If you've ever spent a lot of time in the city, you've probably waited for a bus. And sometimes it's cold, you've got a lot of packages, and some weird people are starting to cruise by. Suddenly, you see the dim outline of a bus on the horizon, and Biblically speaking, your heart leapeth within you. Finally, the bus gets close enough for you to read the sign in the window which displays three very discouraging words, "Out Of Service."
Now, I had never been to a quilt auction before. And I probably never would have been to one except for the fact that I had been invited to speak at an outreach at a Mennonite Relief Sale, where thousands come to bid on items made by Mennonite and Amish craftspeople. All the funds go toward worldwide relief efforts. It was amazing to hear the spiraling bids shouted out for some exquisitely designed quilts. While I was there, one went for $2,000. Last year, they told me that one quilt had gone for $4,000. They even sold two handmade dolls for almost $1,000. I was there long enough to see what gave great value to an auction item. Those dolls, for example, were made by a Ugandan refugee. The quilt that went for $4,000 was made laboriously by a severely handicapped woman, and it was the last one she made before she died. When we were told who made it - when we were told the effort they went to make it - it was suddenly worth a whole lot more.
When I was a kid, I used to like to put on shows for the other kids in the neighborhood. Hey, wait a minute, am I still doing shows for the kids in the neighborhood? Anyway, I bought a couple of cheap books on magic back then and this little kit of magic tricks. Even at my juvenile level, I soon learned that magic wasn't really magic - it was illusions. My beginner magic book talked about this basic magician skill called misdirection. The idea is that while you're doing the trick over here you do something that will get everybody looking over there. They said it helped to talk a lot. I knew I'd at least be good at that part.
It started out as a family adventure; it ended as a family tragedy. James Reddick took his 12-year-old son and his 11-year-old daughter on a hiking expedition up on Mount Rainier in Washington State. All of a sudden, a freak snowstorm arose. It created instant blizzard conditions and hurricane force winds. With a blinding 'white out' around them, they could not go any further. Dad knew they had to create some kind of shelter. All he could do was to cut out a large hole in the ground; he used a cup from their cooking kit to do it, and then he put his children in that hole and he covered it with a tarp. But the fierce winds just kept blowing the tarp away, and that left the children exposed to that deadly storm. The father tried everything he could find to hold down the tarp, but nothing worked. Finally, in one last desperate attempt to save his children, he actually lay across that hole himself to keep the snow from blowing in. Two days later, a search party noticed the edge of a backpack. They uncovered the hole and they found the two children alive and well. But first they uncovered their father who froze to death, protecting the ones he loved.
Some of us have had some very strange winters with wild temperature swings between unseasonably warm, and then sudden drops to very cold and back again. Maybe it's like that where you live. Out of those rapid changes come some less than fun driving conditions like black ice, for example. There's a snowstorm or ice storm one day, and then it's warm enough the next day to start melting much or most of that frozen stuff. Then it gets cold again at night, and what thawed during the day freezes at night, sometimes into this dark, invisible ice patch on the street - that's black ice. And invariably you turn on the traffic report and you hear about a rash of accidents often from cars or trucks speeding along at top speed down the pavement that appeared to be totally dry. Then, out of nowhere, they find themselves sliding on one of those deadly little frozen spots.
The snowstorm hit Chicago on a Saturday, and many of the people stranded at Chicago's O'Hare Airport didn't get out of there until Tuesday. That scene was not unique for O'Hare. I've sat in a plane on the runway for three hours just because brief thunderstorms went through. Maybe you've got some travel war stories like that. The fact is, O'Hare Airport is a hub for so many connecting flights to so many places. And because it's in the Midwest, it's near one of the Great Lakes and it can get hit with all kinds of weather, which sometimes shuts down one of the busiest airports in the world. Someone said, "When O'Hare sneezes, the whole airline system gets pneumonia." It's true that when bad weather makes the hub close down, nothing can get to where it needs to be.
For many years, my wife's father managed to squeeze out a living for his family on their little farm in the Ozarks. It was always a battle financially, but the battle got really intense the summer of the long drought. First, he emptied all three of their ponds to get water; then all of the ponds on his parents' adjacent property. A friend, then, let him use his well that had never gone dry. Well, it went dry the summer of the long drought. Finally, Dad had no choice but to find water and dig a well on his property. But that meant mortgaging a lot of his cattle. And as the well diggers had to go deeper, it eventually meant mortgaging all his cattle. And they never found water. His farming days were over.
OK, I was a Flash Gordon freak when I was a kid. In case you've led a deprived life or you're too young to have this exciting heritage, Flash was that intergalactic hero made famous in a serialized movie made in the 1930's, long before anyone ever heard of Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk. No, I wasn't around when it first came out, but those episodes have been showing ever since. Every episode was a cliffhanger. They always left you hanging with Flash in a terrible jam, about to be destroyed by some space monster or death ray. You were sure there was no way out of this one. But there always was. Somehow, no matter how bleak it looked, Flash always came through somehow.
I was in the room when my friend Bob went up to the speaker for the day and made a fairly startling statement. He took his three young children with him, pointed to them, and said to this speaker, "If it weren't for you, these children wouldn't be here." Needless to say, the gentleman looked at him pretty curiously. But that was not an overstatement. And it attested to a dramatic miracle that my friend had experienced.
Not long after the Gulf War, an Air Force chaplain planted this mental picture in my head I've never forgotten. He told me what he considered to be the ultimate example of loneliness. The chaplain said, "To me, lonely is a fighter pilot in his F-16, on a night mission over enemy territory. The only light is this eerie glow from his instrument panel - and his instruments indicate that his plane has just been "painted" as a target for an Iraqi SAM missile. The only sound he hears in that ultimately lonely moment is this song playing in his headset - God Bless the USA.
