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January 19, 2023

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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."

January 18, 2023

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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.

January 17, 2023

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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."

January 16, 2023

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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?"

January 13, 2023

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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.

January 12, 2023

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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.

January 11, 2023

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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.

January 10, 2023

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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."

January 9, 2023

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I'll bet you looked in the mirror this morning. I'll bet everyone can tell if you didn't. I know it can be depressing. I mean, you look in the mirror and think to yourself, "How can six hours do that much damage?" But at least you know what you're about to subject others to. So you put a sign on the bathroom door, "Slow - Construction Zone." You wash something, you comb something, you cover something, you brush something, you mousse something, you remove something - I mean you do something to something! And the world gets a better you and you prevent a lot of embarrassment thanks to Mr. Mirror.

January 6, 2023

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Well, I did it again! I managed to head right into a storm. Like the family vacation that got slammed by a hurricane. Yeah, the record rainstorm that swamped the airport when we took our daughter to college. Oh, and the Halloween "Snowmageddon" I think they called it. Yeah, we met that in Connecticut while we were there. Oh, then there was super storm Sandy in New York.

January 5, 2023

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In the movie Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks portrays this Army captain whose unit is assigned to find a private named Ryan in the dangerous aftermath of the D-Day Invasion. Ryan's brothers have both been killed in combat, and, unbeknownst to him, he is his mother's only surviving son. The mission involves the captain's unit in some brutal battles with the Germans. But Private Ryan is located and his life is saved by his captain who dies in the process. As Private Ryan attends to his mortally wounded rescuer, the captain speaks his last words in a hoarse whisper, "Earn this." The camera morphs from the young private's face to the face of an old man, standing by a white cross in the cemetery at Normandy. It is Ryan many years later, near the end of his life. He kneels by his captain's grave and he says, "Every day of my life, I've thought about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I've done my best. I hope at least in your eyes that I've lived up to all that you gave for me."

January 4, 2023

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Our sons really enjoyed being uncles for the first time some years ago. Their sister was kind enough to give them two boys to call them uncle. The youngest grandson at the time was four years old and he really enjoyed how his uncles played with him. They kept finding quarters in his nose or his ear. (You know the old magic trick.) Now, before I receive emails about this, rest assured that he had been carefully taught not to put anything in his nose or ear. The grandson that is, not my sons. But he loved it when his uncles pretended they found money there.

January 3, 2023

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It was one of those early spring days when we look out the window and see all kinds of beautiful birds. I saw this one that was actually pretty funny to watch. I'm not sure it was really funny for him. I think it was a bluebird and he was hovering near a rear window on our car, just fluttering back and forth, running into the glass over and over again. Now, he was obviously confused and disoriented. He was going nowhere, just fluttering, chattering, and crashing into the window. My wife said, "You know, I'll bet he sees himself in the glass, and that's what's got him acting crazy."

January 2, 2023

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There's a reason so many of us grandparents are overcoming our technophobia and venturing into cyberspace. We get to see pictures of our grandkids as soon as they're taken!

December 30, 2022

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You know, occasionally I see something enlightening in a little comic strip called "Family Circus." For example, there was this one where the house is a total disaster, and Mom walks in. The look on her face tells you that Mt. Vesuvius is about to blow. She has only one question, "Who did this?" Dad and the children are all innocent, of course. Apparently, the house must have just exploded and made itself a mess. But when Mom presses her question for who should be held responsible, one of the kids cleverly responds: "It was the ghost of 'not me'!"

December 29, 2022

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When I was a teenager, you could tell a girl was going steady by the fuzzy ring around her neck. And when our son started going with a girl, she just got his jacket; football jacket - the one he earned with blood, sweat, tears, and my money. But you could tell this girl was going with my son; the jacket had his name on it. I have to tell you though, it was slightly amusing. See, my son was a big lineman. She swam in that coat! And she wasn't the only one. We had a lot of girls in our school who were dating athletes, and they wore their jackets as a symbol, "Hey, I belong to him. He's mine." But it didn't look that great on most of them. No. You know, wearing what a man gives you for security may not be the best fit for you.

December 28, 2022

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So why did the American colonists win the Revolution? Well, it wouldn't surprise you if you saw how the redcoats fought. They fought battles in the old fashioned European way. They lined up in straight rows. The front row shoots. The next row rotates in while the others reload. Now, the colonists on the other hand didn't believe in lining up. They just came from everywhere. So those red uniforms all lined up in a rigid row? Well, that's like target practice. The colonists looked like they were disorganized, but their new way of fighting won the battle.

December 27, 2022

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A while back I got to explore the world my wife grew up in. And I've been going to a lot of beautiful back roads. One of those was this road that she walked every morning to the school bus. She was only five, and it's about two miles from where she lived to the main road. Fortunately, she was not the kind who bored her kids with, "When I was your age" stories. But boy this would have made a good one. That was a long, sometimes scary walk for a little girl alone. I can almost picture it when we were driving there.

December 26, 2022

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The dam broke. Those are words no one wants to hear if they live downriver from a dam. But that's exactly what happened near some small towns in southeast Missouri. It was just before daybreak when a dam on Taum Sauk Lake collapsed, sending a billion-gallon torrent of water streaming down the mountain and washing away homes and vehicles. When inspectors began to probe the reason for the collapse, they were dumbfounded by what they discovered. Instead of the granite that they had assumed for decades was the main material keeping the water in the reservoir, they found that the broken portion appeared to consist entirely of just soil and small rock. The breach occurred when an automated system mistakenly pumped too much water into the reservoir. But the reason for the disaster was a dam that was made of material that just couldn't stand the pressure.

December 23, 2022

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I love all the "joy to the world" and the Christmas electricity in the air. But maybe you remember a few Christmases ago, just down from the manger there were a lot of flags at half-staff for 26 Connecticut funerals. You probably remember all those little children gunned down so brutally just eleven days before Christmas. We live in a violent time, an angry time, conflicted, confusing. But it's still Christmas, and still the "most wonderful time of the year."

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