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January 31, 2020

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I guess every generation has its surprising music hits. Like a song by a Mississippi truck driver about a hound dog - Elvis something - or a song by some longhaired British quartet about wanting to hold your hand. I think they were called The Beatles. Now, in more recent years, there was a very surprising song that skyrocketed to number one for several weeks and to a Grammy nomination. It's been a while, but it was a pretty provocative song. The singer was not well known, but the song asked some questions that I never thought I'd hear in a popular song. It had a haunting melody that was pretty hard to forget. Years ago, as I played a portion of that song for 11,000 teenagers I was speaking to, virtually everyone in the room sang the lyrics. "What if God was one of us, what would His name be? If God was one of us, what would His face look like?" You know what? The questions were provocative. The answers are shocking!

January 27, 2019

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It's a good thing that out of our three children we had only one daughter. I could only afford one wedding! Now my wife did all kinds of resourceful things to keep the costs way down. It was so nice of those guests to bring a sack lunch, I'll tell you. You know? The only time they'd been to a reception like it. No, no, I'm only kidding. It was modest, but it was beautiful. But it certainly wasn't free! We like watching the video of the wedding once in a while, but we won't have to do the wedding again! No, can you imagine if her husband kept saying every few months, "I think we need to have another wedding. I want to make sure we're married." They haven't needed to do that! Neither have her mother and I because we know we got married that day.

January 23, 2019

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It started on a family vacation in Southern California. The kids were asking about earthquakes which were not a part of our regular growing up years in New Jersey. We started this whimsical little exercise where I would yell, "Earthquake drill!" Now, invariably our older son would run over to his older sister and he would hug her. I would ask innocently, "What are you doing?" to which he would reply, "Dad, you told us to hang on to something heavy!" Oooh, she wasn't, but I'll tell you, that boy was lucky he lived to have a sixth birthday! Actually, when things are shaking, it's really a pretty good idea to hang on to something heavy!

January 21, 2019

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Graduation day was a suspenseful day for our younger son. He wasn't totally sure what was going to be inside that diploma that the college President handed him. See, he had been informed several days before graduation that no one would know for sure that they were actually going to receive their diploma until they returned to their seat and looked inside the cover. The seniors didn't know their final grades, and if there were any unpaid fees they weren't going to know that either, until they opened their diploma cover and found a bill instead of a diploma.

January 17, 2019

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Remember the old days? Yeah, with hotels, you know, and the keys? Yeah, the keys; not the little card they give you that opens the door. In those days I had a little problem. I don't remember when a guy asked me when I checked out of a hotel one day, "Ron did you turn in your key?" I thought somewhere along the way he talked to my wife, because see was the one who got to mail all those keys back. It's true, I have been known to own a hotel key collection. I mean, everybody needs a hobby, right? Some people collect stamps, coins, you get the idea! Well, actually it's never my intention to walk off with hotel keys, but sometimes I end up taking what I never meant to take. When I didn't even know I was taking it.

January 13, 2019

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Metal mouth! Yeah, that's what they called my daughter in Junior High. Of course, there were plenty of kids you could call that. Those pre-teen and early teen years? Those are braces years a lot of times. All our kids got to take their turn at braces, and we were thankful, frankly, that we had a friend who was an orthodontist. The work was important, but the bills? They were challenging! Our friend allowed us to pay in installments, but even that was hard sometimes. We still had this large unpaid balance the day our latest bill arrived. We opened it and we couldn't believe the three beautiful words that were stamped across the bill - PAID IN FULL!

January 9, 2019

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On some of my trips I can travel pretty light, but there have been some where I felt like a mule carrying the things I had to take. One trip I had to pack for three different seasons; professional settings, youth settings. Well, you get the idea. I was going to be gone for quite a while, of course, I had to basically take my office with me too. I had a lot of baggage! When I arrived, someone from the area met me at the gate and they said those magic words, "Let me help you with your bags." I did.

January 7, 2020

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The Lewis and Clark Expedition! They were that bold group of explorers that Thomas Jefferson sent to explore the largely uncharted Louisiana Purchase. The expedition was under the leadership of Captains Lewis and Clark, and it faced blazing heat and bone-chilling cold. They had some close calls with vicious animals, they were attacked by insects, they had the prospect of massacre by many Indian tribes whose land they were crossing, there were perilous passages, and even the death of one of their own. After a year and a half of paying a really high price, Captain William Clark stood one day in the bow of his boat, pointed west up the Columbia River, and shouted, "Ocean in view!" Later he wrote in his journal: "Ocean in view! O joy! Great joy in camp! For we are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific Ocean which we had been so long anxious to see!"

January 3, 2020

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My son and I were waiting in front of a restaurant and we saw this dad desperately trying to keep his impatient two-year-old occupied. Good luck! What's that word we sometimes use to describe the "two-year-olds"? "Terrible twos"? Yeah, well, there's something in a little child that wants freedom, and will go for it at the first opportunity. This kid was no exception. As soon as his dad let go for a moment, he started chugging down the sidewalk. Dad started after him, of course, pretending he was having a hard time catching the little guy. Well, you knew he wasn't. My son just watched in amusement and he said to me, "It's so funny watching a kid trying to get away from his father. You know he's going to lose."

December 27, 2019

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They were just a young fire-fighting crew, assigned to work on a relatively small brush fire in Washington State. No one could have imagined what was about to happen. Seemingly timid fires suddenly roared to life and then they were out of control. In the end, 14 firefighters had to pin their hopes on those tinfoil shelters designed to be the last line of protection in their firetrap. Ultimately, four young firefighters died in the fire that day. They had tried to escape the fire by heading for a nearby road. Apparently, their superiors had not advised them that it was a dead-end road.

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