It had been a rough year for the flu. Yeah, it was nasty, and it was dangerous. Early in the season, my doctor told me he was already concerned about how high the death toll was in our state. And then a friend texted me and said, "It's time for me to descend into the nightly coughing abyss." She had the flu. We've had some family members spend some time in that abyss - so we knew what they were talking about.
Driving in major urban areas of America can be a challenge - especially if you haven't done much of it. But my ministry team member was doing a good job of navigating the Chicago area, driving me to a number of locations where I was speaking. In one case, he was following our local host who was leading us to a place where we had never been. Honestly, we had no clue where we were going without him. I got to telling my driver one of my many stories, and he even seemed to be enjoying it. We were in the left lane, and suddenly a car came up behind us in the right lane, flashing his lights. Then he pulled up next to us, waving his arm out the window. It was our host. Apparently, we hadn't been following him for quite a while. So he led us in a daring - maybe scary is the word - U-turn to try to get us where we were supposed to be.
On our list of holidays that we all celebrate each year, I have a sneaking suspicion there might be at least one of them that was invented by greeting card companies and florists. In America we call it Valentine's Day! Florists freak out and then they count their shekels the next day. And, of course, I even did my part by helping some struggling greeting card company. Yeah, I would do that. I had to of course. I wanted to get one for the woman I love.
If you watch sports very much, you've no doubt seen some great plays that ended up not counting, because they made that great play out of bounds. Oh, I've seen many arguments over whether or not they actually were out of bounds at the time; many of them have been resolved by video replay. But you don't see arguments over where the boundaries are. No, everybody knows that when they go out on the field, right, or the court, and they know exactly what the penalties are going to be for breaking the rules.
Once you've tasted Vermont maple syrup, all the store brands taste like goo! So my ears picked up one night when NBC Nightly News started talking about the troubles that Vermont maple farmers were having that year. They focused on one farmer who lived on a farm where they've been mapling for eight generations! This farmer had known that the maple trees were ready to be tapped for their valuable sap during the first week of March. But recent weather changes had suddenly thrown that predictable harvest schedule into total confusion.
If you travel America's interstate highways much, you've seen lots of cars, lots of scenery, and lots of road kills. Yes, many animals still think they can beat the cars that are storming down the highway - and they're wrong. They end up as those carcasses we see by the edge of the road. It must be a full-time job just picking up all those road kills. At one spot on an interstate in Pennsylvania, they didn't pick up one of them. No, the news reported that a paving crew found a dead deer in their path and they didn't remove it. They just paved right over it! Great! No one could see it now, but they felt it!
The headlines that day were about a movie star dying. But Paul Walker had been a lot more. For those familiar with the "Fast and Furious" movies that he was famous for, his death was especially jarring. Because of the way he died - a high-speed accident, the exotic race car that he was in exploding in flames; eerily reminiscent of the movies that made him famous. But in the days that followed that initial shock, people were actually focusing on Paul Walker the man, not just the movie star.
There are many kinds of artists. My friend, Martha, she made her masterpieces out of thread. She lived in a tiny, sparsely furnished house in a remote corner of the Navajo reservation. It hadn't been an easy life with 11 children and a husband who blew most of his meager income on alcohol. But she found a way to provide at least enough money for her family to eat. She wove Navajo rugs. Now, I've had the privilege actually of being there when she was working on one. She had a loom in her living room where she worked for hours on end, pulling thread from one side to the other. In some ways, it didn't look like it had much promise; no pattern could be seen anywhere. It was all in her mind. But there was something beautiful in her mind that only she could see as she patiently wove those threads back and forth. And when she was finished, she'd produced a masterpiece for which a tourist would pay thousands of dollars in a nearby store. She'd only get a fraction of that, but shame on anyone who ever questioned what she was doing on that loom.
I've lost count of how many times I have landed in an airplane. But who would care? For the most part - routine landings - except for the ones that were unusually soft or unusually hard. In fact I experienced one of those hard landings a while back. We hit the runway, well, let's say with authority.
Two words that will inevitably cause a lot of excitement to appear on any face in our family - Ocean City. That's the name of this charming town on the Jersey shore where our family has got a lot of memories over the years. There was this one trip where several of us rendezvoused there for a couple of days making a few more memories.
