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Spring is a time for cardinals. Like we have cardinals dining every morning at our backyard birdhouse. Oh, and there's the baseball Cardinals. They gather in Florida for spring training, and the fans start counting down to Opening Day...we hope.
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I'm glad I was raised in a part of the country that's a real "four seasons" place, because I love all four seasons! Where I grew up, one of them seemed a little longer than the others. It was called winter. But I think fall is my favorite season of all. I love the blooming beauty of the spring, but my favorite is the blazing colors of those fall leaves. It's not that the leaves have no color the rest of the year, but I've never known people to drive far away to see the beautiful green leaves. They will travel to see the leaves of fall. The ironic thing is that they are about to die at that point. But they are something to see!
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Every little boy gets his share of "boo-boos." Right? That's what little boys' knees and elbows are made for! I could never convince my mother that all I needed for my wound was a kiss. No, she always went to the medicine cabinet, pulled out this little bottle of liquid. I dreaded it! It was iodine. And did that stuff ever sting! But my Mom knew what she was doing. Yes, it stings, but it also disinfects!
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I don't believe in ghosts - for the most part. There's one kind of ghosts that are all too real. They talked about those "ghosts" in the movie, "Amazing Grace." That movie told the story of the 18th Century British political leader, William Wilberforce. He's really more than any other man, responsible for the abolishing of slavery in the British Empire. And that was at a time when African slaves played a critical role in the British economy and slave-owning interests controlled a lot of members of Parliament. The battle took 20 years, but ultimately thousands of slaves went free. Wilberforce's spiritual mentor was actually the man who wrote America's most beloved hymn, "Amazing Grace." In his early years, John Newton had been a slave trader, capturing and carrying thousands of Africans to slavery in Britain and the islands. Conditions were so brutal that many didn't even survive the voyage. Then John Newton discovered how Jesus Christ could forgive and change a man. In the movie, John Newton is going blind but he's still pastoring his church in London. And he believed in "ghosts" you might say. As he dictates what he calls "My Confession" to a scribe, he says, "I have lived for years with the company of 20,000 ghosts - those I made into slaves. Their blood is on my hands."
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So your boss calls you in. It could be good news, it could be bad news. You've probably had some of each, right? But the best good news is probably words like these: "We're giving you a raise." You're trying to be cool. You try not to leap out of your chair yelling, YES!" But face it, it really is good news. They'll usually give you the reason you're getting a raise, or maybe a bonus: your performance, your longevity, your additional responsibilities, you're married to the boss's daughter.
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For the first 16 years of my life you could pretty well guess what I would order in a restaurant. If it wasn't a hamburger, it was fried chicken. If it wasn't fried chicken, it was a hamburger. Now, people - especially my parents - tried to get me to try other foods, but eating out meant two things and only two. Did I mention it was hamburgers and fried chicken? Oh, yeah.
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There's this picture that hangs on the wall in our living room. It has meant a lot to me in recent years. Just like an identical picture did was 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 kids gave it to my wife and me as a gift, and we had a great night together with dinner and a show. The show is in the same place as the dinner; there's this large, indoor arena with long tables that encircle the show floor down below. During and after dinner, we watched an impressive show of trick horse riding, dramatic spectacle, and rodeo style events. There's one part of the show I'm not going to forget. A rider actually stands atop two horses, one foot on each horse. They begin to gallop around the arena with the lights down, except for the torches in the middle and a giant ring of fire. Amazingly, the rider and his two horses leaped through that ring of fire together! I'll tell you, the emcee called it "a demonstration of three-way trust." Yeah, I guess!
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I guess it was inevitable. With our boys growing up in northern New Jersey, it was predestined that they, and I for that matter, would become New York Giants football fans. Big Giants fans. Even in the season when they won only three games, and even when they had a string of bad seasons. Even when the airplane flew over a game with the banner that said, "Fifteen years of lousy football." What used to really annoy my boys was when friends who claimed to be Giants fans kept "jumping ship" when they kept losing. Then came the playoff Giants, and then the Giants that won the Super Bowl. Suddenly, there were gazillions of Giants fans everywhere, jumping up and down, celebrating the champions. But they could never know the joy of fans like my two sons who never lost hope, and who never stopped rooting for their team.
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When a member of our family would "shirk" a chore they had at our house, we had a familiar line that we used jokingly. Somebody would say, "Oh, it's so hard to get good help these days." Actually, I first heard that from a friend of mine who said that about trying to find a housekeeper. Now, that wasn't a real heavy issue for us, hiring a good housekeeper. We had a family!
