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Wednesday, May 26, 2004

I don't know if there was ever a time in our son's life when he checked the mailbox so many times. Now you're thinking "Oh, a letter from a girl, huh?" No, it was grades from college. See, this was during our son's last visit home when he was going to college, and the grades for the semester just completed were supposed to be mailed to him at home. Of course, I was thinking they should have been mailed to me, because they sure mail the bills to me! Well, it got a little frustrating and as he talked with all his college friends, because they, in other parts of the country, already had their grades. And every day that they didn't come, well, he got a little more frustrated. Now why was he so eager to get his grades? He had every reason to believe that he had done very well this time. And finally, they came. Best grades by far since he started college - he was on the Dean's List! High five's all around!

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Now, I grew up in Illinois, so, well, I'm impressed by the mountains in the eastern United States. I mean the highest are around, you know, like 3,000 feet. That's pretty good for Illinois, but my friends from the Rockies think the eastern mountains are like, well, glorified hills. In Colorado, they brag about the mountains they call the 14ers - those that are over 14,000 feet. That's impressive, but when I was in Ecuador, I was awed by the volcanoes that ring the capital city of Quito, and they rule much of the countryside - like Anasana for example - 18,000 feet. It dwarfed the tallest peaks I had ever seen. And then my host really amazed me. He said, "You know, Ron, some experts believe that Anasana used to be even higher." They think it was as much as 28,000 feet high. Well, so much for Colorado's 14ers. I said, "What happened?" Well, the volcano blew its top one day, and though the eruption lasted only a short time, the damage has lasted ever since.

Monday, May 24, 2004

My son had dreamed about an old Mustang for years. I mean, the kind with four wheels, not four legs. He saw a great price advertised; he sold some of his baseball card collection, and he became the proud owner of a 1968 Mustang. Yeah, right, the kind that runs on gasoline, not oats. Right? I just wanted to make that we're clear on the Mustang thing. Now he invited me to take a drive, and I slid in. I turned the key. It whirred to life, and several nearby birds went for counseling as I started up the driveway. I mean, this thing had a roar to it! Now, when I reached the top of the driveway, I found out what I didn't like about that "cool"' car - turning it. See, I'm spoiled. I've got power steering. This car had power steering, except it was my power. When you want to turn that Mustang, it's like a total body operation. You sort of wrap yourself around it several times. You sort of call it corkscrew turning. Now, I never asked to drive the Mustang much after that. It was entirely too hard to turn!

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Twice in a little over a decade, Saddam Hussein's Iraq has been the focus of a war involving American and other Coalition forces. Operation Iraqi Freedom, the second Gulf War, turned out to be much quicker than anyone could have imagined. Saddam Hussein was toppled from power and ultimately captured. But that didn't stop critics from calling into question the intelligence that led to the decision to send troops to Iraq. The absence of the expected stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction brought a widespread outcry for an investigation into how American intelligence missed what appeared to be the real situation. Well, you know, this is nothing new. It's always been important for a country to have reliable intelligence information before they venture into battle. A lot of important decisions are made based upon the reports from intelligence.

Monday, March 15, 2004

Some years ago, my wife got a very serious case of hepatitis. Later, the specialist told her that the battle for her liver was so acute he could hear the blood rushing to save it, "Just like Niagara Falls," he said. Thank God, she recovered fully with no trace today of that disease or any of its effects. But it took a while - seven months of bed rest. That was an interesting time for Daddy - suddenly known as Mr. Mom - and for our three children. Thankfully, our church brought dinner to our home almost every night. God bless them! It's a good thing. I mean, if it had been up to me to feed the kids, they probably would have been on the cover of something like World Vision magazine eventually. But as tough as it was, my wife said she had much to praise God for in her recovery from hepatitis. For one thing, no one could really look to her or count on her for seven months. Here's what she said about it: "God gave me the gift of cleansing my schedule!" He weeded out a lot that didn't matter after all and left only what did matter.

Friday, March 5, 2004

Over the years, I've had the honor and the pleasure of speaking for many professional football chapels. You should have seen me with the New York Giants. I was like the New York dwarf! I guess I'm tall inside, you know. But anyway, their "thank-you" for speaking was two tickets for the game. And they had great seats reserved for the chapel speaker, midfield under cover. Of course, any time you go to a public event like a game or a concert or a show, you hope for great seats. On occasion, I've even looked up a seating chart for the facility where an event was being held so I knew what seats to ask for. Unfortunately, you have to pay a little for the best seats, but you get a view most folks can't see.

Thursday, March 4, 2004

It was a crazy Christmas at our house! Everybody in our family - three generations now - is so excited about giving gifts to the others. Oh yeah, about getting them, too. That sometimes our festivities are not quite like "peace on earth." Such was our last Christmas. The chatter was loud, the laughter was hearty, and the buzz was intense. Or, in the case of a two-year-old, confusing. My wife, with her finely-tuned grandma's radar, noticed that our little grandson seemed a little dazed by all this happy Christmas crossfire. So she just quietly slipped to the floor where he was and began working patiently with him on assembling a toy he had just opened. This precious scene had been going on for a few minutes before any of us even noticed in the chaos. But there was Grandma, quietly creating an island of sanity in a sea of craziness.

Monday, March 1, 2004

Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad! That's not many folks' dream way to spend Turkey Day. But for some American soldiers, Thanksgiving 2003 may be one of the more memorable holidays of their lives. That was the day the President of the United States joined them for Thanksgiving Dinner - actually helped serve them Thanksgiving Dinner. In the aftermath of the Iraq War, Baghdad was still not a very secure place, so the President's visit came as a total surprise, a total secret from the press. Many American soldiers were feeling the weight of an extended tour of duty and, for many, the sudden appearance of their President was a real morale boost. As GIs have learned in previous wartime visits from other Presidents, there's something re-energizing about a personal visit from your Commander-in-Chief.

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.

Friday, January 9, 2004

My friend Rich has just come through a major battle with cancer with heavy radiation therapy which has helped him win. The only problem is that the radiation left Rich pretty weak and depleted. So, he would work a short week at his business and then he'd retreat to this little cabin he and his wife have way back in the woods. One day Rich was down by the stream, and he was feeling pretty tired. So, he lay down right there by the water and fell asleep. When he woke up, he was startled by what he saw. There above him, a vulture was circling him! Now, you wouldn't believe how quickly Rich got up! I can just imagine him telling that hopeful vulture, "Hey, bird, I may look dead to you, but I'm still alive!"

Thursday, January 8, 2004

A little word association exercise for today. What's the first word that comes to your mind when I say this name? Linus. Let me guess - blanket. Well, of course. Unless somehow in your life you've missed cartoondom's classic, "Peanuts" and the world of Charlie Brown and friends. And Linus is the little philosopher of the group, known most of all for his ever-present security blanket. And I mean ever-present. Everywhere this boy goes, he's dragging his precious blanket. Trying to separate him from his blanket is a hopeless cause. It's like, "Who am I without it?"

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