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Years ago there was a Newsweek cover story that really caught my attention. It was about twins and my wife and I had several friends at that time that had twins. Occasionally we had expressed horror at the thought of having had any two of our kids at the same time! Fortunately, God knows who can handle these incredible assignments, and who can't, so he wisely sent our three children two years apart.
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There were two stories in that day's news that stuck out to me. The first troubling story said that Twinkies could be going bankrupt. Yeah, how could that be? I mean, you talk about too big to fail! But, alas, the company that was making Twinkies was talking about filing for Chapter 11. Maybe if I ate enough of them in the next couple of weeks, I could make a difference.
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"So are you planning to go on a cruise sometime soon?" It was the guy checking me out at the drugstore, and he was pointing to the newspaper I was buying and sort of asked that with a wry smile. Because on the front page was this haunting picture of that capsized Italian cruise ship that went aground a few years ago now.
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Our grandson used to love to play "hide and seek." I didn't tell him I was pretty much onto his favorite places to hide in our house. But he figured out the best places to become totally invisible when I'm looking for him.
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Several years ago I thought they were talking about my grandmother storming up the East Coast. Actually, it was a hurricane with her name - Irene. Oh, and I know what that name means. It means peace. How ironic.
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The image of a burning candle on an iPad. That's actually the way that many people paid tribute and honored Steve Jobs' death and life. How appropriate. I mean, he was that inventive genius; the innovative marketer who brought the communications revolution from the "geekosphere" to something you could actually hold in your hand.
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For Christmas, I bought the ladies in the family these necklaces with a beautiful colored glass charm on them. And the Japanese word "nozomi." There's a story behind those necklaces.
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Whenever we passed a park, when I was a kid, I shifted into nagging mode to get my dad to stop, because I loved the swings. Didn't do that spinning carousel thing. No, never did enjoy throwing up. Then, the seesaw. That was fun. Yeah.
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Over the years, we've always tried to keep the real mission and meaning of Christmas in front of our children. Taking food and clothes into New York City, for example, to give to homeless people there. It put a whole new face on Christmas. Only a few miles from our home we were face-to-face with the tragedy of people without any place to call home. I remember the time when I went into the city to talk with some homeless people for my youth broadcast - to try to open my listeners eyes and hearts to a needy world. One man was living on the street, near a major bus terminal. His house was a large, tattered cardboard box. He actually allowed me to crawl inside that box with him, and it was heartbreaking that a box was home. At Christmastime - well, at any time. Wow! It's just a tragic thing to be without a home.
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"It's time to get the old bathrobes out, boys. Yeah, for the church Christmas pageant." You've got to have some boys be shepherds. You know, when I think of shepherds, though, it's more than Christmas to me. It's potentially life changing. There's this picture that hangs on the wall in our living room. It's meant a lot to me in recent years. Just like an identical picture did when I was four years old. That's when my baby brother died suddenly. My grieving dad, who was not a churchgoer, decided he should take his surviving son to church somewhere.
