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People become like the environment they spend their time in. At least that's what I've been told. For example, if you work at IBM, you become amazingly well organized for some strange reason. If you live in a college town, or if you work around a college, it's amazing how your vocabulary can change; sometimes increases. Oh, and your clothing? Yeah, it becomes a little bit more collegiate. You know?
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On September 11, twenty-four years ago, I saw the Twin Towers crumble to dust. And then, on September 11th this time around, I saw so many people grieving the shocking assassination of a hugely popular Gen Z influencer in front of 3,000 people.
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It was one of those really special 90-degree days, when it is very humid and I was just finishing about eight miles on my bike. I was feeling all fit, and then I passed Tom running all ten and a half miles around that lake. Well, I realized that Tom did that every day. Nobody knew; nobody noticed actually.
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After watching the World Trade Center as part of my skyline for many years, it hit really hard that awful September 11th to see those towers come crashing down and thousands of lives with them. The day after the first attack on the Trade Center, which was back in 1993, I was greeted by a TV crew as I got off a flight from Newark. Of all things, they asked me as a New Yorker how I felt after that first bombing. And I could only think of one word, "vulnerable." That was my answer.
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I was sitting on our front porch, and I saw our son-in-law suddenly running full speed across the front yard, headed for the back yard with his camera in his hand. With my incredible detective mind, I surmised that he had seen something that would make a great photo; something that apparently wasn't going to be there for long. Actually, he had seen our horse running across the pasture with her mane flowing and beautifully illuminated by the setting sun. Well, having a wife who's taken some pretty amazing photos over the years, I understood this. I guess you'd call it the "seize the moment" thing. Photographers know about this, and you'd better not get in their way.
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Our daughter is all grown up now, but she'll never forget that very scary moment when she was four years old. My wife was shopping in a supermarket with our son riding in the grocery cart and our daughter walking with her - well, actually running ahead of her. Karen had warned her to stay in the same aisle she was in, but we're talking a firstborn here - so she had to run ahead to other aisles to explore, of course. Until suddenly she noticed how high those shelves were and how long those aisles were, and the fact that she didn't see anything familiar. And suddenly she felt that awful feeling that she still describes today as "scary" - she was lost. Not too long ago, she told me how it felt. As a grown woman, she said, "Suddenly my security wasn't there." Thankfully, her mother came looking for her. Our daughter got lost, but someone who loved her found her.
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The attack on the USS Stark was really a double tragedy. It happened during the Iraq War, and an Iraqi pilot fired a missile into the side of our missile frigate, the USS Stark. And 37 American sailors died in an awful inferno that followed. Actually, one of the reasons for the tragedy wasn't even so much the missile. It appears now that someone had turned off a vital alarm; one that actually could have alerted the crew in time to respond. Well, there's the double tragedy. The American sailors died, yes. But none of them had to. An attack was underway and the alarm was off. Well, wait a minute! Let's be careful, because you and I might be making that same mistake.
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I missed that sunset a few nights ago, but I saw something just as beautiful - the afterglow. A sky painted by my favorite Artist in brilliant hues of orange and yellow. Look, I've seen a lot of sunsets all over the country and all over the world. But the show isn't over when the sun goes down. No, the sky is still glowing, often magnificently. The sun may be gone, but its aftermath is still beautifying our horizon.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "After the Sun Sets."
I've seen lives like that. My wife was a life like that. The sun set suddenly on my baby's life. But its brilliant afterglow is continuing to light up so many lives. More than even I knew.
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Our garage had gotten to the point where it was scary. Yeah, it was so scary my son used to have nightmares about it. He'd wake up and realize the nightmare was real! It was so messy there really wasn't much walking space. You could crawl around, but that was even tight. See, it had been a busy year, and we really hadn't any time to clean it up. It wasn't that it was all our mess - we had been storing things for other people too.
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I was speaking for a youth camp, and I'd been pouring out my heart to those teenagers in service after service. At the end of the week, some kids came up to me and said, "Do you know what really affected us the most this week?" I was kind of waiting to hear which message, or which illustration, or which challenge had impacted them. It wasn't any of those things. These teenagers said, "You know, Ron, we've been watching you with your wife this week. We've seen how you treat her, how you put your arm around her, and how you talk to her. That's what impressed us."
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If you asked me to choose between a fast-food hamburger or let's say a home cooked pot roast dinner with all the trimmings, it wouldn't take me much time to decide. It probably wouldn't take you much time either. But having lived in metropolitan areas most of my life, it was great to rush into McDonald's or Burger King and grab something. See, often the choice has been between dinner on the run and no dinner at all. So, that was an easy choice.
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It might have been the scariest moment of my life. I was only ten years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I was with my friends in Lake Michigan. We started out just wading, but they kept getting deeper past the lake bottom where it dropped off. We started swimming. Well, not we because I didn't know how, and I was too embarrassed to tell them. And I started taking on water fast. I mean, I went under twice, and I was thrashing around. As for my buddies, they thought I was just clowning around. I wasn't! I was drinking the lake. And then he came - the man from the shore who saw my predicament and he jumped in to do something about it. He had come to rescue me. I grabbed him with both hands. I hung onto him as if he were my only hope, because He was.
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I'll bet you didn't know that Christianity is like suntan lotion. Huh? Neither did I until I was speaking at a conference, and I took my oldest son with me. He was about 12 or 13 I think (my poor kids had to listen to their Dad speak so many times).
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Years ago a major art gallery sponsored a competition for painters. They were offering prizes for the best painting on the subject of "Peace." As the attenders browsed through the entries, most had decided that one certain painting was almost sure to win. It portrayed this lush green pasture under a vivid blue sky, with the cows grazing lazily and a little boy walking through the grass with his fishing pole over his shoulder. It really made you feel all peaceful. But it came in second. The painting that won was a big surprise. The scene was the ocean in a violent storm. The sky was ominous, the lightning was cutting across the sky, and the waves were crashing into the rock walls of the cliffs by the shore. No peace. But you had to look twice to understand what was going on. There, about halfway up the cliff was a birds' nest, tucked into a tiny hollow in the rock. A mother bird was sitting on that nest with her little babies, tucked underneath her, sleeping soundly. That was peace!
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Having seen far too many traffic accidents in my travels over the years, I appreciated a story I heard some years ago from Adrian Rogers. A lady was driving down the highway when she came upon the scene of a terrible accident. She got out of the car, and she saw this driver who had been thrown from the car. He was seriously injured and he was bleeding profusely. Later the lady recounted her response to this heart-rending scene. She said, "Thank goodness, I remembered my First Aid just when it was needed the most, and I immediately put my head between my knees to keep from passing out!"
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Our daughter's got this thing about lighthouses. Thanks to her family indulging that passion at Christmas and birthday time, she's got lighthouses all over her house. She's got lighthouse stationery, lighthouse rugs, and lighthouse books; sad to say, even a lighthouse on the cover of her commode. In many places, real lighthouses are mostly reminders of the maritime past when lives actually depended on seeing the light that marked the shore and the rocks. Sometimes lives still depend on them, as in the case of a Greek ferry called the Express Samina.
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There's a 7-Eleven store owner in Texas who won my respect some years ago. Never met the man, but I really respect his creativity. He had this particular problem every night in his parking lot. A bunch of teenagers would gather there and their rock music would blare from their cars and then they kind of took over their neighborhood with decibels. And when they left, they'd leave a trail of litter and broken bottles.
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I was watching on TV the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, and my mind raced back to this unforgettable personal visit I had to the site of what was a very deadly tragedy. My guide for my visit to the memorial made it really special and very moving, because he's a state trooper. He was one of the rescuers that day. His recollections of the joy of rescues and the heartbreak of lives lost I'm not going to ever forget.
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I approached our local McDonald's manager with an idea for using his restaurant one night. I asked him if he would let our Campus Life group have it for a candlelight dinner at McDonald's. He said, "Well, that sounds creative, but we can't close and just shut the public out. But we can allow you to come in."
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This is going to come as a surprise to my friends who know how technically challenged I am when it comes to building things, but over the years, my sons and I have built several houses together. Don't expect to see a pickup truck that says "Hutchcraft and Sons" on the side. No, and don't look for us in the Yellow Pages. Actually, our houses haven't fared too well. It wasn't because we didn't work hard on them - we did. And it wasn't because they didn't look good; actually they were pretty good. And it wasn't because they weren't big; we did some pretty good sized ones. But every house we built literally collapsed within hours of the time we finished building them. It might have had something to do with the material we built our houses from - sand on a beach next to the ocean.
