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"When I was young..." Kids hate those words. If you're a parent, I'll bet your kids; they probably do. But here I go. I'm going to do it anyway. When I was young, there was this woman named Emily Post, and she was the expert on etiquette. And so, we would often ask, "Well, what does Emily Post say we're supposed to do in this situation?"
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Okay, as a city boy, I have a lot to learn about the country. I remember the time when I was a teenager and our youth group played this hide-and-seek game on a farm. This one other kid and I crawled under this piece of machinery, where we had to stay for about a half an hour. I didn't know what it was. After we were stuck there, my nose and I wanted to know what we were hiding under. My friend said, "Oh, this is a manure spreader." Hmmm. Well, in recent times, I've helped out a friend who has some horses, and part of taking care of equine pets is what they call "mucking out" their stables. Now if you've been a farmer your whole life, please don't laugh at me. Be kind. But I was dealing with manure more in those months more than I had in all my life up until then. And, frankly, I wasn't fond of it.
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"Go to your room!" No, I'm not telling you that personally. I'm just saying those four words are some of the most dreaded words in a family. What it does, is it takes the family law breaker and consigns that person to that awful punishment - being alone. Now, on a more serious level, that same punishment is used when someone has been a severe offender in prison. What's the worst thing they can do to them to punish them? They put them in solitary confinement. "Go to your room, and stay there alone." More sadistic people have used aloneness as a form of torture to help break a person's resistance. In fact, there's not one of us who doesn't know from personal experience the awful feeling of aloneness - one of the darkest feelings there is. You've felt it. Maybe you are right now. And there isn't one of us who doesn't need the antidote.
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The other day one of our team members shared a discovery she made during the remodeling of her kitchen. The counter top had been removed, and as she looked into this little 6"x8" drawer by the sink, she saw that it was completely stuffed - with like "stuff!" She realized that for 24 years she had been sticking things into that drawer: twist ties, rubber bands...you know, everything. There were some useful things in the back, but they were inaccessible because of all the "stuff." It had been a long time since the drawer had been opened very much; our friend just crammed things into it and occasionally pulled it open an inch or two to use something out of it. (I can relate to this.) But looking down on it all from above, she was surprised to see what was in there. Almost everything in that drawer could be thrown away, but it had been accumulating for years. And that drawer was much more useful now that it was emptied out.
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I had been watching the news and they were talking about doomsday, and it made me sad. Oh, not because I'm nervous about Jesus fulfilling all His prophecies about earth's final chapter. But because millions were laughing about something that they desperately needed to take seriously.
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If you made a list of the million dollar ideas of the twentieth century, you'd probably have to include something called the Polaroid camera. Now, you might be too young to remember that. I could take you to the museum, but it was a great invention in its time. What was the worst part of taking pictures then? It was waiting for them to be developed. The Polaroid concept introduced the revolutionary idea of developing your photo right on the spot, and then you would know whether you got what you shot. That was way before cell phone technology of course. So with the Polaroid, if you cut off everybody's heads when you took their picture, you can take it again and they could have heads in the next picture. We're naturally impatient to see what the result of our effort is with our pictures, right? And with people.
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Yeah, I'm just not used to news reporters referencing the Book of Revelation. But, you know, in recent times I've heard some of them doing it. These aren't ordinary times. They've been referring to statements in the Bible about things like earthquakes and disasters, and references to what the Bible calls "the last days." They keep using the word apocalyptic. You know, you think about what's been going on in our world, and nature, and in governments, and between people, and you can understand why people are starting to think Bible a little bit. The Bible talks about these last days - the last days of human history - the days before the personal return of Jesus Christ who will change things forever.
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It was probably one of the greatest adventures in American history - the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The size of the United States doubled overnight and President Thomas Jefferson picked his aide, Meriwether Lewis, to lead a group of about forty men to explore a route from St. Louis to the Pacific. The journey took more than two years, covered thousands of miles, meeting with some fifty Indian tribes, and charting a vast area, largely unexplored by anyone other than Native Americans.
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Rick Rescorla was a decorated Vietnam War hero. But his greatest acts of heroism happened years later, on the job at the World Trade Center. As head of security for Morgan Stanley, one of the largest employers in the Twin Towers, he began to take special measures after the Trade Center bombing that happened back in 1993. Suggesting that there might be another attack, possibly coming from the air, he became known as the man who predicted September 11. He began regular drills for Stanley's 2,700 employees in emergency evacuation procedures. Morgan Stanley had offices from the 44th to the 74th floors of Tower Two. When Tower One was hit on that awful September 11, there seemed to be no reason to get out of Tower Two, except for Rick Rescorla's training.
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It seems as if every summer there are raging fires in the American West that destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of timberland, and sometimes homes, businesses, and sadly, even lives. When a major fire broke out near an Indian reservation that our Native team had ministered on only a few months ago, I paid pretty special attention. Sadly, that fire spread to parts of the reservation, consuming the very timber that's a major part of their already impoverished economy; along with homes and property outside the reservation. I knew it was going to take a long time to recover. You know what the cause of that very costly fire was that made the whole thing even sadder? It was started by a government firefighter who was hoping there would be a small fire that would give him some work.
