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I remember the summer that I trained two teams of young people for ministry. I went as a speaker with the South Team. The other team was the North Team.
Now, both teams had been sleeping on the floor at training camp-these are tough kids. But things changed when they got on the road. Our team stayed in
private homes with real beds. They were happy campers...or happy not-campers I guess.
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Sports is such an emotional thing! It's a lot of thrills, but then there's an occasional tragedy. This happened some years ago, but I still remember the death of the captain of the Boston Celtics basketball team, Reggie Lewis. He collapsed in a basketball playoff game. A team of doctors said that he had a potentially deadly heart condition and he couldn't play any more. Well, they went for a second opinion and those doctors said it wasn't so serious and he could gradually return to play. He died doing practice shooting in a gym a few months later, maybe trying to make a come back. One newscaster I heard reported it this way, "He heard what he wanted to hear."
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There's one sure way to gather a crowd at our house. In fact it just happened last night. You just walk slowly through the house with a flat, white, large, square box – "Pizza!" And you will get that Pied Piper feeling. We've noticed that these pizza boxes all say the same thing. I don't know if you've noticed that. You can go to 10 different pizza places, and they all seem to have the same slogan. "You've tried the rest; now try the best." Somebody's got to be wrong about that.
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I don't know whether or not your town has a big water tank. But if it does, I bet I can guess what it says. It probably has the name of your town on it, right? I don't have some kind of gift. I've just seen a lot of water tanks, and they all look basically the same, you know, with the name of the town or something on them.
But I saw a particular water tank on one trip that really got my attention. Actually, I saw two of them. We were driving through Virginia, and all of a sudden I looked up and here are two water tanks on a mountain overlooking this town. You can't miss them. Two tanks; each one has one word on it. One says "HOT." I'll bet you can guess what the other one says – "COLD."
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We have three children. My wife has had four pregnancies. At the end of the third month of her first pregnancy, she had a miscarriage. It was tough but God gave us grace to deal with it. That might be an experience you've had. We were all geared up for this new life to come, and suddenly there wasn't going to be one. When people heard that we'd experienced a miscarriage, it seemed like women came from every direction basically saying, "Me too."
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As 1986 ended, a lot of commentators were looking back at the greatest moments of the year, and some of the most tragic moments too. And they all mentioned a player named Len Bias. At 22 years old, he was the number one college basketball star in the United States. He'd been drafted by the then champions Boston Celtics. He had a 1.6 million dollar deal to do commercials. Newsweek Magazine said, "They were the best days of his life."
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Our son-in-law is pretty used to the scenery in Wheaton, Illinois. He lived there until he graduated from college. But one day he saw something sort of new that got his attention. He and my daughter were driving along, and my son-in-law pulled up to this stop sign on the street that he'd seen hundreds of times. He looked at the street sign and he said, "Hey, you know, I'm used to that sign being dull. It's not supposed to be that clear. I can really read it!" You want to guess why it suddenly had a sharpness to it that he didn't remember? Same sign; it hadn't changed. He just got his new glasses.
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I have a pastor friend who lives in a beautiful spot in the country. And he sees things there that I couldn't see where I lived for many years in an urban area. Like the bird life there was pretty much limited to sparrows, and there were a few rowdy crows, an occasional robin or blue jay. Oh, yeah, and then the parrot in our kitchen. But my friend, he was able to see and still is, all of those things with one of the classiest birds around-the hummingbird. You've seen them probably doing their amazing hovering thing and flying from one flower to the next. And they're always attracted to the most beautiful things in the yard. Now, my friend also gets to see one of the un-classiest birds around too-the buzzard. I mean, here's this amazing contrast. You've got the hummingbird and the buzzard flying over the same ground. But the hummingbird sees the meadow; the buzzard sees the carnage.
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Look, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. And the bank does their part; they send you that photocopy of all the checks that you've written in the last month. And you get to compare those with what you've recorded in your checkbook. Don't you look forward to doing that? You get to participate in the necessary evil called balancing your checkbook.
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If you've never been to a symphony, let me give you a little advice. Don't leave during the first few minutes. See, the musicians are tuning up during that time, and it doesn't sound like anything you'd want to stay for. That's not what the whole concert is going to be like. You might say to yourself, "Man, if this is going to be like this, I'm out of here. Is this what I paid for?"
