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Monday, December 3, 2018

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For many years, my wife's father managed to squeeze out a living for his family on this little farm in the Ozarks. It was always a battle financially, but the battle got really intense the summer of the long drought. My wife talked about it so many times. First, he emptied all three of their ponds to get water; then all of the ponds on his parents' adjacent property. Then a friend let him use his well that had never gone dry. Well, it did go dry that summer. Finally, Dad had no choice but to find water and dig a well on his property. But that meant mortgaging a lot of his cattle. And as the well diggers had to go deeper, it eventually meant mortgaging all his cattle. And they never found water. His farming days were over.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

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They just don't make garbage like they used to. Do you remember the good old days when you could throw away everything when you were done with it? Actually, those were not the good old days, because we were also trashing our environment. I don't know how it is in your neighborhood, but we lived in a neighborhood for a long time where we had the privilege of sorting and putting out what used to be just garbage; you know now they're called recyclables. It's amazing how they can take that garbage and then recycle it into something useful again.

Monday, November 19, 2018

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Some of our great moments as a family have been spent watching those old videos, which now thankfully have been converted them to DVDs. Yeah, they are at a time when we were all a lot younger. For a while, our firstborn had the camera all to herself. Then we added a co-star-her brother. Then along came another subject for the lens-a baby brother! And, of course, some of those camera-worthy moments are when your baby or toddler is winning some of their first victories, right? Doing some of those things that are irresistibly cute. You know? So often the camera was focused on our daughter's little brothers. So you'll be watching one of them doing some adorable thing when suddenly this five-year-old girl jumps into the picture, waving and smiling right into the camera, blocking the view of everything else. It's almost as if our daughter was saying, "Hey, remember me? I'm over here! Don't forget me!"

Thursday, November 15, 2018

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A lot of news stories just flash into our lives and and we forget them almost immediately. Then there are those images that are like embedded in our brains for years to come. For me, one of those was an image that took place of a little toddler named Jessica, who had been playing in her backyard in Midland, Texas, and suddenly she plummeted down this narrow little shaft. Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember this. But she was wedged in there; trapped underground. It seemed as if the whole nation literally stopped to watch this tense vigil as rescuers tried to find a way to save that little girl. It was a long ordeal, but one rescuer, who used a parallel shaft, working in the tightest of quarters, was finally able to get to little Jessica. And I can still remember seeing it on TV live. In a moment of incredible relief and joy, he brought her out.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

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I was in the room when my friend Bob went up to the speaker for the day and made a fairly startling statement. He took his three young children with him, pointed to them, and said to this speaker, “If it weren’t for you, these children wouldn’t be here.” Needless to say, the gentleman looked at him curiously. But that was not an overstatement.  And it attested to a dramatic miracle that my friend had experienced.

Friday, November 9, 2018

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When we were involved in building a new headquarters for our ministry, I have to confess that was new ground for me. I've been involved in building people my whole life, but not buildings. It became very clear that there is a specific order in which you have to do things. Obviously, you don't just start by having the carpenters show up and start putting up the building. No, there has to be a foundation laid first. But whoa, wait-you can't lay the foundation or start building until you have the detailed plans for the building. Yes, it takes contractors, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, pavers, and heating and air conditioning people. But first, the architect! Without his design, it's going to just be mass confusion at the construction site. But thankfully, God gave us a gifted architect who could lay out a detailed plan. And you know what? Things worked really well because everyone was going by the plan.

Monday, October 29, 2018

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It happened decades ago, but it's one of those events I'll never really forget. It happened in Chicago where I grew up. It was the most devastating tragedy most of us would remember from that time. It was December 1, 1958, and a fire broke out at the foot of a stairway in the Our Lady of the Angels School. That fire raged out of control very quickly; it cut off all normal escape routes. Ninety grade school children died in that fire. But there's one I remember vividly from a news account that I read at the time and I still have not forgotten it. This little boy was in a second story window-they actually had a photo of him. The boy's father was down below, yelling to him to jump into his arms. That boy could see the fire racing toward him from behind, but he refused to jump. Then, one awful moment, the boy disappeared from the window. He was one of those victims.

Friday, October 26, 2018

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I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and honestly we did not have a lot of sheep running around. So I listened with fascination when I heard my father-in-law tell about being the shepherd for his family's flock of sheep. He was just a boy, he was the only child, and Mom and Dad left the sheep pretty much with him, and he was with them a lot. One day he and his parents were watching the flock and he said, "Would you like me to call one of them out?" Right, kid. Like one sheep is going to know it's him you want? So Mom and Dad kind of laughed. The little shepherd asked them to pick a sheep they wanted called out, and then he made a little bleating sound and the selected sheep proceeded to leave the flock and come right to him. Mom and Dad were still skeptical. So he said, "OK, pick another sheep." And they did. Another bleat, and Mr. Sheep answered the call. And no one else could get that kind of response. That little exercise was repeated several times, until there was no denying the amazing fact: those sheep had such a personal relationship with their shepherd that his was the only voice they followed.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

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"They were our pilots. It was our aircraft. The aircraft should not have been on that runway." That's what an executive of Singapore Airlines told reporters after their Los Angeles-bound jumbo jet crashed on takeoff from Taipei, Taiwan. It snapped into three pieces and it burst into flames. Eighty-one of the 179 passengers aboard died in that crash. It was a crash that never should have happened. The pilot somehow ended up on a runway full of construction equipment. The resulting collision was obviously deadly. The pilot had warnings; preflight briefing papers and two big signs indicating the number of the runway he mistakenly went down, but it didn't matter. He was on the wrong runway.

Friday, October 19, 2018

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So I heard this comedy routine that suggested some humorous ways to finish this sentence: "You're having a bad day when..." Well, I heard on the news about a man who might be a finalist for the "baddest day of the year" award, and there's nothing humorous about what happened to him. There was years ago an Avianca Airlines plane that crashed on Long Island. It was a flight from Colombia to New York. This particular Colombian man was seriously injured in the crash. Well, that's a bad day; I mean that's a really bad day. They rushed him to the hospital where it was determined that they'd have to do abdominal surgery. And when the surgeons opened him up, they found little plastic bags in his stomach full of cocaine. He was a drug courier, and he had ingested those little bags of cocaine to smuggle them into the country. So after he crashed and then was operated on, he was arrested. Now who would have ever thought he would be found out? He was.

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