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October 15, 2025

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Because we lived along the East Coast for so many years, we had the opportunity to see many of America's old lighthouses. I mean, we came up over the top of a hill on an interstate one day and I saw what I certainly never expected to see hundreds of miles from the ocean. It was a lighthouse with a bright, functioning light on top. Obviously, it wasn't there to point any ships in the right direction. Actually, it was part of a church that stands right near the highway. This lighthouse is for people!

October 14, 2025

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Years ago, I was at a youth conference where we needed to raise some money for a camp scholarship fund. So we challenged the kids to buy their counselor into this Friday night food fight. Well, the kids found the money alright pretty quickly! So, Friday night all of us leaders showed up on the field of battle with the campers watching like sadistic spectators at the Roman Coliseum. Now, for starters, we got hosed down so everything would cling to us. I have to tell you, in retrospect, I'm embarrassed about the food we wasted.

October 13, 2025

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When you play high school football, you learn to play another game too. It's called Impress the Coaches. Of course, the coaches decide who plays, who starts, who sits. All summer long players show up for weight lifting in this steamy, hot weight room. Now, they come three times a week. Why would guys want to come and sweat and strain? Because the coaches are there. You can't help but ask how many of those fellows would show up if, well let's say the coaches suddenly announced they were taking a week off, "Fellows, you keep coming. We just won't be here all next week, okay?" I have a feeling the attendance would really go down in the weight room.

October 10, 2025

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It happened over 100 years ago, but we still seem to be fascinated with it - the Titanic. I mean, the Titanic has sailed into the Internet! You can find all kinds of information about the sinking of that "unsinkable" ship back in 1912. And then, there was the Academy Award-winning movie, endless TV shows, articles, and there was even a Broadway musical about it. It seems like fascination with the Titanic just never goes away.

October 9, 2025

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I was once held hostage by a dragonfly. This is very embarrassing, but it is true. I was just a little guy and my cousin and I were sitting on these swings in her backyard. I believed everything she said. And a dragonfly started to circle us on the swings. He was a big old guy - at least he looked big compared to the size I was then. And then he landed on the swing, and my cousin said to me, "You know, if they get mad at you they'll drill a hole through you."

October 8, 2025

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Ah yes, World History class. I'm sure you remember everything you heard there very vividly, right? No. If you remember anything, you probably remember that for centuries the nations of Europe were fighting it out to be number one on their block - often using their ships to build their empires. Now, if you were out on the high seas back then, sailing, let's say for England, the only way you knew if an approaching ship was friend or foe was by their colors flying from the mast. That was also how they would know whether or not to shoot at you as well. As the story goes, many captains decided to strategically lower their colors in a risky situation so folks wouldn't know what their allegiance was. But apparently there were a few bold and courageous skippers who gave a different kind of order to their crew. It went like this: "Nail the colors to the mast." "Uh, sir, that means we can't lower our colors if we need to?" "That's right, matey. Nail them to the mast!"

October 7, 2025

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I think I've lost the same five pounds 200 times - uh-huh. That's enough to make about six of me! Actually, I used to weigh 55 pounds more a number of years ago, and I lost it. But that's no great accomplishment. As anybody will tell you who has that same battle, the challenge is to keep it off. So I set a certain ceiling, and then I would kind of have this anchor weight. And as my weight creeps up there, which it often does, I yell down to the engine room, "Reverse all engines! It's time to go to work!" Frankly, it's just too hard to fight 20 or 25 pounds. It's much smarter, I've learned, to fight the problem when it's a baby than when it's full grown.

October 6, 2025

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It's hard to describe to you how our first grandchild lit up our lives. He had a smile that was really a people-stopper. Yeah, I know I sound like a grandfather. Now, it's a good thing this is radio or you'd have to look at my pictures as well! One day when he was about eight months old, I came home from the office to a pleasant surprise. My wife and I were babysitting our grandson. There he was, sitting on his Grandma's lap, leaning against her. I knelt down in front of the chair and told him what I tell him often. "I love you." He just looked at me, without changing his expression. I repeated it again - no response. Then two more times. "I love you." Suddenly he smiled, his arms started reaching, and his whole body leaned forward for me to hold him. And I did.

October 3, 2025

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This has got to be one of the great engineering feats in the world - packing the trunk of our car for a family trip. Oh, those were the days. Maybe you can relate to that. We had a family of five - quite a challenge to get all of that luggage in one trunk. So, I would stuff every corner, trying the suitcases every which way, and then I'd see if there was something the kids could sit on during the trip. And if all else failed, I called my wife and she could figure it out. Finally, you get it all in, but just barely of course.

October 2, 2025

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Every winter we hear the stories, we see the pictures of avalanches. We have done a lot of work in Alaska, and I took special note of an avalanche that happened at Alaska's Turnagain Pass. The mountain slopes had danger written all over them that day - eight feet of new snow had fallen on this older, packed-down snow, a warm sun had been beating down all day, and there were avalanche warnings. But that didn't stop some snowmobilers from powering up this 2,000-foot-high mountain to see who could go the highest. There was an even more sobering warning of the danger they were in. Twenty minutes before the major avalanche there was a smaller one in a nearby gully. But some of the snowmobilers just kept going.

October 1, 2025

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When my wife and I were raising our three children, communication during the early morning shift at our house was, shall we say, non-verbal. There I was, getting ready for my day. The kids were getting ready for school, and my wife was doing her role of maid, chef, valet, chauffeur.

September 30, 2025

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Now, as a good football coach prepares his high school players for the season, he's going to bring up the dangers of what he will call playing tentatively. I know no one's anxious to get hurt, and so there's a natural tendency to hold back a little in a contact sport; to hold back when you hit, when you block, when you tackle. But the coach is going to tell you that the best way to get hurt is to play tentatively, half-heartedly. Either give it all you've got or don't play.

September 29, 2025

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When you hear the word "superstar," you may think of some great athlete or A-list movie star or some television personality - a celebrity. I'm sorry, but I personally think that's a pretty lame use of the word when you hear about the kind of star that astronomers have been discovering. Like the largest known star in the universe! Conventional telescopes had missed it because of vast dust clouds. But the Hubble Space Telescope picked it up. It is (get this) 186 million miles wide and ten million times brighter than the Sun! That's a superstar. Don't even try to comprehend one star that enormous! Interesting footnote - according to many theories on how stars are formed, a star this large is an impossibility! It's there, it is not impossible.

September 26, 2025

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It wasn't very loud. Just three little words, softly spoken. But they were loud enough to drown out a gunshot that had reverberated across the nation.

September 25, 2025

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Our son was falling in love. I mean like the big one - like the girl he ended up marrying. Our beautiful Navajo daughter now. Our son lived on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona, and the girl of his dreams lived in a remote area of the Navajo Reservation. It was about an hour drive to get out to her house to see her, but he managed - frequently. And the road? Oh, boy! It's one of those reservation roads that kills your shock absorbers, covers you with dust, and even opens up a crater or two for you to dodge. It's not that there weren't better roads around in that area; there are some nicely paved highways with some beautiful views. They even had some nice girls living on them probably. But my son didn't take any of those, for one very good reason. There was only one road that led to the destination he wanted.

September 24, 2025

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Some longtime friends dropped by for a visit and they told us a moving story of what had happened to their son. Tom had been a missionary pilot in Mexico - one of those spiritual heroes, I think, who take the Gospel and God's help to places where it could otherwise never go, including a mountain village in Mexico where the pilots have been God's instruments to launch a mighty work for Christ. And then came the crash. With three missionary pilots and several passengers aboard, a defect in their plane's almost new engine caused a terrible crash. Tom was one of those who survived that crash that could very well have killed everyone. The villagers who loved them actually traveled hours to reach them and rescue them. Tom's body was really badly shattered, and his recovery was long, grueling. But then he was flown back to the area where he ministered. His parents really choked up, and so did we, when they told us what happened as he got off the plane. There to greet him was a crowd of cheering Mexican friends. And they were holding a banner that simply said "Welcome home, Captain Tom!"

September 23, 2025

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I guess you could call it creative architecture. Or you could just call it a big stone in the middle of a high brick wall. I saw this phenomenon when I visited the new station of one of our radio partners. The front wall of the station has this big old 230-pound stone about halfway up the wall in the middle of the bricks. There's no way that could be a mistake or an accident. It is, in fact, a message.

September 22, 2025

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I never heard the words till I got to college. You start talking about Senior Panic. Yeah, well, if you didn't have a prospective mate by your senior year, it became pretty obvious that the odds were working against you and time was not on your side. Sadly, there were some people who got somebody in their desperation, but time began to show they got the wrong somebody. I guess you don't have to be a senior to begin to panic over your singleness. In fact, you may very well fear deep down inside never being married or never having anyone again; that you're going to be stuck eating frozen dinners alone a lot of nights for the rest of your life. In your anxiety, you can make a terrible mistake. I think we've got some good news today!

September 19, 2025

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When we secured land to build our Ministry Headquarters, we barely noticed the barn that was standing on that land, until God blessed us with some truckloads of donated materials which needed a place to be stored. Suddenly, we were taking a second look at this old pole barn filled with hay. The center was the only part that had walls - walls with rotting wood. The east and west sides of the barn had no walls, just some rotting old poles holding up a makeshift roof. We asked a contractor friend if there was any hope for the barn - especially since some folks had said just to bulldoze it. The contractor said the rafters and the foundation were actually good enough that something might be able to be done.

September 18, 2025

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I had the opportunity to spend 24 hours of my life in the city of Athens in Greece. I was on my way home from a teaching mission, and if I only had 24 hours, well, I knew what I wanted to see. I wanted to see the Acropolis, and there it was on a hill that just dominates the entire city. That's where the ancient Greeks built a temple to their goddess, Athena, after whom, obviously, the city was named.

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