah, there was a violent storm at Newark airport, and thousands of people had their plans suddenly changed. Storms have a way of doing that. Did you ever notice that? 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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Let's say that someone steps on the wooden backstairs of your house. Imagine what they do when all of a sudden one of those stairs caves in. Okay, whose fault is it the stair caved in? Well you could blame it on your friend and say, "'Bout time you went on a diet, isn't it buddy?" Or could it be that it wasn't their weight that really made it collapse? Could it be that those little bugs got in and ate it from the inside; and it was already weakened? In fact, even a skinny friend might have made it cave in.
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We say a lot of things we don't really mean. For example, when we sign our letters, sincerely yours—now have you really been sincere about everything you said sincerely yours about? Or how about this one, the check is in the mail—well, sometimes yes, sometimes no; maybe just an intention. Here's a classic one that we often don't really mean, "Hey, let's get together sometime; we'll give you a call." How many times have you been told that, and then how many times did it really happen?
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It's amazing what a difference a camera can make. Some years ago there was a very popular TV series that lasted for years and kept getting reincarnated, pioneered by a guy named Allen Funt. Now he was pretty well known in his time, and the reason he became well known was one thing. He became the creator of a program called Candid Camera. And he proved the principal over and over again, that the camera can make a big difference. See, he would prove that people do these dumb little things totally unaware that the nation was watching. If they knew that, they never would have done what Allen Funt tricked them into doing. Course, the results of clicking cameras aren't always amusing. Incriminating photos can bring down a presidential candidate or a Christian leader and they have. You can imagine the photographer's victims saying, "If I'd only known they were recording this." Well, why don't you assume they are?
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Special people tend to get special treatment. Did you ever notice that? For example, look at what we serve for dinner when the boss is coming over or some out of town friends. It's kind of interesting when special people come and your kids look at you and say, "Mommy, I like it when guests come." And then you find out the reason why. "We never have this when they're not here." They finally get something other than hotdogs and hamburgers. It's amazing when somebody special is coming. We clean house, we cook new things, we put on our best manners. The problem is we often forget who the most special people on earth are—well according to Jesus, that is. And how you treat them is a revealing measure of how much you think like your master.
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If you live in snow country, there are few words more frightening than the word "avalanche." And there's no place where that is a greater concern than in Alaska. Oh, its got majestic mountains; it's got massive snow accumulations. And so, they've actually been creating avalanches there on purpose. You say, "Wait! Avalanches on purpose?" Yeah. Yeah, they actually fire avalanche cannons that bring down accumulations of snow that might otherwise trigger a larger avalanche or come down at a time when people would be jeopardized. Now, at first, it sounds kind of strange to cause an avalanche to control an avalanche. But it works with snow, oh, and it works with relationships.
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Now, if you're a night person, there is nothing more aggravating than a bright-eyed morning person who's trying to get you to be a morning person along with them! And one of the great, interesting, fun things about God is He tends to kind of put those kind of people together in a marriage. Maybe so there's a night shift and a day shift. I don't know. Maybe you have the other kind of metabolism; maybe you're a morning person. Well, then there's nothing more aggravating than a raring-to-go night person who's trying to get you moving when you're ready to put it away.
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Now, listen. When it's man versus lots of water, you know the water is often going to win. Oh, we've built dams and levees and water management systems. But sometimes, like this past spring, and then along the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, oh man, just too much water!
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I'll bet you turned on the water this morning and never gave it a thought. Well, you probably didn't grow up in the middle of a desert. You know, speaking of deserts, there was a great story years ago about the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. There was a movie made about his life. He had made many friends there in his campaigns and they had grown up in the desert, and they did not take running water for granted.
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Now, I've spent a fair amount of my life on airplanes, and so the thought of a fire on a plane is pretty unsettling. So I wasn't too excited about what I heard happened on an Air Canada flight several years ago. The fire actually started in the lavatory and the fire wasn't so big, but the smoke started to billow through the plane and it very quickly reached the cockpit. You can imagine how fearful that was going to be.
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If you're in the manufacturing business and you plan to stay in it, there is an important function you must not neglect. They call it quality control. You know that someone needs to be checking what's coming up that assembly line to see what kind of finished product you're getting, not just how many you're getting. Imagine if there was a machine that turned out four broken items out of every ten that it produced. Would you say that machine needs some work, or maybe you need a whole new machine? Well, actually there is such a machine, and we just keep it cranking and it keeps losing four out of ten.
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It all depended on the levees. So many Americans have been watching record high flood waters rising all around them this past spring, and desperately hoping that the wall between them and all that water was high enough to hold it back.
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Over the years, two words that could really stir up some action at our house go like this, "Let's romp!" Yeah, uh-huh. You have to understand I was a father of two sons, and that meant that Dad is ready for some "rough housing" with one or maybe two sons. But I learned I had to be careful, because then one day they got to be my size. So I didn't say that much any more.
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Honest, we really didn't mean to be in northern Kentucky on Kentucky Derby weekend. But obviously, thousands of people did! In trying to avoid flooding as we traveled, that's exactly where we managed to be. So there we were in the middle of rampant Derby Fever. I didn't bet on anybody, and I refuse to wear one of those floppy hats.
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Most of us urban or suburban type husbands don't go out with a bow and arrow to bring in our family's dinner. That was in the good old days where Dad went hunting for dinner. Instead, we go to a shop, or an office, or some such place and we get a paycheck. Then we turn it over to the grocery store.
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Anytime I'm planning to be in New York City I make sure I have plenty of loose change with me. Yeah, I know I'll need it for tips; maybe for a parking lot attendant or cab driver, a waitress. In fact, tipping, well it's a way of life in America. Now, I looked up tipping in the dictionary and here's what a tip is: It is a small present of money given directly to someone for performing a service. Aw, that's nice isn't it? A tip, a small thank you. Nothing major; loose change stuff. And that's fine if it's in response to a small service, but what about if it's a response to a total sacrifice.
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Whenever you look at a sports schedule for the season you'll see one of two letters next to each game—an H or an A. Now those H's are the ones the players look forward to the most; that's the home games. And, of course, the A is the away games. Now, if you're an athlete, you know that your best chance of winning is probably in your home setting. In sports, it's generally easier to win at home and it's tougher to win on the road, which is actually the opposite of how it is in our personal lives.
