Monday, February 12, 2007

Not long ago I was speaking at a Christian workers' conference in Alaska, and a veteran missionary approached me afterward with some intriguing information. She and her husband have worked for many years with an Indian tribe in Alaska - a tribe that has an interesting custom. If you are from that tribe, you grow up learning about your backpack. It's not a real backpack, but it's a symbol of a very real human experience. The idea is that whenever you do something wrong, a rock goes in your backpack and you carry on your back all the weight of all your mistakes all your life.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Our son's first word was the name he called me, "Da!" I know it's supposed to be "da da," but it was good enough for me. He'd greet me at the door each night with a loud and impassioned "Da!" Our grandson's first word was "mama," which he liked so much that he just let it keep rolling, "ma-ma-ma-ma-ma." Sort of the opposite of "da!" The first words that children learn can reflect what's going on around them. If they see Mama all the time, you can expect them to say her name early on. Sometimes, those first words aren't very happy words. Our friends have been dedicated missionaries in a war-torn part of the Middle East for years. Not long after their daughter was born, their area became a place where frequent bombardments and violence erupted all around them. Some of her first words told the story: "bomb" ... "gun."

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

I'm pretty sure there's a five-year-old kid in all of us (for sure there is one in me), and one place it came out in me was years ago when we took our kids to one of America's major theme parks. Like a lot of theme parks, we found you had to get there early because you have to wait for some of the most exciting attractions. The earlier you get there, the shorter the line. Of course, you can't ride all the rides simultaneously, so even the early birds end up in lines a good part of the day. Now, at this particular park, some of the longest lines are for a ride called Space Mountain. Maybe you've been there. It's basically a wild roller coaster ride through outer space in almost total darkness. When we took the kids there, I asked someone coming out how long they waited in this obviously long line. "An hour," one guy told me. An hour? Well, we did it. We even went back later and did it again. We even saw a lot of teenagers; you know, people not normally known for their patience, enduring the wait for Space Mountain. Why? Because you have to wait if you want the best stuff.

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Tupperware can be a good thing. Those sealed plastic containers can preserve leftover food so you can enjoy it later. Tupperware can be a bad thing, if you forget about it. I know from distasteful personal experience what can happen when you do - intermediate life forms, morphing into something unrecognizable. The problem comes when that Tupperware with leftovers in it slowly gets pushed farther and farther back in the fridge, until it's tucked out of sight behind the pickle jar and the gallon of milk. Ultimately, though, the lost little Tupperware will make its presence known. As you open the fridge and utter those inevitable words: "What's that smell?" The smell isn't going away until some domestic Green Beret storms the depths of that fridge and bravely opens that Tupperware and carries away the rotting contents inside, or beats them to death with a stick, if necessary.

Monday, February 5, 2007

Sometimes, when we travel to Indian reservations in North America, we end up on roads that go where not many go. The Director of our Native work, Craig Smith, was on one of those roads not long ago. His destination was a remote reserve in Northern Canada. At one point in his 140-mile journey, he noticed a van coming from the other direction, proceeding very slowly. Craig decided to slow down, too. That's when he saw what the van driver had already seen - a beautiful deer by the side of the road. Sadly, one of his rear legs was broken and just dangling limply when he moved. My friend said it was too painful to watch. At that point, he saw the rest of the picture that had caused the van to stop in front of the deer. On the other side of the road was a wolf, stalking the wounded deer. It was obvious all the van could do was postpone the inevitable. There was no happy ending for that deer.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I have some friends who love to fish, and in their honor I have to tell you this great fisherman story I heard from my friend Ravi Zacharias. It seems that two men were out fishing in separate boats. And the one watched the other with a growing curiosity because he would catch a fish and keep it, then catch another fish and throw it away. And he continued this with catch after catch. The really strange part was that it was always the big ones that this man threw away. Finally, the man watching all this couldn't contain his curiosity, so he called out the obvious question, "How come you're throwing away the big ones?" The man answered back, "Oh, because I only have an eight-inch frying pan!"

Friday, January 26, 2007

It's a familiar scenario. A man is driving his family on vacation; let's say they're going from Chicago to California. His wife gently points out to him that she just saw a sign saying, "Welcome to Kentucky." Kentucky is definitely not between Chicago and California. Repeatedly, the Mrs. suggests that the Mr. stop and ask directions. Then she says that four-letter word, "I think we're lost." But will he stop and ask for directions? No! Maybe it's something in the male chromosome. Like most men, he's too proud to admit he's lost, and he's probably not going to end up where he hoped.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Few things in life are so depressing as a boy's long-uncleaned room. Sometimes you might not even want to ask them to clean it. It might be better just to torch it or hose it out like a monkey cage. I remember one time my wife and I wanted to say, "I love you" to our boys in a special way. So while they were gone one Saturday, we literally attacked their room. We thought it would be a little easier to keep it clean if we would, this one time, make it clean. When we were done, it was a great place to be again, and when the boys walked into their room, they became believers in miracles. And we did make two things really clear to them. First, "We love you guys." Secondly, "Don't expect us to make this a habit."

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Oh, those firstborn children. Somewhere inside their brain is this tattoo: "I can do it myself." Wait. I'm a firstborn. So is our daughter. And when she decided at the age of five that she was going to bake a cake, she, of course, didn't need any help. Her "I'm going to bake a cake" moment was a good news/bad news announcement for me. Good news: my little girl is growing up. Bad news: I have to eat it. Well, we heard a lot of banging of pans in the kitchen and ultimately the smells of something baking. Maybe this was going to work after all. Minutes later, my little girl came into the living room, almost tripping over her lower lip. She was sad. She explained: "Daddy, it came out flat." Then she brought in her first cake. Or maybe I should say pancake. It was that flat. That's when Sr. Baking Advisor, Mom, entered the picture to see what our daughter could learn from the cake that fell flat. She'd put in the milk, the eggs, the flour. But she forgot just one ingredient - the baking powder - the anti-flat ingredient in a cake.

Monday, January 22, 2007

The plan was flawless. They told me that Cadillac Mountain was the first place you could see the sun rise in the United States. And my job, of course, was to provide wonderful memories and special experiences for my children. We were vacationing in Maine, and I was determined to let them have this thrill. Somehow, they didn't seem as excited about it as I was; must have been a maturity thing. Then why wasn't my wife excited? Anyway, I carefully checked the weather forecast every day until I was sure we'd have a clear morning to see the sunrise. I made everyone go to sleep early. I woke everybody up at 3:00 A. M. We were in a campground and I was afraid the kids would wake up complaining and waking up the neighbors, so I had a doughnut ready to stuff into each little mouth - including mine. I bundled everyone into the car and up we drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain. I kept checking my watch, waiting for that magic moment of the scheduled sunrise, and the moment came. No sun. We waited and waited. Surprise! The weatherman was wrong. We saw a distinctly unmemorable cloudrise.

Monday, January 15, 2007

I know what it is to need a stamp. You've got something that has to be mailed - like an urgent bill, for example. You've gotten spoiled by having electricity in your house, and you really don't want to see what it's like without it. Your electric bill is due, the check is written, the envelope is addressed, but you can't find a stamp. But something that happened during a recent election has to be ultimate postage desperation. An absentee ballot arrived with an unusual stamp on the envelope, a picture of an inverted World War I airplane. The news report said that stamp may well have been a rare collector's item worth $200,000! Yes, postage rates are going up, but this is out of control!

Thursday, January 11, 2007

I heard a true story from the life of veteran missionary, Helen Roseveare, and it touched me deeply, and it reminded me of why I face some huge needs with perfect peace. I though it might be the encouragement you need today. Helen was a medical missionary to Zaire, and she tells about the night she had tried to save a mother in the labor ward. In spite of all their efforts, the mother died, leaving the missionaries with a crying two-year-old daughter and a tiny, premature baby. They had no incubator. They had no electricity to run an incubator, and they had no special feeding facilities. And even though they lived on the equator, the nights were often chilly. They wrapped the baby in cotton wool, they put him in box, and they stoked up a fire. They really needed a hot water bottle for the tiny newborn, but they discovered that the last one they had was burst and there was nowhere to get one. So they put the baby as near the fire as they could safely and they hoped it would be enough. It was a touch-and-go fight for that little life. And then came the little girl's prayer.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

The thought of a fire on an airplane is really pretty unsettling. That's exactly what happened on an Air Canada flight a few years ago. The fire started in the lavatory and smoke quickly spread throughout the plane. The pilot couldn’t see and he didn't know how he was going to land. But suddenly this calm, measured voice came into the cockpit, "Just do what I say. I'll bring you in." It was the flight controller. And that calm voice literally talked the pilot in for a miraculously safe landing!

Monday, January 8, 2007

One day our ministry got a call from a lady who identified herself as being with a bank that we don't even do business with. She said, "The wire transfer has not come through yet" and she wanted us to call her back with more information. Interestingly enough, no such lady works at the bank she mentioned. The folks at the bank told us that things like this can actually be part of a very clever scam that crooks use to get your money. They lead you to believe that a donation is coming through; they just need your bank routing number. But that information might be all they need to access your bank account and get what's in your bank account transferred to their bank account. So you have to be a little careful out there. There are plenty of folks out there who are claiming to give you something, so they can take something!

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

When you're taking a team of Native young people to nine different reservations - often in pretty remote places - you need a combination command post/prayer room/counseling room/supply room on wheels. Our rented RV served all those purposes. Now I'm still getting used to this RV thing. Some of them are like entire civilizations on wheels. They're actually in two zip codes everywhere they go. Ours was a lot simpler, but it did the job. One challenge for me was the distance from the RV to the ground. I think really that there may have been some mix-up at the factory and some NBA player got part of my legs. It looked like a long way to the ground for Mr. Vertically Challenged. But the RV had a cool feature. As I stepped out, a step automatically came up under my dangling foot and helped me land safely every time.

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

I don't mind visiting people in the hospital. I just don't stay in hospitals myself. Visitor - yes. Patient - no. My medical value system sort of works like this: minor surgery is any operation on you, and major surgery is any operation on me. I've actually learned that there's something worse than being a hospital patient myself. It's having one of our grandchildren in the hospital, especially when the treatment means pain. I can take it when I'm the one hurting. It's just hard to take it when it's one of them. A few weeks ago, our ten-month-old grandson had to go to the emergency room in another town, and it wasn't a happy time for the little guy. They had to try multiple times to get a needle into a vein for a blood test. It was excruciating! He was increasingly traumatized by one injection after another and by that big old oxygen mask they kept holding over his nose.

As soon as I got there, I decided there was just one thing I could do that might help. It's a little song I've sung to him since the first times I held him. It's always seemed to calm him down, even when he was unusually upset. So I leaned down so my cheek was touching his cheek and I began to gently sing our little song in his ear. With medical folks continuing their necessary but pretty scary work, he stopped his panic crying and he settled down a lot. I must have stayed there for thirty or forty minutes. I think that song must have nearly driven a couple of nurses cuckoo. But my grandson - well, a little song made a big difference.

Friday, December 29, 2006

I guess you could call it creative architecture. Or you could just call it a big stone in the middle of a high brick wall. I saw this phenomenon when I visited the new station of one of our radio partners recently. The front wall of the station has this big old 230-pound stone, about halfway up the wall in the middle of the bricks. There's no way that could be mistake or an accident. It is, in fact, a message. A masonry contractor offered to do some of the work on the station, and somewhere along the way he thought about a stone like this. He thought about what the Bible says about Jesus being the "chief cornerstone." So he went to the local quarry and found this impressive piece of rock, which he installed in a central spot in the front of the building, with the "chief cornerstone" scripture reference under it. I love the reason he gave for this unusual feature. He said, "You build everything around the cornerstone."

Monday, December 25, 2006

When I was growing up, Christmas was a double-header for me, because my birthday is just a few days before Christmas. Just in case you care, it's on the date that the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane successfully. With all the time I've spend on airplanes in my life, you gotta wonder if that's some kind of destiny. That's also the date of the Battle of the Bulge. Destiny again? But I have never had a complaint about when my birthday is. As a kid, I tried to turn that into an advantage by asking for a gift that would be too much for just Christmas but not for Christmas and your birthday. And besides cleaning up in the gift department, it's just neat to have a birthday at a time when all the world seems to be celebrating. All right, not my birthday obviously, but it's just the best time of the year!

Friday, December 22, 2006

Our family opens our Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve, and I've got to tell you, it's usually one amazing outpouring of love. There is not a member of our family who just runs out to some mall and says, "Oh boy, I gotta get something for her or for him." No, there seems to be this almost scientific process where they say about each person they're buying for, "Now what do I know about what this person? What do they really need? What do they really like?" I think we've even got a couple of sons who evaluate their gift-giving success on the basis of how touched the recipient is - you know, the tear test. And there are always some neat, touching moments.

Everybody really seems to like giving a gift more than receiving it. And though none of us has a lot of money to spend, folks seem to sacrifice, if necessary, to buy or make a gift that's really a gift of love. Now here's a way I could ruin this beautiful scene. My wife or one of the kids gives me the gift that they've carefully thought about and maybe sacrificially paid for. And I get up, walk over to that family member, pull out my wallet and say, "So what do I owe you?" They would say, "Nothing." And I would just keep pushing, "Look, I want to pay for this gift, man. Here, take this money!" They'd be pretty hurt; they'd be pretty ticked. I'm trying to buy what they already paid for as a gift.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

It was our grandson's two-year Christmas, and he was so much fun to watch. One day during the season, his mother unpacked the family Nativity Set for her and her boy to set up, and he loved it. I mean, they put up the manger, and Mary and Joseph, and the angels, and the shepherds. They put out everyone except the one figure they couldn't find - Baby Jesus. Well, our grandson was pretty concerned about this missing person, so Mommy told him that Daddy would look for Baby Jesus when he got home from the office. Hours after that, our grandson heard Daddy coming up the back steps. He ran to the door and greeted his father with an impassioned two-word question, "Where's Jesus?"