"Office of Homeland Security" - the fact that America needs one pretty much tells the story of the kind of world we're in now. There are gloves in many company mail rooms, troops and added security checks in our airports, tours are curtailed at many public utilities, our bags are searched at sporting events, and business is booming at security companies.
It was always a highlight when our friend Dave invited out family to go sailing with him on his sailboat. And he really knew his stuff - he'd been sailing on Long Island Sound since he was a boy. I remember one spectacular day when we were out with him, and in spite of the beauty around us, he thought we should head for the harbor. Somehow, he had sensed rough weather coming. Sure enough, we reached the harbor just as the skies opened up. I was glad we were in the harbor. Dave told me he had actually stayed on his boat during the last hurricane that hit. He got blown around a lot, but he and his boat were OK - because they were inside the harbor, inside the hurricane gate.
It was Bible story time for our three-year-old grandson. When Daddy asked about David, our little Bible scholar said, "David obey God." But when Daddy asked about Jonah, our grandson said, "Jonah not obey. Go in whale." Then, for the grand prize, "What happens if you don't obey?" The little guy paused for a moment and then he answered, "Go in whale."
A friend of mine recently attended a semi-pro football game between his team, the Arkansas team, and the overwhelming favorites, the Tennessee team. Actually, the Tennessee team was already playoff-bound. But much to everyone's surprise, the halftime score was Arkansas 55, Tennessee 21. At the end of the third quarter it was still Arkansas 55, Tennessee 21. An upset in the making. Not so fast. Final score - Tennessee 56, Arkansas 55 - a victory won with a touchdown in the last seconds of the game. Another one of those surprising outcomes.
It was a fogged-in morning at the country house we were using for our vacation. The valley below us, the mountains beyond us were nowhere to be seen. In fact, you couldn't see much beyond the front porch. But by about 10:00 A. M., the sun was obviously doing its thing. I could sit there and literally watch the mist being sucked upward and up and away by the heat of the sun. I called my wife's attention to the vanishing moisture, and she made an interesting observation. She said, "That's what happens to you when you dehydrate" - which I did a few months ago. But actually watching the moisture being sucked away - and thinking of that happening to me - well, it will make a fellow be sure he's got a bottle of water with him most of the time.
After watching the World Trade Center as part of my skyline for many years, it hit pretty 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 in 1993, I was greeted by a TV crew as I got off a flight from Newark. They asked me as a New Yorker how I felt after that bombing. "Vulnerable" - that was my answer. Well, since the events of September 11, and the days since then, I think a lot of us are feeling that way. We watched everyday people like us, doing things we do - passengers on a jetliner, folks at their jobs -suddenly wiped out en masse. We're uncertain about what a new kind of war might mean, what's going to happen economically. And some of us are trying to help our children understand what we're not sure we understand. We feel vulnerable. It's as if some of our own sense of personal security and safety came crashing down with those majestic towers.
Laura Ingalls Wilder - she'd written some books that enjoyed some success - but her name became almost a household word only after her death. After "Little House on the Prairie", based on her books, became the #1 TV series in America. Even though the series has been off the air for years, you can still find it just about any given day in almost any American city. And Laura's books about her family's life on the frontier have sold far more after her death than when she was alive. And as you read those books, you find that Laura really was a gifted storyteller. In touring the home where she wrote them, we learned one of the reasons why she was such a good story teller. As the TV series portrayed, her older sister went blind as a teenager. And Pa Ingalls told Laura she now had a mission - to be her sister's eyes, to put into words what was going on around them. That gift would later help her tell the stories that would touch the lives of millions.
She was only 21 years old - but she was well on her way to becoming a superstar. Aaliyah was enjoying huge success with her music, and she was beginning to emerge as an actress with a great future, as well. But that all ended in one awful moment in the Bahamas when the plane carrying her and her crew crashed shortly after takeoff. What made the crash even more tragic was the fact that apparently it was avoidable - at least on the preliminary findings of investigators. The plane had been loaded with something like twice its maximum baggage capacity. And investigators believe that it was all that weight that made that plane go down.
I'm lucky they don't make me wear a nametag when I go to see our dentist. See, he doesn't see me all that often. It's not that I don't need to see him; it's not that I don't pay for it when I put off seeing him. Oh, I'll get around to it--later. Now, don't you think we all have this tendency to avoid appointments that may be unpleasant? Sure we do. And, in most cases, you can put off--even cancel--meetings that you don't want to have. In most cases.
When our son was playing high school football, he looked like the tattooed man at the circus, with bruises all over his body. He always dreamed of playing football. And he had his dream, but he paid a price. As soon as practices started in August, the coaches had those players running 'til they almost dropped, and hitting, and tackling, and straining, and sweating. Some guys quit because it was just too much. Finally, the season began - and his team started winning - a lot. I remember one incredibly rowdy victory celebration on the bus home after they had managed this 20-0 shutout. He had weighed the pain of playing against the pleasure. What he concluded may help you weigh yours.
When our son entered high school, he carried with him the study habits that had served him well in junior high school. They didn't serve him well in high school. He learned a whole lot about studying his freshman year. Now his grades weren't awful - they were just, you know, below his potential. So the last part of the year, we resorted to, uh, martial law. We enforced three hours of study nightly and we allowed no calls - no going out until his homework was done. Now, turn the page to his second year in high school. I'd go into my study at night and I'd find him with these books and notebooks all spread out across my desk. Sometimes I'd tell him there was a phone call for him. And he'd answer, "Tell them I'll call them back later, Dad. I'm not getting on the phone this year until my homework is done." Interesting. I didn't have to discipline my son. He was disciplining himself.
When my wife and I pulled up late to the Bed and Breakfast we were going to be staying at, I tried to be real quiet. I was afraid we might wake some people up, you know. Not a problem. That B & B was buzzing like a beehive. Inside there were ten women huddled around the dining room table, each one with a sewing machine in front of her. Now, I learned that the other guests--all women--were there that weekend for a Mystery Quilt weekend. They were each making a quilt...some for the first time. And even though I felt like I had sort of crashed a grownup slumber party, I did ask a few curious questions like, "What pattern are you following?" They didn't know. See, it turns out that one of the women there, Millie, does these quilting weekends with ladies...and she has the pattern. It's a mystery quilt because each woman only has instructions what to do with the next piece or pieces; she has no idea what all those pieces will make. The next day, one lady said to me, "I can't wait 'till I can see what all this is going to look like when it's all put together." Good thing she didn't leave early with her pile of pieces, huh? She would have never known what it all made.
Man, I almost forgot how much wood there is in a cord. I remembered real fast the last time we got a cord of wood delivered to our house - and dumped in our driveway. I got to stack it all by myself. But as I did, I thought about all those great fires we would have in our living room fireplace all winter long, and of how much our sons would enjoy those fires when they were home for Christmas. They have loved a roaring fire in our fireplace since they were little. And that's okay. But imagine if I had come home one day when they were in high school and I smelled smoke coming from one of their rooms upstairs. I am alarmed. I call upstairs, "Do you smell smoke?" "Yeah, Dad. I built a fire." "But, there's no fireplace in your room!" And he answers, "I know, but I just love fires." I am very alarmed. We have a big problem here. When you have a fire in the fireplace, it will make you warm. But when you have that same fire outside the fireplace...well, you get burned. Well,
During our most recent mission to South Africa, our hosts were kind enough to take me to an incredible game park where I could see African animals in the wild. And I did! Rhino, giraffe, ostrich, baboon--not the kind of animals you usually see wandering around the New York area. But the highlight was coming around this curve and meeting a great bull elephant in the road. He put on a real show for us for several minutes.
Recently, I picked up my local newspaper and saw a news article with that game park as the dateline. The article was about the young male elephants there--the ones the rangers call these teenagers. Apparently, in the last few months, these teenage male elephants have been on a reign of terror in the park, doing things that elephants don't usually do. They have attacked other animals like rhinos. They have attacked tourists, inflicting death or serious injury. And finally the park officials have figured out what's gone wrong with these young males. When they were newborn, they were taken from another game park and brought to this one. But their fathers--the bull elephants--were not brought with them. So these teenage elephants grew up without a model of how a grownup male should act--and they're out of control.
When your life moves as fast as mine does, your food has to often move pretty fast too - as in drive through orders at fast food restaurants. Now, the one closest to us is a Burger King. This is not an endorsement, it just happens to be close to us. I, needless to say, know their menu pretty well after all these years and my order is pretty predictable, including my drink, which is usually an iced tea. Frankly, I'm not a real tea drinker, but, this tea is pretty good because it is pre-sweetened. To me, tea without sweetener tastes just a little bitter - just a little bland. So, being a fast food frequent flyer, I expect all Burger Kings to do it my way. The way my Burger King does it! Well, they don't. In other parts of the country I've gotten my iced tea, taken my first drink and discovered an unpleasant difference. They gave it to me unsweetened! And it isn't nearly as good that way.
It was one of those real short nights. I had just spoken for a large youth event, and the night went late for the best of reasons: God brought hundreds of young people to faith in Christ that night. The counseling of all those kids took a blessedly long time. Now Jason, who was one of the organizers, took me to my hotel that night and told me he would be picking me up in a few hours for my very early morning flight. I said, "I'm sorry you have to get me so early when you've been up so late." He said, "Oh, don't worry. I'll just roll out of bed, throw on a baseball cap, and come on over." Well, bless his heart, that's just what he did. When we got to the airport, I asked him if we could pray together before I went on my plane. He respectfully took off his baseball cap, and we had a neat time of prayer. When I opened my eyes at the end, he still had his cap off. And a very creative hair style--I mean, it was all over the place! He even laughed about it. The cap covered what he didn't want anyone to see--except when he was praying.
When I was in Junior High School, we usually bought one copy of the local newspaper each day. Until the day after I won the County Spelling Bee! Aren't you impressed? (Autographs will come later.) Well, that day we got about 20 copies of the local newspaper. What was the difference? My name was in it this time.
John and Becky were gone when this huge windstorm hit their neighborhood recently. Although no one could be sure a tornado was involved, the winds were clocked at 70 miles an hour. John and Becky told me that when they returned later that day, their street was closed. A huge pine tree had been blown down, and it fell right across the road. Now other kinds of trees had lost some branches, but the wind had actually totally uprooted this evergreen. Well, a neighbor explained to John that it really isn't that hard to uproot a pine tree - no matter how big it is. Because even though it's a big tree, it has shallow roots - so it's relatively easy to bring it down.
You know, sometimes people just overwhelm me with their love and their kindness. Some dear people from the church I grew up in learned about some needs we've had in our home for a long time. And well, with the schedule I have, there really hasn't been much time to make some of the desperately needed improvements or repairs--not to mention the fact that I am constructionally challenged, shall we say. And with our limited budget, we haven't been able to pay anyone else to do it either. Well, in this amazing expression of God's love, a work crew from my childhood church came to our house for three intensive days of house transformation. And now we can see all over the house the wonderful results of their labors.
But while they were in the middle of that work, life got very interesting around our house. We couldn't park in the driveway. Walking through the house was like walking through a minefield of cans and tools and workers. Our clothes were out of closets and laying all over tables. Furniture that had to be moved out of the worker's way made it very exciting just to walk through the house. It was a total mess! And even though I didn't enjoy the mess, I could handle the mess--for one simple reason: they were making our house a mess in order to make it better than it's ever been before.
This past summer I introduced a group of young people to someone they started calling "Evil Bert." You see, Bert was actually a hand puppet I asked one of our more creative leaders to make for me. He was limited to the few materials we had at this training camp, but somehow he managed to create a primitive puppet - who just happened to have very black eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth - and a not-too-friendly expression. Some said he looked a little like "Bert" of "Bert and Ernie" fame on "Sesame Street" - so he was "Evil Bert". And he certainly lived up to his name. He held this styrofoam bat in his hand, and as I walked around the room with Evil Bert on my hand, he kept hitting people with it. But was Evil Bert really the problem?
