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You want to write a best-selling book? Do something about self improvement. Man are we into self improvement! I mean, think about how the health clubs and how they boom in membership in January. A resolution is called, "A firm decision to do or not to do something." Well we find out that about 88% of our resolutions don't happen.
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It used to be pretty uncommon to see a headline about suicide. Not so much today. Athletes, celebrities, a lot of famous people, musicians. We keep hearing about people who have died by their own choice. Sometimes it's people we know and people close to us. We often wonder, "Why?"
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Jennifer and Courtney were three-year-old twins. And they were excited about preschool. In fact, they were so excited they got up in the middle of the night in their Omaha, Nebraska home and walked out of the house to make the six-block walk to school. Well all this while, their parents were sound asleep. You say, "Oh, isn't that cute?" No! See, snow was everywhere that night and the temperature was nine below zero. The girls were reported missing at 4:04 a.m. after family members awoke to find this light on and the door open.
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Every New York television station you turned to had the same bold graphic that just said Blizzard of '96. I still remember it. It was barely 1996; we were only six days into the new year when anywhere between 20 to 30 inches of snow unloaded on the Metropolitan New York area. It was like a mega-ton snow bomb.
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A Pope's visit to Cuba is not an everyday thing by any means. Pope Francis more recently visited. When Pope John Paul II made the very first visit in 1998, he saw a very different Cuba than Pope Francis saw.
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Most of the courtrooms I've been exposed to are on TV. But there was a moment in a courtroom I will never forget. It began when we learned the whereabouts of a young Native American friend we had been trying to locate for a while. Let's call her Cathy. We learned, almost miraculously, that after a dark time away from God, Cathy was in jail in Nebraska. We got that word on Friday as I was leaving Michigan to meet our Native American summer team in South Dakota on a Monday night. We ate up the Interstate trying to get to Nebraska before Cathy went before the Judge. She had no idea we were coming - until we saw her during her Sunday afternoon visiting hours.
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Now there are happy video tape recordings. You know, audio recordings of our kids when they were little before their voices changed, Karen and I giving our vows to each other at our wedding.
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There was a young man we knew who was pretty distraught over a death in his family. He acted it out by deciding to just delete a bunch of Facebook friends. And think we all know someone that has been "deleted" or "canceled." It's just the world we live in today and it hurts! You can delete a relationship with a stroke of your finger. Sometimes it can be really brutal.
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So there have been several Supermen, well, you know, men who have played Superman over the years. From TV to all the movies. The first one was George Reeves, on the TV show many years ago. Some supermen have had tragic lives. George Reeves who played Superman from 1951 to 1958 actually committed suicide after his career had stalled. He was forever typecast as Superman. Then another actor, Christopher Reeve, who played Superman in five films, became paralyzed in 1995 from an equestrian accident where he was thrown from his horse. These actors played the part of a man who was invincible, but "behind the role" was the awful reality.
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If you've always been skinny, you can just give it up because you're not going to understand what I'm about to say. But if you're like me and you've battled over that scale your whole life, if you've ever been overweight, you'll probably understand this. Once you've battled that, you always tend to think of yourself as overweight even if you're not any more. Now, I've managed to lose some of it. Others may say you're okay, and the scale might even say you're okay. But there's this voice that keeps whispering, "Overweight!"
