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Some people have wall-to-wall carpet. Some people have a wall-to-wall schedule. I think I'm one of those. And it was like that when we took our daughter to college. She and I had just returned from a mission's trip to the Philippines, and I had to be in Chicago Friday to produce radio programs and deliver her to college. It had to be perfectly timed.
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Life wasn't easy on the little farm where my wife grew up. The land was hard to farm, the money was pretty hard to come by, and the water was sometimes even harder to come by. In fact, on several occasions, Dad tried to dig a well. Again and again, they dug but they ended up only with dry wells. Thankfully, though, there was this spring not too far away. My wife actually remembers her grandfather hitching up Jack and Betsy – that was two mules, not cousins, and going down to this amazing spring that just gushed horizontally out of the rocks. And with each trip, they'd bring back two large barrels of water.
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Some years ago, my wife had a very serious case of hepatitis. Later, the specialist told her that the battle for her liver was so acute he could hear the blood rushing to save it; just like Niagara Falls, he said. Thank God, she recovered fully with no trace today of that disease or any of its effects. But it took a while – seven months of bed rest. That was an interesting time for Daddy – suddenly known as Mr. Mom – and for our three children. Thankfully, our church brought dinner to our home almost every night. God bless them! It's a good thing. I mean, if it had been up to me to feed the kids, they probably would have been on the cover of something like World Vision magazine. But tough as it was, my wife said she had so much to praise God for in her recovery from hepatitis. For one thing, no one could really look to her or count on her for seven months. Here's what she said about it. "God gave me the gift of cleansing my schedule!" He had weeded out a lot that she said didn't matter after all and left only what did.
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The crews assigned to the recovery effort after the September 11th attack on the Pentagon had an awful job to do. They were working in 120-degree heat; they were making their way through the wreckage left behind when terrorists flew Flight 757 into the Pentagon. They didn't find any survivors. They did find a mass of concrete and metal debris; the metal too hot to touch. But the news reported that they had found a sign of hope as they looked into that black chasm inside. On a second floor, right next to where the jet sheared off a section of the building, was an undisturbed stool. On it was a thick, open book – a Bible. It wasn't burned. Neither was anything around it or on the two floors above it. The leader of the recovery team was quoted as saying, "I'm not as religious as some, but that would have me thinking. I just can't explain it."
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Laura Ingalls Wilder was the American author of the popular series of books called the "Little House" books. However, her name only became a household word after her death after the "Little House on the Prairie" became the #1 TV series in America. Even though the series has been off the air for years, you can still find it just about any given day in any American city. And Laura's books about her family's life on the frontier have sold far more after her death than when she was alive. And as you read those books, you find that Laura really was a gifted storyteller. In touring the home where she wrote them, we learned one of the reasons why she was such a good story teller. As the TV series portrayed, her older sister went blind as a teenager. And Pa Ingalls told Laura she now had a mission - to be her sister's eyes, to put into words what was going on around them. That gift would later help her tell the stories that would touch the lives of millions.
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As many of us northerners know, the beginning of Spring does not necessarily coincide with the official date on the calendar, unfortunately! For some of us it's Spring when we see the first Robin, or the first blossom, or green grass. For me, it's Spring the day the forsythia comes out. They appear suddenly. I'm driving along the highway one day, they're not there, and then the next day there's yellow everywhere! I want to yell out the window, "Hey everybody! It's Spring today!" Actually none of this Spring explosion of color is really sudden. Those flowers have been getting ready to bloom for weeks; it's just that I couldn't see them until now.
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Our grandson loves to take home souvenirs from visits to our house: Rocks, shiny rocks, colorful rocks. So why not a rock tumbler for him for Christmas? Today, it's running full speed ahead tumbling rocks. For three weeks! For goodness sake, how long does it take to turn a blah rock into a beautiful rock anyway?
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Denise moved to New Jersey to join our ministry team from Florida. Hello, climate shock! Now she grew up in Detroit, so winter wasn't exactly a new idea to her. But her last years in Florida showed her there was another way to live, like not having winter. It was in the early days of April when she came into a team meeting with this big smile on her face because of something she had seen over the weekend – a robin.
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It was hard to believe. Our daughter was pregnant. My wife was going to be a grandmother! And I was going to be...married to a grandmother! Our daughter and son-in-law had a lot of fun surprising both families with this wonderful news.
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When I was young, I hate to say it, so was television. Prehistoric guy you know! One of my television heroes was a space explorer called Captain Video. I wish I still had his decoder ring.
The day they took me to that children's hospital for those tests, they tried to pull a Captain Video scam on me. See, I'd been born with a heart murmur, so I was in the hospital to have a series of what was then state of the art tests to see how my heart was doing.
