Jenny was a counselor with a student group we had taken to a youth organization conference at the New Jersey Shore. She was walking along the Boardwalk enjoying all the attractions, and suddenly she heard what she thought was a scream. It seemed to be coming from the ocean. Now, it was night and it was, of course, too dark to see out there. So Jenny ran down the steps, across the beach, and to the water's edge.
Recently, a friend of mine had a ringside seat on a family of birds. They actually decided to nest under the roof on the porch. The fun part was watching the birth and development of those baby birds. My friend actually got to see them hatching out and then settling down into their nest. They all fit in there so nicely - at first. See, Mama kept filling their open mouths with more and more food, and the little birdies didn't stay little! They grew and the nest seemed to shrink. As it got more and more crowded, each baby did more and more wiggling around to kind of keep his position in the nest. Then they feathered out and they forgot about all of them sitting in the nest ever again! Well, they began to perch on the edges of the nest until they were pushed off the edge by their siblings in a battle for whatever food Mama brought. One by one, as crowding pushed those little birds to the edge - and then over the edge - they were forced to fly or die. They decided to fly. The last nester stayed in the nest for actually another full week, being fed as an only child by Mama Bird. Finally, Mama must have gotten disgusted with her nest-addicted child. She quit feeding him. First, there was a lot of squawking and fussing, and then even he abandoned the nest to finally touch the sky.
It was enough to make a girl stop talking for years to come. That is, about her relationship with Jesus. One day in high school, God laid it on my wife's heart, (of course she wasn't my wife yet), to share Christ with one of her fellow band members. Ricky was a drummer. In my experience, drummers are usually cut from a little different piece of cloth than everybody else, and Ricky was no exception. He was a wild and crazy guy with a mouth to match. But one day my wife got up the courage to rise above her shyness and tell him about her Savior. Ricky didn't exactly fall to his knees in the band room and repent. In fact, he said, "Well, if you're going to heaven, I want to go to the other place!" Ouch!
Are you sure you want to turn on the news tonight? Yeah, it will cheer you up. Right. We need a few laughs. That's unlikely. It has been pretty ugly. Things are happening environmentally that are difficult, the weather is kinda going crazy. You've got headlines about growing crime and financial turmoil, and gun violence. Boy, you know all those headlines.
A pastor I heard of was meeting one of the ladies from his large church one day, and he asked her, "What do you do?" Her answer was classic. She said, "Well, Pastor, I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ cleverly disguised as a machine operator!" I love that!
Who would think you'd miss a fleet of big brown trucks? If they say UPS on the side, you'll miss them if you're off the streets for long! I mean, Americans found out a few years ago when the UPS drivers went on strike. Within hours in some cases, days in almost every case, thousands of UPS customers were in a crisis. At that time they said 80% of America's packages were carried by UPS! It's probably changed by now, but that's how it was then. Apparently, all the other guys were fighting it out for the other 20%.
Once you've tasted Vermont maple syrup, all the store brands taste like goo! So my ears picked up one night when NBC Nightly News started talking about the troubles that Vermont maple farmers were having that year. They focused on one farmer who lived on a farm where they've been mapling for eight generations! This farmer had known that the maple trees were ready to be tapped for their valuable sap during the first week of March. But recent weather changes had suddenly thrown that predictable harvest schedule into total confusion.
Two words that will inevitably cause a lot of excitement to appear on any face in our family - Ocean City. That's the name of this charming town on the Jersey shore where our family has got a lot of memories over the years. There was this one trip where several of us rendezvoused there for a couple of days making a few more memories.
It's an English-speaking church. The visiting pastor was Hispanic. He spoke in Spanish, using an interpreter to help his audience understand. I've spoken through an interpreter. So, you either have to say half as much or it takes twice as long. Well. the pastor chose the latter. Yeah. It took quite a while to get through his message. And to be honest, I know some minds started to wander at times. Well, at the end of his message, the pastor surprised everybody. He spoke to them completely in English. And he made a promise - the next time he would definitely speak in English. Of course, some folks were just a little frustrated. He could have spoken in the language of the people he was talking to; he just chose to speak in his own.
An upscale restaurant in Manhattan's iconic Rockefeller Plaza, filled with Wall Street "movers and shakers." A dusty reservation basketball court, surrounded by impoverished, hope-starved Native American young people. I've ministered in both worlds, within weeks of one another. Worlds that - at first glance - seem to be really far apart. But when it comes to what God is doing, these divergent worlds share some striking - and instructive - similarities.
