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I spent my seventh through tenth grade in a small town in Illinois. So I went to junior high there and my first two years of high school. And I hadn't seen my friends from there for 28 years!
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Years ago I had some friends who lived near a heavy industrial area where the mills filled the air with a shall we say very distinctive aroma; well, actually, smell would be a better word for it. It was sort of a sulfur-like, rotten eggs type of odor. When you first went there, you would sniff and you'd go, "What is that?" And the people who lived there would say, "What's what?" See, they'd lived around the stink so long, it didn't even register any more. Well, you know, there are some smells you should never get used to.
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Some people have wall-to-wall carpet. Me? I have a wall-to-wall schedule. Maybe you do too. It was like that even when I had to take my daughter to college years ago. She had just returned from a mission trip to Manila and so had I. We had one day to get her to Chicago for college. Not only did we have to get her to school that day, but on that particular Friday, I had to produce some of these radio programs.
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When you have three children, of course only one can be the first, and that one becomes to the others the measuring stick for all privileges, all fairness, and all comparisons.
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When my grandson was playing Upward basketball as a boy I told him about Jeremy Lin who at that time was lighting up the scoreboard for the New York Knicks. Now, he was not your typical professional basketball star, that's for sure. He was a Harvard grad. He was Asian-American. He was refreshingly humble. Oh, and you could tell that he unashamedly loved Jesus.
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The passenger across the aisle from me wasn't very happy. He was complaining to his seatmate on the plane about everything and complaining with a lot of profanity inserted, oh I'd say maybe like every third word. The man next to him was mostly listening as this, shall we say, colorfully spoken speaker cussed out his favorite baseball team, then the service on the plane and the clients he was working with.
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As kind of a life-long, off-and-on dieter, oh, how well I know the things we do to maintain or lose weight. And sometimes, I mean, you can't just have water, fruit, and lettuce all the time. Maybe throw in a little celery for dessert. You can lose weight that way, but you know what? You can't keep that going. What you have to do, I've learned, is you have to make friends with your metabolism. And if you're going to take some foods out of your diet, you better put something good in its place if you want the change to last. Actually, that's not just a dieting principle. That applies to spiritual change.
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Now don't accuse frogs of being dumb. Not that you ever would. I mean, I've been told that if you take a frog and you put him in a pot of boiling water (which, why would you do that?) he'll be smart enough to jump out. He knows he's going to die there.
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When I was little, my bicycle and I spent a lot of time together. You would see this little fat guy chugging all over town; that was my way to get around. There was only one thing that compromised my total enjoyment of biking - the dog on the corner. Yeah, since our street ended right after our house and our house was just beyond the corner, there was just no other way to approach our house. So, often that little dog would sense me coming; I'm sure he had lookouts posted. He would appear out of nowhere, charge my direction with teeth bared, his bark would send chills up my spine. I picked up my speed; boy, I got really fast! I could feel him nipping at my heels. I didn't even know I could pedal that fast! I think I could have qualified for the Olympics.
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When you eat in a hurry you sometimes leave some traces of the meal on your face, and you sort of wear your food. There are some crumbs maybe, or some tomato sauce, or this little spot of chocolate. Of course, you don't know it.
