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I was blessed one time by an observation made by a three-year-old granddaughter. A friend asked her, "What's your granddad up to these days?" To which she simply replied: "Oh, he's getting taller." I am? I'd like to think she's right. I think I'll go measure.
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Okay, we're going to do a little experiment right now. If you're near something printed - and you're not driving - let's say a book, a newspaper, a magazine - would you just hold it in front of your eyes? Okay, now wait, if you're driving, remember you're excused from this.
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Our local high school band worked hard to put on some great performances at our football games. I know. Our daughter was one of the trumpet players. I also remember going to band competitions at different schools. We have some precious memories of sitting on the top bleacher with a wind chill that would have made a polar bear go inside. My teeth were chattering loud enough to be in the percussion section! Our band also got to perform in several local parades. But, there's just a handful of high school bands that get invited to play in one of America's really big parades. You know, like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. You know, the Mountain Home, Arkansas, band - not too far from us - they had that thrill.
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Hooper Bay, Alaska! It's not the first remote place we went with the outreach teams of Native young people that we go with, but it's a tough one. Each Summer of Hope, it's our privilege to take these teams of Indian and Native Alaskan spiritual warriors to the reservations and the villages where America's most devastated young people live and die too young. The suicide rate among young Native Americans is something like three or four times that of the rest of America's young. And in some places in Alaska, it's twenty times greater. Hooper Bay, Alaska, is one of the hardest places in this country to grow up. We had to take our team there.
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Several years ago, there was a blockbuster movie called "Independence Day." You can catch it occasionally on TV now. From what I heard, it wasn't about Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. No, it was about an alien invasion of Planet Earth. A unique concept. As this alien force moves across the world, the American military throws its most sophisticated weapons at it. They can't stop it. Even the White House gets destroyed and the President barely escapes with his life. Other countries try to resist with their military. No one's even close to a match for this invading force. Well, something very interesting happens. The world's leaders begin to wake up to the fact that suddenly they all have a common enemy and it isn't each other anymore. Allies and enemies begin to work together to defeat their enemy, and they win big! Yea!
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It was such a neat surprise to see our longtime friends, Bob and Marcy, at a conference where I was speaking. We hadn't seen them for several years, and we didn't know they were coming. After one session, my wife was talking with them in the hall outside the auditorium, and my observant honey noticed Bob's color suddenly turned pale. And within moments, he was crumpling to the floor. My first thought was, "Is that what my speaking does to people?" When Bob finally came around, he sat in a chair wondering what had hit him. His wife wanted to drive him six hours to their home, but others were really urging him to get to a local hospital...preferable in an ambulance. Men usually resist ideas like that, but Bob was wise enough, and maybe just concerned enough, to agree. And that was a good thing. His heart stopped once on the way to the hospital, and again in the emergency room. Within two days, he had a pacemaker implanted, and he left that hospital feeling great. Had he not had that scary incident in the lobby, he might not have made it.
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Some people seem to have a special gift for sleeping. So much so that waking them up is more like a resurrection. We had one of those gifted people staying at our house for a few weeks. Greg was a young intern helping out and training in our ministry. And he did a good job - once you got him out of bed. He stayed at our house - so I got the joy of figuring out how to get him up each morning in time to start his work day. I started with just an alarm clock. Forget about that - no alarm so much as phases this boy. I tried shaking him, and then I tried shaking him violently. I tried bells. I tried water. Yes. If he ever did wake up, he just went back to sleep until I landed on the Extreme Wakeup Option - the pan. I got the biggest metal pan we had. I got the biggest metal spoon we had and I marched into his room playing percussion. If standing at the door clanging that pan didn't do it, I just moved progressively closer until he was up and out of bed. Look, I was a desperate man. Look, I'm really sorry it had to go that far, but he had to wake up, and it wasn't easy.
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There are many kinds of artists. My friend, Martha, she made her masterpieces out of thread. She lived in a tiny, sparsely furnished house in a remote corner of the Navajo reservation. It hadn't been an easy life with 11 children and a husband who blew most of his meager income on alcohol. But she found a way to provide at least enough money for her family to eat. She wove Navajo rugs. Now, I've had the privilege actually of being there when she was working on one. She had a loom in her living room where she worked for hours on end, pulling thread from one side to the other. In some ways, it didn't look like it had much promise; no pattern could be seen anywhere. It was all in her mind. But there was something beautiful in her mind that only she could see as she patiently wove those threads back and forth. And when she was finished, she'd produced a masterpiece for which a tourist would pay thousands of dollars in a nearby store. She'd only get a fraction of that, but shame on anyone who ever questioned what she was doing on that loom.
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When our sons were playing football, the varsity guys let them know an important factor in impressing the coach. He'll be looking for you in the weight room, not just at practice. Coaches know serious athletes serve their time in the weight room, concentrating on becoming stronger. They're not there because it's fun, it's not. But because it's important to winning the battle. One measure of your growing strength is what the lifters call your bench press. That's not lifting a bench of course, but it's how much you can lift over your head as you lie on a weight bench. I've worked with a lot of football players and weight lifters, but I've seldom met one who's content to keep that amount that they can lift where it is. No, they're always adding a little more weight to that bar. So, if your bench press is 170 pounds, you want to go to 180, 190. If you've been lifting 200, you want to work to get it to 210, 220. You know, you're always pressing more.
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During the high school football season, our Campus Life Club used to have a crowd breaker that provided a lot of entertainment for all of us. We had four cheerleaders up front with a box of football equipment, minus the more personal stuff, of course. They raced to see who was the first to get fully dressed in shoulder pads, hip pads, knee pads, helmets, the rest, you know. Well, they each had a football player providing verbal coaching, but the results were still hilarious. Those cheerleaders had no idea what gear went where. But that's okay. They didn't need to know. You can be sure the players knew. Every day, whether it was for a practice or a game, they got that equipment on. They didn't need it all day in school, of course, because they weren't generally being chased, or run into at high speeds, or thrown to the ground. But when it came time to play, the coaches made sure they had the equipment they needed. The coach wasn't about to send them into the battle without what they would need to protect them.
