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Several years ago I thought they were talking about my grandmother storming up the East Coast. Actually, it was a hurricane with her name - Irene. Oh, and I know what that name means. It means peace. How ironic.
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Our daughter and son-in-law inherited our big red van. Let me describe it to you. There were two seats in the front, there's a bench seat in the back, and in-between nothing but open floor - carpeted open floor. It was always challenging to talk in there. In fact, it was almost impossible when the windows were open.
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The image of a burning candle on an iPad. That's actually the way that many people paid tribute and honored Steve Jobs' death and life. How appropriate. I mean, he was that inventive genius; the innovative marketer who brought the communications revolution from the "geekosphere" to something you could actually hold in your hand.
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Some of the ugliest scenes from the 20th Century, of course, come from the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. And some pretty inspiring scenes, actually, come from it as well. One of the most famous accounts of those awful years was written by a Jewish psychiatrist named Victor Frankl - a survivor of the concentration camps. Frankl told of how the Jews there had almost every freedom stripped from them: they were imprisoned, they were awakened any hour of the day or night, they were treated like slave labor, humiliated, always facing the specter of death. But he lived to tell us about the one freedom they learned no one could take away from them - the freedom he saw in many of those who survived the horror. And it's the one freedom that could make you a survivor.
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I'd rather not have to use one of those carts to carry my groceries out to the parking lot. If you take it out there, you should be nice and return it to where it goes. Right? No, I'd rather use the mule approach, carrying every possible bag I can in my arms, my hands, hanging from my shoulders. So here I am, moving precariously toward the door of the store, with every appendage committed. Problem: how am I going to open that door that goes to the parking lot? If I start walking toward it, it remains closed, threatening my bodily welfare and my new treasures when I walk into the door. But if I just stand there, it won't open either. Well, thankfully, you know. Stores have automatic doors. The door remains closed, though, if I stand still, and it remains closed if I only walk part of the way toward it. But as I walk steadily toward it until I'm close to it - voila! - the door opens just before I need to go through it! What a world!
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For Christmas, I bought the ladies in the family these necklaces with a beautiful colored glass charm on them. And the Japanese word "nozomi." There's a story behind those necklaces.
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If you don't like to wash your hands, don't ever become a doctor or a nurse. You have to wash your hands a lot! Scrubbing up is a routine procedure for people in the medical profession. I don't think any of us wants to be opened up by some doc who hasn't washed his hands all day! Right? Actually, a loved one of ours had a major heart surgery a few years ago, which she made it through. What she didn't make it through was the staph infection that she picked up in the hospital. It's avoiding that kind of thing that's at the heart of a hospital's insistence that healers and caregivers get really clean before they touch you. If they carry infection, they can do a lot of damage.
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Whenever we passed a park, when I was a kid, I shifted into nagging mode to get my dad to stop, because I loved the swings. Didn't do that spinning carousel thing. No, never did enjoy throwing up. Then, the seesaw. That was fun. Yeah.
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It was one of those great night-night conversations that a father can have when he's with his son or daughter at bedtime. Our son-in-law tried to prepare our four-year-old grandson for sleeping by saying, "You know you don't have to worry at night because Jesus is with you." Our grandson, ever the thinker, said, "How do I know that Jesus can see me?" Dad told him, "Well, Jesus is up in heaven, watching everything we do. And He also lives inside each of us and He can see everything." Oh, ponder time! And then, "So that means I'm Jesus' house!" (We knew that he had asked Jesus into his heart.) Dad affirmed him, "Actually, that's exactly how the Bible describes it!" Then came our grandson's application questions, "Is Mommy Jesus' house?" "Yes." And you're Jesus' house?" "Yes." "And my little brother is Jesus' house?" (Well, his little brother then was too young to give his heart to Jesus yet.) Daddy said, "Well, not yet." Good. Sounds like Daddy passed the theology test.
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Over the years, we've always tried to keep the real mission and meaning of Christmas in front of our children. Taking food and clothes into New York City, for example, to give to homeless people there. It put a whole new face on Christmas. Only a few miles from our home we were face-to-face with the tragedy of people without any place to call home. I remember the time when I went into the city to talk with some homeless people for my youth broadcast - to try to open my listeners eyes and hearts to a needy world. One man was living on the street, near a major bus terminal. His house was a large, tattered cardboard box. He actually allowed me to crawl inside that box with him, and it was heartbreaking that a box was home. At Christmastime - well, at any time. Wow! It's just a tragic thing to be without a home.
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Our boys used to approach Christmas as methodically as like a military campaign. They painstakingly made their Christmas lists sometimes like October? You know, you must get the jump on anybody who wants to buy you underwear or socks. Right? So, they listed what they wanted in priority order, with what they called "the big one" right on top, circled and surrounded with big stars around it. One year, our oldest son had the year's hottest toy on top. I knew I would have to break my pattern and do this particular shopping early. So right around Thanksgiving, I bought it before it became virtually "ungettable." But my son must have reminded me about that like twenty times between then and the day he got it - that very happy Christmas Day. Of course, I just smiled.
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Christmas is always kind of a love fest with our family. And they're all so good at paying attention to what people want and need, and getting the great gifts. You know? So I expect good things, and I hope what I'm giving fits the description as well this Christmas. And you know what? Sometimes, occasionally I will find a little gift that I forgot to give. No, I don't save it for next Christmas. It might be "Happy New Year" or something like that.
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"It's time to get the old bathrobes out, boys. Yeah, for the church Christmas pageant." You've got to have some boys be shepherds. You know, when I think of shepherds, though, it's more than Christmas to me. It's potentially life changing. There's this picture that hangs on the wall in our living room. It's meant a lot to me in recent years. Just like an identical picture did when I was four years old. That's when my baby brother died suddenly. My grieving dad, who was not a churchgoer, decided he should take his surviving son to church somewhere.
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Our ministry summer outreaches in Native America are some of our daughter's most cherished weeks of the year. But the year her first child was due in late summer, there was no way she could get the doctor's green light to travel - especially when the destination was the villages of Native Alaska. Now that's one of the amazing aspects of the first Christmas - that Mary would travel by donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem in her ninth month of pregnancy. I've traveled the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem by car, not by donkey or foot as Joseph and Mary did. It's a tortuous journey through hills and mountains. It's about 90 long miles. There's no way you're going to get a loving husband to go with his very pregnant wife on a trip like that on the eve of their baby's birth, right? Wrong.
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It takes a real romantic klutz to ruin himself with four girls at one time. (It was me.) Oh, I did a pretty good job of that when I was in high school. See, it was Christmastime, and I decided I wanted to write kind of a romantic masterpiece on the back of the Christmas card to a girl named Wendy. The problem was that I actually was interested in three other girls too.
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Besides all the other upheaval of 2020, it was like a record year for hurricanes. They went through the entire English alphabet of names, then they started on the Greek alphabet! It's reminiscent of those two massive hurricanes that hit within days of each other. Remember? Harvey swamped Texas. Irma devastated Florida.
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Pierre lived in a pretty small world most of the time. But that's okay, he was our parrot. We had him in this cage in the kitchen so he would be around people a lot. By day his cage was uncovered. By night it was covered, just like the bird people said to do. Since I was usually the first one up in the morning, I was the one who lifted the blanket that covered him at night.
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Some of the worst stories of human brutality in history, of course, came out of Hitler's concentration camps in World War II. But out of those camps also came some incredible examples of human triumph and heroism. Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust in the infamous Auschwitz death camp, told some of those stories in his book. He testified that some of those in Auschwitz were surviving better after a year than some of them did after only a few days. He said that those who didn't sink were those who drew their outlook from what he described as a second dimension experience.
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If you want to have some fun at a gathering where there are married couples, just ask a simple question. "How did you two meet?" You'll get some run-of-the-mill, maybe average type stories like, "We knew each other since we were six days old." But you may also get a few of them who start laughing out loud before they tell you why. They start rolling their eyes, they look at each other, and one or the other of them will say, "Do you really want to know?"
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Birthdays have changed for me over the years. When I was little, my parents always made it a big deal with a party, and friends, and hats, and cake with candles and all the rest. Today my birthday just isn't a big "hoopla" like it used to be. Many times we have a quiet kind with cards, a couple of gifts, nice family dinner together. Actually, it was getting to the point where my wife was hesitant to put candles on my cake. Yeah, she said there were so many she was afraid it was going to like set off the smoke detectors in our house. Come on! But it is getting tougher. The observance varies from year to year, but one thing is for sure. I always know when it's my birthday. You say, "Well, congratulations! Most people do." In fact, I have to write it on a lot of forms many times a year. And then I know when I was married, too. Did you know that? Aren't you proud of me? Yeah, I can even remember that. And I'd better remember the anniversary, you know, it was always important to remember that. Yeah. See, those are important beginnings. You know when they were (or you should).
