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Funny things happen when church youth groups go on summer missions trips. Suddenly these comfortable American kids are facing a totally unfamiliar situation, maybe for the first time in their lives!
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We have had a wide variety of people come to our front door. The salesmen - oh they're basically asked to stay on the front steps and give us their little pitch. And then there were those neighborhood kids who, well, they were raising money. Well, they usually got inside the door - we'd let them into the welcome mat, and we'd deal with them there. And there were a lot of acquaintances and friends of course. Those people you just immediately invite into your living room to sit down and stay as long as they want. And sometimes at the door is a relative or real close friend, and they come in and they go straight to the refrigerator and help themselves. If they want to make a call they go ahead and do that and they feel very free to use the bathroom. So you can tell how close we are by how far a person is allowed into the house.
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I guess it was just the way the light reflected off the building, but it set the stage for one of the more unusual boxing matches I've ever seen. It was night, and there was one large floodlight that illuminated the front of the chapel in this conference center where we were. There were two teenage guys standing out in front of the chapel. One stood in just the right place to cast a giant shadow of himself on that building. It looked like some monster up there on the building. The shadow must have been at least like five times the size of the guy, and of course you know what the other guy was doing. He was boxing with a giant shadow. It didn't look like he was in his weight class, that's for sure. Well, needless to say, you can never win if you're just boxing with a shadow.
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There was this plant in my office that had seen some good days and some bad days. It had really seen some pretty bad days for a while, and it looked like it was about to be a memory and there was going to be a little empty spot in the corner of my office. But one of our staff very lovingly took a knife to that plant. That doesn't sound very nice, but the plant was on its last legs and so she went and pruned out some of the dead or dying branches.
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Someone said the best cure for the population explosion would be if men had to have every other baby. That would slow it down considerably! I'll tell you, there's something that women know about that process, though, that leads to life. A woman, particularly in her first pregnancy, is introduced to a long, sometimes very difficult life process. She knows she wants the baby; there's no question about the results, but it's the process she has some questions about sometimes: nausea, discomfort, her body's doing things it never did before. And the months sometimes feel like years. And last but not least, there are the labor pains. That day alone can seem like one of the longest in her life. But then...then the baby comes.
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So, what can you do when you realize there's an accident about to happen and you can do nothing to avoid being part of it? Well, your best bet is to try to limit the damage.
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When you hear about the weather on the East Coast, you almost always hear about a place called Cape Hatteras. It's a barrier reef off the coast of North Carolina; it's been called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. And it's probably the storm center of the East Coast. In fact, when you look at the map or hear the weatherman in the morning he'll say, "There's a blizzard off of Cape Hatteras. There's a hurricane off of Cape Hatteras. There's a major storm system off of Cape Hatteras."
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When someone in our house felt overworked or unfairly overloaded, sometimes you'd hear them say, kiddingly I think, "Hey, I thought Lincoln freed the slaves!" Well, actually, I think the members of our family might have been right about all of us. We do need an update on that Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, you might be surprised who the slaves are today, and the slave master. Spiritually, that is. The slaves are nice people, successful people - maybe someone like you.
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I heard not long ago about a little boy who was trying to move this huge rock. He pulled, and he pushed, and grunted and strained, trying to move it with leverage from a board, but it was all to no avail. Finally his Dad said, "Son, have you used all your resources?" "Oh, yeah, Dad. I can't make it move! I've tried everything." And his Dad replied, "No, you haven't. You haven't asked me to help you yet."
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I think I've been on a diet since I was about three days old, and I've become somewhat of an expert at what works and what doesn't work at losing weight...or putting it on.
