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My children were picking up their children from school, and that day they were holding them very close. Because some parents of little schoolchildren in Connecticut would not be able to pick up their children from school or hold them close. Not that day - never again.
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Now, you probably wouldn't expect the subject of intimacy to come up in a discussion of wallpaper. Yeah, well it did. I have a friend who is a painter and a wallpaperer for a living, and he was helping in our office. He actually volunteered to help us out by scraping the old wallpaper off a wall that really needed some work. And before we were in our building, someone had put wallpaper on the sheetrock years ago. Well, when I walked in, he was very frustrated because what happened was, well apparently, when they had applied that wallpaper to the sheetrock they hadn't put any preparation layer on it. So, you can probably guess what happened. The wallpaper and the top layer of the sheetrock had sort of become one. And when he scraped off the wallpaper, you got it. The top layer of the sheetrock came with it. He was pretty frustrated, and he held them up to me and he said, "I can't separate them!" Then he said, "You know what we call this, Ron?" We being "wallpaperers" I guess. He said, "We call this an intimate bond." Well, those intimate bonds are hard to separate.
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When I fly into Washington D.C., I sort of flash back to an unforgettable scene. It's been quite a while, but I can't help but think of it as I see that same bridge. It actually happened way back in 1982 in January. It was when Air Florida's flight 90 took off in Washington. It raked the 14th Street Bridge; plunged into the freezing waters of the Potomac River. I can still remember that image of the tail section sticking up out of the river and six survivors clinging to that plane.
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It was really cold outside. It wasn't supposed to be cold inside. But when I awoke that morning, my nose felt like a puppy nose. It was cold - 45 degrees in the house! Turned out the problem wasn't the thermometer. No, that just reflected the temperature. It was the thermostat that sets the temperature.
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It wasn't easy being queen. So it should come as no surprise that monarchs like the late Queen Elizabeth would like to escape from London sometimes. In fact, one such occasion, the queen asked her chauffeur to take her for a ride in the country. Then she asked him to pull over so she could just take a little walk by herself. No crown, no gown - dressed down. So for these golden moments, the queen was just an ordinary lady, taking a walk in the country. She'd gone out about a mile down the road when this sudden rain shower opened up. The queen knocked on the door of a small hut that was nearby. She asked the lady if she had an umbrella. The lady actually had two umbrellas - a tattered, battered old umbrella and a brand new one. She gave her the beat up umbrella. This is the queen, but she doesn't know that of course. The queen promised it would be returned the next day. Well, you've got to imagine the scene as a uniformed chauffeur pulls up in the royal limousine, goes to the door of the hut the next day and announces, "I'm returning this for the queen." Needless to say, the woman was in shock. All she could say was, "If I had known it was for the queen, I would have given her my best!"
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A few years back, there was some things in the news about a lot of grumpy prime ministers and presidents. Yeah. Well, there was a reason. It seemed the U.S. was allegedly dropping in on their phone calls uninvited. Now, I'm not sure what all prime ministers and presidents talk about, but they obviously did not like being snooped on. But then, who does?
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Kids count the days. Teachers count the days. Principals count the days. Until everybody can shout those happiest of all words, "School's out!" Police cars sport bumper stickers that warn drivers to be extra careful. Same reason: "School's out." And graduations? Those are real milestones because you don't ever have to go back to that school if you don't want to! I hate to rain on anybody's parade, but that "school's out" thing is actually a myth. Or at least it should be.
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It was many centuries ago in a remote village in India. Word began to spread that something was about to happen that no one had seen in their lifetime - the prince was actually coming to visit this forgotten little village. Well, everyone was excited, but no one was more excited than the village beggar. Every day he eked out another day by sitting by the road with his little cup, hoping to get enough money to buy some rice to live one more day. He actually had two cups, one for collecting money and one for a few grains of rice. But now the prince was coming. I mean, the wealthy prince! And when that prince finally arrived, the beggar mustered his most impassioned appeal, "Alms! Alms for the poor!" And the prince stopped. The beggar's heart was pounding furiously.
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It may have been the most defining moment in a generation - the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most of us were marked indelibly by just watching it on television. My friend Mark lived it. It was his first visit to New York, and his business took him high up in one of the Twin Towers. After the attacks, there was still great confusion as to whether to evacuate or stay in the building, Mark disregarded the announcement to "return to your office." That decision saved his life.
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I have carpenter friends who never leave home without their tools. There are doctors who never leave home without a stethoscope. And I can understand those kinds of things, but what about a friend of one of my friends who is an electrician. Well, he always carries an outlet box with him - you know, the thing in your wall you plug your things into. But that's all this electrician carries - just the outlet box. He says he carries it just in case he's in a situation where there's a power outage and no electricity available. Now, listen, there's probably something I don't understand here but, like is this going to help?
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I was speaking at a Christian conference center in the Midwest; actually, speaking at least three times a day there! Don't feel bad for me. No, feel bad for the people who had to listen to me all those times! After about three days, I decided to grab some break time to do something I had wanted to do since I arrived. I wanted to climb this monster sand dune that's not far from the conference center. It was just sitting there all week saying, "Climb me, Ron! Climb me!" So I grabbed a couple of friends and we started trudging up this huge mountain of sand. At first, we were charging up that dune, all full of energy. But if you've ever climbed a sand dune, you know it gets pretty exhausting pretty fast. After a while, you could hear the huffing and the puffing and you could feel the steps slowing down. My climbing partners were starting to lose their enthusiasm for the rest of the climb - especially when they looked up and saw how far we still had to go. So I encouraged them to stop for a minute and rest, and to look down. We needed to look at how far we had come - not just how far we still had to go.
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Ah, Laurie. She may have been my first romantic crush. It was 7th grade. I was insecure - that's a synonym for 7th grade - and I didn't know how she felt about me. So one day I went to the store, I spent all the money I had - which wasn't much - on a little rhinestone necklace. (Yeah, pretty romantic, huh?) And then I wrote this mushy little note to Laurie and I put it in an envelope with that necklace. The next day, as I was sitting in study hall, (the only class we had together), I smelled that perfume. I knew Laurie was approaching. I handed her that love-filled envelope, which she took with her to her desk. The next day - study hall, approach of the killer perfume - my heart was beating out of my chest. Then, as Laurie went by, something very familiar appeared on my desk. It was that envelope - with the necklace and the note inside. Ouch! Of course, it didn't really bother me that much ... then why am I talking about it so many years later?
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When you've passed thousands of cars on the Interstate, you've seen a whole lot of bumper stickers - most of which you've forgotten. But there's one I saw I've never forgotten. It was just five little words - words which weren't even that original. But as I passed that particular car, I glanced inside at the passengers, and suddenly the bumper sticker took on great meaning. A mother was driving and she had her child in the back seat. It was a little boy, who even with a quick glance, I could see had some severe mental handicaps. You know, this lady had a very challenging life, and I knew how she was handling it because the bumper sticker told me. It simply said, "One day at a time."
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There are not too many TV shows you remember many years later. But I still remember a TV documentary that was filmed during the Vietnam War. It was called "Same Mud, Same Blood." This correspondent traveled with this infantry company that was made up of mostly white soldiers from the Deep South and a few others who were African American. But the unit was commanded by an African American sergeant.
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I was there the day my son's dream died. Since he'd been little, playing big-time football had been his dream. If, as they say, biology is destiny, and him being my son, he was not destined to have a football player's size by any means. But he really worked at it, he spent hours in the gym, bulking up, practicing with focus and intensity. And honestly, he was very good at football - until the day he went down in a driving drill with a badly injured knee. He'd torn his anterior cruciate ligament - an injury dreaded by anyone in sports. One of the top sports med doctors in our area examined our son's knee - and then he said those words that sounded like a death sentence to our boy, "You'll never play football again."
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Little Mark was at that stage. He was about three years old, the son of our friends. He was cute...until he would start asking all those questions! Guess what his favorite one was? (I'll bet you'll know!) "Why? Why?"
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I think it had something to do with moving a piano. I've been part of moving one of those monsters, and I know what a bear it is to do. Fortunately, we had plenty of guys to share the load. I guess my Dad didn't. Ultimately, he said moving a piano was a major reason he had to have one of those difficult surgeries - actually to repair a hernia. I'd never even heard the word before until my Dad helped move a piano. There weren't enough men to bear the load of that piano that they moved at church. Well, for at least one man - my Dad - the load was too much to bear without major damage.
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It may have been the happiest traffic jam in history. The scene: the Brandenburg Gate between East and West Berlin on an incredible November weekend years ago. Suddenly, after rapid revolutionary changes in the policies of East Germany's communist government, people could go through the wall that for 28 years had divided that city between free and communist. The cars were lined up for miles to cross that barrier that had been closed for so long. Some people drove through the wall, some people walked through the gate, some scaled fences to get there more quickly, and the news reported that tens of thousands of people began to break into a delirious chant that the whole world could hear, "The wall is gone! The wall is gone!" Well, so is yours.
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So, how much would you pay for a piece of cardboard; like $100, $500, $2,000? Actually, people do it all the time, if that cardboard is a valuable baseball card. My sons, over the years, well they profited from collecting that cardboard strategically. They tried to anticipate rookies who would be stars and they bought those cards before there was much demand. Later, when lots of people wanted those cards and there weren't many to be found, our guys cleaned up. Now, they didn't have any of those cards that sold for thousands, because they're most valuable for one reason. There just aren't many of them. You have something like that.
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It all started with an S.O.S. from a counselor at a conference where I was speaking. I'd just extended an invitation for young men and women who wanted to make a commitment to following Christ. There were many young people in the counseling room after that, and a counselor came back and said, "You've got to talk to Kelly. She's really hard."
