It was a race against time. That last ferry boat to the island where we had a hotel reservation left at 8:30. We did everything the speed limit would allow. When we stopped for gas, we did one of my infamous Hutchcraft drills where you fill the car, empty yourself, and grab a meal in just minutes. All that's missing is the stopwatch. Yep! We roared into town and up to the dock at 8:40. We got there too late. We missed the boat...the last boat.
"Daddy, will you play with me?" I can still hear those echoes from when our kids were little. And I can still remember how preoccupied I was a lot of times when they asked that. So I can relate to the man who was reading his Sunday newspaper - you know, one of the big ones that comes in volumes. His little guy kept tapping on the newspaper and asking his Daddy to play with him. Dad kept giving him little things to do to keep him occupied. Finally, he tried another way to be able to finish his paper. He actually tore out a page that had a map of the world on it and he ripped it into pieces. He said, "Scotty, why don't you put this puzzle together. As soon as you've got it finished, I promise I'll come and play." Two minutes later, Scotty was tapping on Dad's newspaper again. "I'm finished," he said. And there it was, the whole map of the world together on the floor. Dad said, "Son, how did you ever put that together so fast?" His little guy replied: "It was easy, Daddy. There was a picture of a man on the other side. If you put the man together right, the world goes together just fine!"
Okay, the plan was flawless. They told me that Cadillac Mountain was the first place you could see the sunrise in the United States. And my job, of course, was to provide wonderful memories and special experiences for my children. We were vacationing in Maine, and I was determined to let them have this thrill. Somehow, they didn't seem as excited about it as I was; must have been a maturity thing I guess. Well, why wasn't my wife excited then? Anyway, I carefully checked the weather forecast every day until I was sure we would have a clear morning to see the sunrise. I made everyone go to sleep early. I woke everybody up at 3:00 A. M. We were in a campground and I was afraid the kids would wake up complaining and waking up the neighbors, so I had a doughnut ready to stuff into each little mouth-including mine. I bundled everyone into the car and up we drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain. I kept checking my watch, waiting for that magic moment of the scheduled sunrise, and the moment came. No sun. We waited and we waited. Surprise! The weatherman was wrong. We saw a distinctly unmemorable cloudrise.
One of our new staff members had just discovered the secret in our headquarters dining room. As she was carrying her lunch to the table, she bumped into this white pillar that stretches from floor to ceiling, and it moved. The look on her face was priceless! She wasn't quite sure what she had just done, or if it was about to cause the collapse of the room on top of all of us. Well, that's the secret. The pillar looks real enough, it's just decorative. It's just made of plastic. It doesn't hold up anything!
Amid all the amusement and theme parks clustered in Orlando, Florida, there's one that is pretty distinctive. It's that Holy Land theme park that attempts to bring some of the scenes and the stories of the Bible to life. Our daughter and son-in-law were there once with two of our grandsons. And the kids, who are pretty up on their Bible stories, really enjoyed walking through those stories and meeting some of the characters (Well, actually, people portraying some of those characters.). The one that impressed our then two-year-old grandson the most was Jesus. A man portraying Jesus stood in the middle of that small crowd and He spoke some of the very stories He told in the Bible. But then came the moment our little guy will not soon forget. Jesus came over and picked Him up, just like Jesus did with the children when He was here. The next day Mom and our little guy were talking about his upcoming third birthday party, and suddenly out of the blue, he said, "I want Jesus at my birthday party."
It was a day of national mourning; an unusual outpouring of emotion and affection for the man who had died. The final farewell to former President Ronald Reagan began with official funeral observances in the nation's Capitol. There were these long, all-night lines of everyday Americans paying their respects at his coffin in the Capitol Rotunda, the highest officials of the land paying tribute to the former President, the memorial service in the National Cathedral, and then that final journey on Air Force One to a family service at his ranch in California. One of the more moving moments of a day with many such moments was when Air Force jets flew over in what is known as the "missing man maneuver." Clusters of jets flew overhead, with one jet in the final cluster suddenly peeling up, away, and out of sight. That's symbol says a lot.
Several years ago on an Indian reservation, a friend there told us about an elderly neighbor of hers who had taken an unusual pet into her house. It was a half wolf and half dog. Half wild and half domesticated, and as it turned out, big trouble. One morning that wolf dog picked up the lady's granddaughter and began to carry her away. The grandmother saw it, and she screamed at the top of her lungs. The animal stopped and froze in this moment of evident struggle between his wild side and his tame side. The wolf dog looked straight at this screaming lady, totally unafraid; his wild side wasn't scared at all. His wild side wanted that child. But then in one dramatic moment, the animal dropped the child and let her go. The tame side finally won, but there were still a lot of scars.
Norma Jean was born on a cold, snowy day after a battle just to get into this world. Norma Jean - a little white calf whose mother wouldn't have anything to do with her, and she lay out in the snow and the cold for many hours, actually, before her owner realized her predicament. That newborn was in pretty bad shape, with her hind legs not even supporting her when she tried to stand. Her attempts to get up were, well, they were pitiful. Kenny is a teenager, and he doesn't live on the farm where that calf was born. But when he saw her, he offered to take her and try to pull her through. The farmer was pretty pessimistic about the calf making it, but Kenny arranged for her to stay in a stall in a friend's barn. Every morning, he drove to that barn before school, and he faithfully fed Norma Jean a big bottle of milk substitute, and he slowly nursed her back to health. You know what? Eventually, that calf who had been on her last legs literally was now bouncing all over the place on four good legs!
Seattle-Earthquake! As I watched those words appearing on CNN's Breaking News years ago, it really caught my attention in that airport. I expected to see the word "earthquake" associated with a place like California or other parts of the world, but that day it was Seattle-6.8 on the Richter scale. Now, thankfully, the damage was not nearly as great as it could have been, but the experience was a sobering reminder of how unstable the ground beneath them really is. During the quake, a camera was rolling during a meeting in a conference room, and the video showed the reactions as the realization dawned on each person that his world was suddenly shaking. One moment, it was business as usual. The next moment, man, everything was moving.
Linda, one of the members of our ministry team, married a guy with an eye. I mean, an eye for artistic possibilities. Ted works on home improvement projects, and he actually helped to improve our home a little bit not long ago. For example, he created this beautiful shelf in our living room. It's made from wood that he scouted and found in the nearby forest. My wife said, "Hey, we're the only ones with a shelf just like that." Ted does originals. Recently, he took Linda out into the woods to see a tree that he thought had tremendous artistic possibilities. So, he envisioned out loud what he wanted to make of it. Linda's comment on this little field trip was slightly amusing: "Ted saw this beautiful work of art. All I saw was a tree."
