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Our friend, Ruthie, loved crossword puzzles, and she hates bridges. So when she's riding with us and there's a bridge, she knows what to do. She covers her face with her crossword puzzle book until it's over. I've teased Ruthie about this a lot. But then two bridges in a week collapsed in different parts of the U. S., and I was wondering if I should buy a crossword puzzle book. Oh wait - I'm driving.
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Our little granddaughter, when she was little, oh what a Mickey Mouse fan! So I got her a big helium Mickey balloon. It had gone through three pretty distinct phases. First, Mickey was totally flat and folded up into a little square. Then the lady at the store gave him a shot of helium that made Mickey big and flying high. In fact, without a string to tie him down, he'd fly away and be in Bolivia. I know from past experience, though, that there's another phase. Yeah, his flying high days can't last forever. One day we knew we were going to find him all soft, mushy, and (you can picture it can't you, right?) slowly shriveling up on the floor.
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This might come as a surprise to you, but athletes often have egos as big as their biceps. One way I've observed that is that I used to take a lot of pictures of our local high school football team. And I would ask my youngest son, "What happens when we tell the players that we're going to show some of those pictures at an event?" And he said, "Well, instead of three people coming, about 300 come." "Why is that?" "All because they all want to see themselves on the big screen." That would happen. One of the fellows would come up to me afterwards and he'd say, "You didn't have me in any of the pictures Mr. Hutch."
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Okay, I admit I'm a history guy. I stop at President's houses and all these places like that. My poor kids have gone on more tours of places: Revolutionary War, Civil War. And, of course we're going to stop and see that. We'd just come back from a vacation that had included a tour of a Civil War battlefield and we had our appropriate souvenirs. That night there was actually a revealing addition to my wife's and my room! On her side there was a gray hat, on my side there was a blue hat. We were just goofing! But guess who grew up in the south, and guess who grew up in the north. But I'll tell you what. Back in those days, as in many battles throughout history, the color of your uniform made you the other guy's target.
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I've been to South Africa several times. I love those accents, but not when they're talking about an inspirational sports icon killing his girlfriend. You may remember some years ago there was a lot of fog about what exactly happened, but what we do know is that South Africa's Olympic hero admittedly shot his girlfriend four times. Now, he said accidentally and the police said on purpose.
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We live in one of the mountainous regions of America. And, you know, mountains are beautiful once you can see them. In areas like this, you can start quite a few mornings with fog and mist. Sometimes it just obscures the mountains in the distance, and sometimes I can't even see the neighbor's yard. If you're the kind of person who lets the weather determine your mood, you could feel pretty "blah" on those foggy days. But there's something you can always be sure of when it's foggy. It's not going to be there all that long. Because even though you cannot see the sun, you know it's shining out there. It's burning off that fog until you can see the beauty around you again.
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After a while I gave up trying to read those little blurbs that were next to the senior pictures in a high school yearbook. In our school, the seniors got to write their own, and it was usually in cryptic abbreviations so they could get in as many words as possible. Now, those abbreviations refer to something meaningful to the person who wrote it; some important people, some important memories, "Oh, yeah, sure." But most of those blurbs are like hopelessly cryptic. I guess you had to be there in order to understand what they're writing about, right?
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Your first clue that something unusual ahead is a sign on the Interstate announcing what they call "the biggest cross in the Western Hemisphere." And, sure enough, as you approach that spot in Texas, you begin to see this huge white cross on the horizon. Actually, it doesn't look all that large from a distance. But then, as you drive that direction, it looks more and more impressive. Until you are coming up on it; (or especially when you do what I did), you stop and you stand at the foot of it - that cross is huge!
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Our sons' room was upstairs, off the beaten path where my wife and I tended to travel in our house. But usually when we did venture into Boys World, we were in for a shock. Let's just say the boys had this unlimited capacity to make a mess and this uncanny ability to live in one without even noticing the mess. (Did I mention to you they're guys?) So, often the stern command would reverberate in the halls of our home: "Clean your room!" The boys seldom disagreed. Usually they would respond with a compliant, "We will." And, I think they really intended to...maybe. They knew it was fundamental to the privileges they wanted, so they went along with our cleaning orders. But did that mean the disaster area got un-disastered? Usually, no. The boys didn't disagree with what they were supposed to do; they just somehow didn't get around to doing it.
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One of our staff came back from his vacation and he reported on how exciting it had been for him and his family to see the sights of Washington, D.C. I asked him if he had ever been there before, and he said, "No. In fact, none of us had ever seen it." Then he went on to explain, "You know I'm sort of a hometown kind of guy." I know that's true. He actually has lived most of his life within a relatively short distance of home base. Then he said, "I sort of had to stretch to do this, but I'm really glad we did."
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You've probably seen pictures of an eagle, probably soaring majestically. You've actually seen some eagles? Okay. I'll bet they were soaring. It's always special when you see one. But apparently, from something I read recently, there are times that they can't even fly. and very few people have ever seen them in their bad times. According to this account, eagles do get sick, and sometimes when they're sick they're almost immobilized. They're weak, depleted, and frankly they're not much to see. When an eagle crashes like that he goes off to a place where he can be alone, often on top of a high cliff. And he lies out in the sun, face up, spread-eagled, totally collapsed. God has actually outfitted the eagle with eyes that can look at the sun without any damage, and that's what the powerless eagle does. He focuses his eyes on the sun and he lies there until his strength comes back. Yeah, the eagle crashes, but he knows how to come back to soar again!
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When I was growing up, we had a bully in our neighborhood. Maybe every neighborhood has a bully. I don't know. Ours was named Boomer! Nobody knew what his real name was, and if we did we probably would know why he was called Boomer. It kind of sounds like a neighborhood bully doesn't it? He intimidated us little kids, I mean. I think it was his hobby, and honestly we were pretty scared of him. He'd come and take our baseball paraphernalia and call us names and threaten to beat us up.
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Because I've had the wonderful opportunity to have a lot of Native American friends, and brothers and sisters, and be on many reservations with our On Eagles' Wings team, I've gotten to hear some of the very colorful ways that Native Americans express themselves. One of them I heard when we were with tribes in the Northeast. And it's really stuck with me, because it sounds like something Jesus said. They were talking about the choice historically that their people had to make between the world of the white people and the world of the Native people. And the elders would say, "No man can stand in two canoes." That's a pretty funny picture if you think about it. The guy trying to stand in two canoes as they drift apart. You know what? You had to choose your canoe.
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I couldn't help but overhear the conversation across the aisle on an airplane flight. The man was dropping profanity about every third word; he even mentioned God quite a few times. He stopped only to work on his meal. Apparently, he needed some cream for his coffee, so he demanded the flight attendant get some, in his usual colorful language.
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Non-verbal communication. You don't always need words to communicate what you need to get across. Well, our 18-month-old granddaughter didn't. It might have been one of those times when Mommy was preoccupied with one of the thousand things that, you know, you have to stay on top of. The little one didn't try to make any big noise about what she needed. She just toddled from the living room where Mommy was, into the bedroom, picked up a diaper, toddled back into the living room, and laid herself down right in front of Mommy, diaper in hand, with her legs in the air, ready for a change. Get the idea, Mommy?
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Some years ago I saw that movie "Twister." It was hair-raising! Even for a guy with not much hair to raise. But I kept telling myself, "It's just a story. It's just special effects."
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I knew about lighthouses. I never knew about lightships though, until I visited Nantucket, that charming old island that's about 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. In the harbor there. You now can tour the retired Lightship Nantucket. But before the development of modern navigational technology, the work of that ship actually saved a lot of lives. See, there are deadly shoals that extend south of Nantucket, and the main shipping lanes to New York City run right along the outer edge in what's called the Ambrose Channel. Now, for many decades, the Lightship Nantucket was stationed at the eastern approach to the channel - at what was called the "Times Square of the Atlantic." Well, she dared not leave her position there - because all ship navigation was fixed on that lightship. If the lightship moved, every ship would follow her - possibly to disaster.
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The first time I ever flew into New York City, the man who picked me up said, "Well, you just landed on the garbage of New York." I said, "What do you mean by that?" He said, "Well, you see, LaGuardia Airport is built on landfill. Years ago all these garbage trucks hauled all this garbage from New York out here and built a place where there's now an airport." I was impressed. I thought, "You know, it's amazing what engineers can do. I mean, they made something very useful out of garbage." Did you know there's a cosmic engineer who put the galaxies together, and He's a genius at making something useful out of garbage.
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We know well all about the World Trade Center and what happened on that September 11th. But there's those personal stories that put a face on it even to this day. I saw a particularly moving first-person story of one woman who miraculously survived the collapse of the North Tower that awful day. She tried to make her way down the long stairwell from her office on the 64th floor. She got to the 13th floor. That's when the entire tower began to crumble. She fell to the ground as the building continued to literally collapse around her. She dropped 13 floors and ended up with her head pinned between two concrete pillars and her legs trapped in a staircase. She said, "I saw that no one came, and I wasn't hearing any noises around me. So I thought, 'I'm going to die here. I'm going to see myself slowly die here.'"
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Even the reporters choked up. That monster tornado tore up in Moore, Oklahoma, tore at our hearts: houses gone, neighborhoods gone, schools gone, children - gone.
