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Little Mark was at that stage. He was about three years old, the son of our friends. He was cute...until he would start asking all those questions! Guess what his favorite one was? (I'll bet you'll know!) "Why? Why?"
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It may have been the happiest traffic jam in history. The scene: the Brandenburg Gate between East and West Berlin on an incredible November weekend years ago. Suddenly, after rapid revolutionary changes in the policies of East Germany's communist government, people could go through the wall that for 28 years had divided that city between free and communist. The cars were lined up for miles to cross that barrier that had been closed for so long. Some people drove through the wall, some people walked through the gate, some scaled fences to get there more quickly, and the news reported that tens of thousands of people began to break into a delirious chant that the whole world could hear, "The wall is gone! The wall is gone!" Well, so is yours.
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It all started with an S.O.S. from a counselor at a conference where I was speaking. I'd just extended an invitation for young men and women who wanted to make a commitment to following Christ. There were many young people in the counseling room after that, and a counselor came back and said, "You've got to talk to Kelly. She's really hard."
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Well, I did it again! I managed to head right into a storm. Like the family vacation that got slammed by a hurricane. Yeah, the record rainstorm that swamped the airport when we took our daughter to college. Oh, and the Halloween "Snowmageddon" I think they called it. Yeah, we met that in Connecticut while we were there. Oh, then there was super storm Sandy in New York.
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There's a reason so many of us grandparents are overcoming our technophobia and venturing into cyberspace. We get to see pictures of our grandkids as soon as they're taken!
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When I was a teenager, you could tell a girl was going steady by the fuzzy ring around her neck. And when our son started going with a girl, she just got his jacket; football jacket - the one he earned with blood, sweat, tears, and my money. But you could tell this girl was going with my son; the jacket had his name on it. I have to tell you though, it was slightly amusing. See, my son was a big lineman. She swam in that coat! And she wasn't the only one. We had a lot of girls in our school who were dating athletes, and they wore their jackets as a symbol, "Hey, I belong to him. He's mine." But it didn't look that great on most of them. No. You know, wearing what a man gives you for security may not be the best fit for you.
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A while back I got to explore the world my wife grew up in. And I've been going to a lot of beautiful back roads. One of those was this road that she walked every morning to the school bus. She was only five, and it's about two miles from where she lived to the main road. Fortunately, she was not the kind who bored her kids with, "When I was your age" stories. But boy this would have made a good one. That was a long, sometimes scary walk for a little girl alone. I can almost picture it when we were driving there.
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The dam broke. Those are words no one wants to hear if they live downriver from a dam. But that's exactly what happened near some small towns in southeast Missouri. It was just before daybreak when a dam on Taum Sauk Lake collapsed, sending a billion-gallon torrent of water streaming down the mountain and washing away homes and vehicles. When inspectors began to probe the reason for the collapse, they were dumbfounded by what they discovered. Instead of the granite that they had assumed for decades was the main material keeping the water in the reservoir, they found that the broken portion appeared to consist entirely of just soil and small rock. The breach occurred when an automated system mistakenly pumped too much water into the reservoir. But the reason for the disaster was a dam that was made of material that just couldn't stand the pressure.
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I love all the "joy to the world" and the Christmas electricity in the air. But maybe you remember a few Christmases ago, just down from the manger there were a lot of flags at half-staff for 26 Connecticut funerals. You probably remember all those little children gunned down so brutally just eleven days before Christmas. We live in a violent time, an angry time, conflicted, confusing. But it's still Christmas, and still the "most wonderful time of the year."
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One of the beautiful things to see on the news at Christmastime is soldiers coming home. Boy, we've seen it over the years, and coming from sometimes war torn places in the world. But there was a Christmas not too long ago, and that was not Amy's story. I had met her at a dinner I had spoken at and she was stressed. See, she had just gotten called up to go to Afghanistan at that time. So as the Christmas displays were lighting up everything, Amy was saying goodbye to the people she loved and leaving for the battlefield. By the way, God knows that feeling.
