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Friday, February 27, 2004

If you ask our kids about the four or five most indelible memories from their childhood, at least one is bound to bring up the night of the hurricane. Some friends had offered their home on Eastern Long Island to us for our vacation. I wonder if they had advance word that Hurricane Belle would make it all the way up the East Coast that week and smack Long Island right on the chin? Thankfully, the home we were in was on a cliff above the ocean so we didn't have to evacuate. But we made all the appropriate preparations. We loaded up on batteries and candles, stored water in the bathtub, lined the freezer with newspaper in case the power went out. Well, the leading winds of the hurricane started blowing in about bedtime that night, and you could really hear it howling around our bedrooms upstairs. The kids were pretty unnerved. So, we all moved out of our rooms to the downstairs living room. We laid out some sleeping bags, and slept side by side together in the living room. I'll tell you, the kids loved it. They actually said, "Hey, hurricanes are fun, Dad!"

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Okay, I admit that I'm often in a hurry to get where I'm going. More than once, we've been traveling in the crew configuration my wife and I have used for years - me pilot at the wheel, her navigator with map. I'm clipping along at a healthy rate of speed, believing that the purpose of the exercise is to be there, not to spend a lot of time getting there! Right? And even though my beautiful navigator may have announced that a turn may be coming up soon, I maintain my "must get there" speed. Then, suddenly, I hear those words, "This is our turn!" Zoom! We blow right past it - sometimes without an opportunity to turn around for several miles. So much for me trying to make good time. Too often, I've ended up on the wrong road - just because I was going too fast to turn.

Friday, February 20, 2004

Part of our ministry team works on a remote Indian reservation in the Southwest. In fact, our sons launched this ground-breaking outreach to Native young people a decade ago and named it "The Path." In the past couple of years, that ministry has become a part of ours. Together, we've had the opportunity of launching, by the miracle working of God, a low-power FM radio station on this reservation. A reservation that's hard to reach - spiritually, as well as geographically. Now the light of Christ is going out 24 hours a day across the reservation in an original format that is really making a difference. Part of the adventure was just getting the station on the air - including setting up the tower. That required some special climbing abilities. And one of the Native young men who God sent to help with the station just happens to have that experience - illegally, in the years before he was following Christ. He used to love to climb towers that the law actually forbids people to climb. Now, all of a sudden, those abilities - practiced in a way that did not honor God - were suddenly being used by God to glorify Him. Don't you just love it!

Friday, February 13, 2004

Once you've gotten used to a new convenience you find yourself asking, "How did we ever do without these?" Sadly, my cell phone is one of those new things that seems indispensable now. Especially when you have lots of irons in the fire and you're on the road a lot. Often, by the end of the day my cell phone and I have something in common - our battery is dead and we need recharging. I get into a bed - my phone gets plugged into an outlet. Not long ago, I went through my night-night drill in my motel room, including plugging in my cell phone. It wasn't happy the next morning when I went to turn my cell phone back on. Oh, I had plugged it in - on one end. See, I had connected my phone cord into the phone, but I had forgotten to plug it into the wall. So, my dead phone was still very dead.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

It may have been the most memorable - maybe even the most defining moment in the history of our generation - the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most of us were marked indelibly by just watching it on television. My friend Nathan lived it. It was his first visit to New York, and his business took him high up in one of the Twin Towers. After the attacks, while there was still great confusion as to whether to evacuate or to stay in the building, Nathan disregarded the announcement to "return to your offices." That decision saved his life. He made his way down the long stairwell until he neared the bottom. There rescuers guided him and many others with him to a safe exit, not long before the tower collapsed in those few horrific seconds. I'll never forget when Nathan told me about the firefighters he saw as he neared the main floor: he said, "I looked in their eyes and thought, 'They must be as frightened as I am.' Except I was going down, and they were going up." Is it any wonder we call them heroes?

Wednesday, February 4, 2004

There are not too many TV shows that you remember for 30 years. But I still remember a TV documentary that was filmed during the Vietnam War - it was called, "Same Mud, Same Blood." The correspondent traveled with this infantry company that was made up mostly of white soldiers from the Deep South with a few others who were Black - a unit commanded by a Black sergeant. Now, we're talking a time when America was being convulsed with civil rights conflicts. But the documentary told the amazing story of how a company that started out with huge racial walls between them became molded into a group of guys who would die for each other - after all, they were "same mud, same blood." There was something about being in war together that brought people close together who might otherwise have never have had anything in common.

Tuesday, February 3, 2004

It's sad, but we - like a lot of people - have had to institute a lot of safety precautions to protect our computers. Things like not opening any e-mail attachments or putting foreign diskettes in each other's computers. There's this dreaded word for anyone who owns a computer - virus. Now, this is not "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" stuff. No, we're talking technical viruses that can get into your systems and wreak havoc with your data and your equipment. That's why the first display I see when I turn my computer on says "Virus Scan." There are plenty of horror stories of what happened when one of these little alien invaders got into a computer system. We're talking total meltdown in some cases. It really does pay to go to extra effort to keep those invaders out!

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

For many years, J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, Lord of The Rings, has fascinated thoughtful readers. Like C.S. Lewis (who was helped to Christ by Tolkien actually), Tolkien communicated spiritual truths through allegorical myths in a world called "Middle Earth." His works have now captured the imagination of people who had never heard of his books through three epic motion pictures based on them. At the heart of Lord of The Rings and its epic battles is the ring. It's a gold ring that is the key to enormous power - but a power that inevitably addicts the possessor to its power. That power ultimately corrupts and destroys the one who holds it so tenaciously. It is, in fact, called by one main character, not the ring, but "The Precious."

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

During our Mission Alaska trip to young Native Alaskans, I spent a lot of time in a little missionary aircraft. It's the only way to get to villages that are 400 miles from the nearest road! One day when the weather wasn't much fun, our pilot asked me to keep an eye on the wing on my side. He said, "Let me know if you see any icing." Of course, I hear "icing" and I think of a birthday cake. A pilot hears icing, and he thinks danger in the air. Amazingly, a little ice on the wings adds just enough weight to endanger the plane. It interrupts the airflow that keeps the plane airborne, and it starts losing altitude. So that day over Alaska, I really kept my eyes open for ice!

Monday, January 12, 2004

I don't get sick very often, but I managed to pick up last season's special flu bug. Which, of course, meant my wife soon followed suit. We believe in sharing everything. Our friend Janice got a similar flu - sick for four or five days. Then her husband got it - sick for four or five days. Then their lucky daughter took her turn - sick for four or five days. Their teenage son was the only one who didn't get it. His mom said he was the one walking around the house with a can of Lysol all the time! You can almost count on it - when one person is infected with a germ, it will probably end up infecting the people closest to them.

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