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October 21, 2022

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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.

October 20, 2022

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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.

October 19, 2022

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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.'"

October 18, 2022

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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.

October 17, 2022

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If you're into college sports, it's always a big day. If you're into professional sports, it's always a big day. Some call it Alumni Day or Old Timers' Day. Whatever you call it, it's the time a lot of those who played on that very same field come back to cheer on the men and women who are today's players. If you're a player and the game is tough, glance up there in the stands. You'll see some people up there who know how you feel, who've played the game you're playing, who've gone against that same opponent, and who are up there right now, screaming their lungs out for you. They just really want you to win!

October 14, 2022

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Our sons were - and are - crazy about baseball, and then followed the grandsons. They know the players, the standings, the stats. Did I mention they're crazy about baseball? Yeah, it's true; it runs in the family. But dark clouds again rolled in over America's baseball stadiums, because, well, there were suddenly more reports that some stars, who are a lot of kids' heroes, cheated to be great. You remember all that.

October 13, 2022

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Our three-year-old grandson had been around long enough to show us that he's gonna be the one who lived on the edge. You know, trying daring things, and basically a physical kind of guy. Consequently, he might be on a first name basis with the folks in the emergency room. We hope not, but you know, he's already visited there more than once in his short career. The first time he got a bad cut on his lip from a fall - lots of bleeding, run to the emergency room, stitches. This medical stuff was all new to him. Oh, listen he fought it. It took four people to hold down this tiger while the stitches were put in. It was traumatic for everybody involved - including my wife who was one of those E. R. wrestlers that night trying to hold him down. The second time was when another fall caused a big cut in his chin. Lots of bleeding, run to the emergency room, stitches. Get a pattern here? Less fighting this time. Oh, it wasn't easy, but it wasn't as bad as the first time. Who knows, maybe pretty soon he'll be helping them put the stitches in!

October 12, 2022

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Our oldest son and his wife, who became our wonderful daughter, were living on an Indian reservation and had ministered there for several years. And then it was time to expect their first baby. It was wonderful that this baby girl was going to come. They lived pretty far from the hospital, so of course, you needed to "get in gear" when it was time. Right? And those were the words our daughter-in-law spoke that fateful night, "I think it's time!" Well, they had gone to the classes. They knew what to do. Oh, but my son? Well, he simply started (this is what I've been told) walking around in circles in his living room going, "Okay! Okay!" Meanwhile his wife's gently going, "It's time." "Okay! Okay!" Well, listen, when you know what time it is, you need to know what action to take.

October 11, 2022

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We met Gal on an Indian reservation. She wasn't very easy to get to know. Gal was a cute black and white dog owned by a missionary couple that our On Eagles' Wings Team was working with on a remote reservation. Most dogs run up to you when you come to the door, even if you're a stranger, and they're usually all over you. Not Gal. She ran the other way and cowered in the corner, no matter how gentle, how friendly you were to her. She didn't want to come out of her corner for anybody. "Strange dog," I thought. Until her owners explained that Gal had been terribly abused by her first owners. When she saw people, she saw pain.

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.

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