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As an airline passenger, those video images from the Los Angeles airport that day were just plain disturbing: a human stampede, terrified passengers, fleeing from a gunman on the loose in the terminal.
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I was on the road again so it had to be a fast food lunch. You know, I keep the nutrition guides from several of those fast food places, even if "fast food nutrition guide" sounds like an oxymoron. I try to think calories before I order because my food too often goes from a moment on the lips to forever on the hips. Interesting thing about the food we eat, the same meal can turn into fat or turn into energy. It depends on what you do after you eat it!
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It was November, and we were thinking turkey, not tornadoes. Right before Thanksgiving there were some 68 tornadoes that didn't consult the calendar. From EF-2s to EF-4s, they left a swath of erased homes and devastated communities across the middle of America. Washington, Illinois was clearly one of the epicenters of the violence in the skies. And the pictures from there are all too familiar; splintered neighborhoods, and residents trying to figure out which pile of rubble used to be their home, and what one reporter called "the good stuff." Like Steve Bucher, who had no home address as of the night the tornado hit. He told CNN that his attitude was "in the next minute and a half, we're either gonna be in heaven or we're going to be in the hospital, or we're going to walk out of here." Thankfully, they walked out safe, but minus pretty much everything else they had.
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When our sons were playing football, the varsity guys let them know an important factor in impressing the coach. He'll be looking for you in the weight room, not just at practice. Coaches know serious athletes serve their time in the weight room, concentrating on becoming stronger. They're not there because it's fun, it's not. But because it's important to winning the battle. One measure of your growing strength is what the lifters call your bench press. That's not lifting a bench of course, but it's how much you can lift over your head as you lie on a weight bench. I've worked with a lot of football players and weight lifters, but I've seldom met one who's content to keep that amount that they can lift where it is. No, they're always adding a little more weight to that bar. So, if your bench press is 170 pounds, you want to go to 180, 190. If you've been lifting 200, you want to work to get it to 210, 220. You know, you're always pressing more.
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Ashley Smith was just getting her life back together. A 26-year-old single mom, she had had a pretty rough journey. A Christian upbringing but a youthful rebellion - brushes with the law, some drug issues, jobs found and lost - and finally marriage and a little girl. Four years earlier, her husband had died in her arms from stab wounds in a violent attack. On that night in March of 2005, she was just getting settled in the apartment she had moved into two days earlier. When she returned from her 2:00 A.M. run to the store, accused killer, Brian Nichols, forced his way into her apartment at gunpoint.
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It's hard to believe there was a time when you had to be carried by someone in order to get anywhere, right? You know, there was a time when it was a major, major breakthrough for you to finally figure out how to move yourself places. Well, years ago, I had a chance to see our six-month-old granddaughter in that milestone struggle to figure out how to crawl. We stopped the presses when she had learned how to sit up by herself. Now, that's a good start. I mean, I'd been sitting on the living room carpet with her. (In fact, I recently learned to sit up by myself too!) Well, I lay down a few feet from her, I held a favorite toy on the rug in front of me, and I started drumming my fingers rhythmically on the carpet. She was definitely intrigued. And you could tell she really wanted to get to my fingers and to that toy. She finally figured out there was no easy way to get what she wanted. She managed to fall forward from her sitting position, get up on all fours, and then rock back and forth in neutral. She reached my direction with one hand. She was risking her delicate balance. Didn't quite make it. But I knew she would soo, because I knew she would eventually do whatever she had to do to get where she wanted to be.
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A college student was supposed to pick me up at this small town airport, and I was going to go to his college to speak. He had my press photo in his hand; just one of those typical head shots...you know, you have to send out to newspapers sometimes. I didn't, of course, have a photo of him. So who would you expect to find who in that airport? It wasn't exactly LaGuardia or Kennedy or Newark Airport. There were only two gates.
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During the high school football season, our Campus Life Club used to have a crowd breaker that provided a lot of entertainment for all of us. We had four cheerleaders up front with a box of football equipment, minus the more personal stuff, of course. They raced to see who was the first to get fully dressed in shoulder pads, hip pads, knee pads, helmets, the rest, you know. Well, they each had a football player providing verbal coaching, but the results were still hilarious. Those cheerleaders had no idea what gear went where. But that's okay. They didn't need to know. You can be sure the players knew. Every day, whether it was for a practice or a game, they got that equipment on. They didn't need it all day in school, of course, because they weren't generally being chased, or run into at high speeds, or thrown to the ground. But when it came time to play, the coaches made sure they had the equipment they needed. The coach wasn't about to send them into the battle without what they would need to protect them.
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It really bothers me when I go into the next room for something and I can't remember why I went in there. You ever had that experience? So, as long as I keep having birthdays - and I hope I do - this memory thing is going to be getting worse and worse I guess. At least that's what they say. Now, my wife's grandfather? He lived to be 93 years old, and frankly there wasn't much that he remembered near the end. She called him one day and she told him who it was, and he didn't say much. And then she said, "Granddad, this is your granddaughter." And then she said, "I love you." Well, it seemed like he was almost embarrassed. He said, "I...I don't know you." He's thinking, "Who is this strange woman calling this old man and telling him she loves him?" That was pretty tough for my wife, because she was very close to her grandfather. Well, she bounced back, though, and she gave her granddad one more reminder. Then we found out the one memory that the years had not erased.
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The Blob! Yeah, that's what they call this huge inflated pillow-like thing they have at this camp we use in our ministry. The Blob's in the water at the camp beach, just sitting there, daring someone to jump off the platform above and onto its bouncy launch pad. Shall we say, it's kind of a leap of faith. Yeah. See, one person jumps onto the Blob and then they clumsily scoot out to the end that extends into the lake. Then a second person makes the jump. And when they hit the Blob, you know, the force of their landing will literally launch the person on the end into the air and ultimately into the lake with a nice loud splash. For the launch to work, there can't be more than thirty pounds difference in the weights of the two Blobbers. Well, since our son is a pretty big hunk of a guy, he went most of the week without getting Blob-launched...until the campers convinced Frank, our other generous-sized leader, to try it with our son. Every person in the camp was at the beach at two o'clock to see this one, and we went out to support him. Our son made the jump and crawled to the end of the Blob. Then his counterweight friend made the jump. The camp erupted into cheers and gales of laughter as the force of Frank's landing sent our son into the air like a Cape Canaveral rocket! It was awesome!
