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October 10, 2022

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Where are those gnats coming from? Not in the studio. I mean every family member - one after another - was asking that around our house. We had this sudden outbreak of pesky little bugs floating around through the air. Have you ever seen them? And you'd see every one of us swatting back and forth. We couldn't imagine where they were coming from. Where do these guys come from? We killed as many as we could.

October 7, 2022

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It's probably one of the most famous offices in the world - the Oval Office of the President of the United States. Every four years, two people fight it out with the voters to be the one who gets to occupy that room from which a lot of world-changing decisions are made. And with the President comes a supporting cast, of course. There's the Chief of Staff, a Political Director, a National Security Advisor, and so many more. You know. The greatest perk at the White House has little to do with how nice an office you have or even how much money you make. It's all about your proximity to the President's office and, more importantly, what kind of access you have to him there. Some of the President's staff see him barely at all; others see him occasionally. But there are trusted few who are in and out of the Oval Office several times a day. Given the weight of what goes on in that room, those are some of the most privileged and powerful people in this land.

October 6, 2022

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Now, you know something huge has happened when my Yankees are playing the Red Sox fans' favorite song - at Yankee Stadium! Well, that's what happened when bombs suddenly rained death and destruction on the Boston Marathon. The shock waves, of course, reached around the world. And it brought back an all-too-familiar wave of sadness to my heart and a lot of others.

October 5, 2022

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It was shocking and it came on the day my Dad went to heaven. I flew in; I couldn't make it back in time before he took his last breath. But we had some great conversations before he died. And that was the day that my Mother made an announcement. She said, "You have a brother." Okay, here I am a grown man with children of my own. Now, I knew I'd had a baby brother who died when he was six months old, and that's how all of us came to know Jesus as a result of the tragedy that went into our family through that. But that was the day I learned about a brother I never knew about all those years. Now, there's some complicated circumstances that would explain why I didn't know. But the fact is, my Dad and Mom had never told me about this brother by another mother. Since then I've had a chance to meet that brother I never knew about, and wow, what a blessing. And it's so enriched both of our lives, along with our wives as well. But it was a story I'd never heard. It was a story I wish I had heard. It was a story that changed my life. But it was a story that I almost never heard.

October 4, 2022

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I remember the time my daughter volunteered to clean the house, and it was a mess! No, it wasn't our house, it wasn't her house, it was the house that her college boyfriend and some other guys wanted to move into. Now when I use the word mess, that's charitable.

October 3, 2022

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When you have young grandchildren, hey, you're back in the toy business again. And sure enough, man, have we had a closet full of toys that, contrary to some vicious rumors, are not mine. They are there for the grandchildren. And they quickly learn to relocate those toys from the closet to our living room every time they would visit. One of them is this furry blue puppet with bulging eyes - good old Cookie Monster of Sesame Street fame. You know him. And he's got this string in his back. When you pull it, he starts chewing and moving his arms and uttering his trademark phrase: "Cookie. Me want cookie!" Pull the string again and he'll say the same thing again. No matter how many times you pull that string, he's going to do the "cookie" thing every time.

September 30, 2022

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Snow I can handle, I grew up with it okay. But ice - that's another story. Driving on that slick stuff, walking on it - that's just downright treacherous. Some of the most dangerous winter weather I ever experienced was a few years ago. There was a series of ice storms that dumped this triple layer of ice on every surface in our area. And then the temperature was stuck below freezing for nearly two weeks, so we did some fancy-dancin' for a while. One thing I was glad we had, though, was a stock of that ice-melting compound, those little crystals that you scatter on the ice. And slowly but surely it starts to soften that slippery stuff and then it starts to melt it. And when there's hard ice everywhere, man, that's a breakthrough!

September 29, 2022

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I was 12 years old. I was on a Southern vacation with my folks. I've never forgotten those signs I saw on the bathrooms: "Colored" "White."

September 28, 2022

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I think we all have awful memories of the painful scenes at Ground Zero in the rubble of the World Trade Center after September 11. I was kind of close to that because of our years in the New York area and even the people we knew in that building. And the firemen, policemen, emergency personnel, combing through the wreckage for their fallen brothers and sisters. You can remember. They would pause for a moment of silent tribute as the remains of one of them would be carried out. But at a time when there was talk of reducing the number of workers at the site, I saw a scene that was painful in a different way. Tempers flaring in the raw emotions of that moment, and some of those firefighters and police who had been fighting together to save or find people in the rescue and recovery effort were suddenly fighting with one another at Ground Zero.

September 27, 2022

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When we were living in New Jersey, boy, Giants Stadium - it was a mecca in northern New Jersey. At that time, 70,000 people. before the new stadium was built, were... I mean it's bigger now. But, boy, that's a lot of people descending on the Giants football game; cars clogging every artery anywhere near the stadium. And I was one of those crazy people sometimes! All across the New York area, countless others did nothing that afternoon but watch television to see what was going on there at the Meadowlands. It was like that stadium had a giant magnet inside it, with the power to pull multitudes of people to focus on one place and one event.

September 26, 2022

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They advertised a special on "flying sharks." And the TV channel didn't disappoint the people who tuned in. They showed an island off the coast of South Africa where great white sharks jump as much as 15 feet in the air with their prey, and the seals are their meal du jour. The area around this island is called the "Ring of Death"...and a whole lot of seals would agree. No one knows exactly why the sharks there get airborne as they do. It's apparently the only place on earth where they behave like this. But the TV special showed real footage of a shark suddenly coming up underneath an unsuspecting seal, grabbing it in his jaws, and soaring into the air with his catch. Now the seals have learned something about these jumping jaws. The sharks seldom attack when they're traveling together. So they tend to stay in groups of seven or eight. Smart! But occasionally a stubborn seal will just go off on his own. And the scientists say when a seal goes off by itself, he is just asking to be shark lunch.

September 23, 2022

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Okay, I'm traveling. I get off the road because it's lunch time. I have a choice. My vehicle is empty, and I'm empty. Which one shall I fill up first? Well, there's a gas station on one side of the road; a restaurant on the other. Guess which one I fill up first? Yep, me. So, I went in, ordered my food. Looking out the window, I noticed that the attendant over there was changing the sign out in front. Does this sound familiar? He's posting a new gasoline price, and it's several cents higher per gallon than the price it had been a few minutes earlier. Oh, you can believe that can't you?. That was a costly choice.

September 22, 2022

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Traveling with our On Eagles' Wings team of young Native Americans, we had an opportunity to make an interesting scenic stop at the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi River; except the Mississippi isn't very mighty at that point. Now I've crossed the Mississippi many times - you know, over long bridges that span the "Father of Waters" at places like St. Louis and Memphis and it's impressive. But not where it begins. No, after walking this little trail through the woods, you come to this very unimpressive little stream. Actually, "stream" is probably a compliment. It's sort of an overgrown puddle at that point. I mean, you can easily wade through the shallow water. You can walk through the Mississippi without even getting very wet. That's at the headwaters. And it takes less than a minute to walk across, or through, the Mississippi. But as it flows down its 2,500-mile course to the south, something amazing happens to this humble little puddle. But who would ever guess that just standing there looking at where it comes from?

September 21, 2022

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I got this wonderful letter from Mark, who was a teenager in one of my Campus Life Clubs a looong time ago. He was reflecting on those high school years and his summer job as a lifeguard. I'll just quote from his letter. He said, "Lots of city folk who couldn't swim came out to our beach, and we went in many, many times for them. I was paranoid that I'd lose someone on my watch and we never did." Then he went on to describe another nearby beach as a place where "suburban trained swimmers go. They did lose a child when no one else was looking."

September 20, 2022

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Our grandsons experienced an unforgettable vacation when Mom and Dad took them out West to see the Tetons, Big Sky country, and Yellowstone National Park. God made sure they got plenty of memories; the herd of buffalo that basically surrounded their vehicle, the moose that was right by the side of the road, that elk that posed patiently for all the pictures anyone wanted to take. But as impressive as all that was, nothing impressed them so much as this water that kept shooting high out of the ground. You guessed it - that amazing geyser known as Old Faithful. In fact, our older guy told his mom, "I want a geyser." We're working on that. That geyser! That really is something to see. This tower of water and steam, exploding out of the ground, high into the air, and always at the same time intervals. Well, of course, it's Old Faithful.

September 19, 2022

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I had to stop at a convenience store on Halloween night. I was not "trick or treating." I was just trying to pay for the gas I put in my car. That's when I saw this interesting sign they had posted; it was a sign I had never seen anywhere else. It simply said, "Please remove your mask before you enter." I wasn't wearing one. But for one unhappy moment, I did remember what they used to tell me in school long after Halloween, "Hey, Ron, Halloween's over! Take off your mask." I wasn't wearing one then either. But the sign was no joke. Obviously, they didn't want someone to try to pull off a Halloween heist, wearing a mask that would conceal their identity from the security cameras. Honestly, I didn't see anyone in the store that night with a mask.

September 16, 2022

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When I worked with our championship high school football team, I was there for a lot of timeouts called by the coach. And I know how important they were. He told the players what they were doing wrong, what they needed to do more of, and how to play against the other team and their weaknesses. It was a strategy for winning, actually. When you watch sports on TV, they usually run commercials during the timeout. A timeout may not be very exciting to watch, but what happens during a timeout can determine the outcome of the game.

September 15, 2022

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One Saturday morning years ago my son called me into the living room to see what was coming on television. I knew it was Saturday morning, and I thought, "Oh, great! The Smurfs! That's not my idea of a Saturday morning." Well, when I saw what it was, I dropped what I was doing, I sat down and I watched the whole thing. It was the original episode of my favorite boyhood television show, The Adventures of Superman.

September 14, 2022

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For some reason, for over a century, people are still intrigued with the Titanic. I mean, it hit an iceberg and it sank over a century ago, and there have been a handful of big screen movies made. And the story - then it was made into two television miniseries. There have been explorations of the wreckage, even sales of pieces of coal from the Titanic.

September 13, 2022

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Another sad story from the "entertainment capital of the world." A lot of that goes on behind all the Hollywood hype.

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