I'll bet you turned on the water this morning and never gave it a thought. Well, you probably didn't grow up in the middle of a desert. You know, speaking of deserts, there was a great story years ago about the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. There was a movie made about his life. He had made many friends there in his campaigns and they had grown up in the desert, and they did not take running water for granted.
Now, I've spent a fair amount of my life on airplanes, and so the thought of a fire on a plane is pretty unsettling. So I wasn't too excited about what I heard happened on an Air Canada flight several years ago. The fire actually started in the lavatory and the fire wasn't so big, but the smoke started to billow through the plane and it very quickly reached the cockpit. You can imagine how fearful that was going to be.
Some years I traveled to Alaska with my family to do some speaking up there. What an awesome place it is! You know, it says on the license plates The Last Frontier, and it really is. Now, we had one magnificent obsession while we were there. We wanted to see moose. Yeah! We didn't see too many of those when we lived in New Jersey. So we wanted to see those moose.
Some couples' wedding vows get tested sooner; some get tested later. My friends had theirs tested right away. When they went to Mexico for their honeymoon, they promptly picked up some Spanish speaking bug down there, and they got very, very sick in the middle of what was supposed to be their very romantic honeymoon. I think it was commonly called Montezuma's Revenge or something like that.
I think I still remember one line of poetry from high school, "Water, water everywhere." Yeah, well, for lots of folks this past spring, that wasn't poetry. It was their town, their neighborhood, their house. The rivers overflowed and they backed up into every creek and stream they were connected to. It was a mess.
The first time I ever flew into New York City, the man who picked me up said, "Well, you just landed on the garbage of New York." I said, "What do you mean by that?" He said, "Well, you see, LaGuardia Airport is built on a landfill. Years ago all these garbage trucks hauled all this garbage from New York out here and built a place where there's now an airport. I was impressed. I thought, "You know, it's amazing what engineers can do. I mean, they made something very useful out of garbage." You know, there is a cosmic engineer who put the galaxies together, and He is a genius at making something useful out of garbage.
I know our granddaughters sure think so. They've got princess everything, the dolls, the sheets, tiaras. We probably got most of them for them. Well, you get the picture. But, you know, our granddaughters aren't unusual. So many little girls, from lots of generations, have grown up with dreams of being a princess. And look! What's at the center of Disney World's Fantasyland when you go there? Well, of course, Cinderella's Castle.
Okay, I wasn't expecting a goat to be my teacher. But something kind of special happened. A good friend of ours helped a new baby goat come into the world. You might say he was "kidding" around. But you shouldn't say that.
You can find it at a football game. You can find it in a concert. There are thousands of people drawn to a gathering, and they're talking excitedly about some star that they've come to see or hear. Hands and voices are raised in praise and all eyes are on the star, or the stars. In fact, if you want to get people really agitated, use the name of their favorite musician in vain. Or say something negative about their favorite athlete. Uh-huh. I mean, people who might be relatively passive about minor issues like nuclear war, or abortion, or people starving to death are majorly aggressive about their heroes. I mean, we're excited about our favorite musician, our favorite sports star, even our favorite spiritual celebrity...maybe too excited.
It's almost been a century when the unsinkable ship sank and some 1,500 passengers died. You know, I actually have my boarding pass for the Titanic. Yeah, for real! They gave it to me at the entrance to the Titanic artifacts exhibit I went to. (No, I am not that old to have the original thing.) Now, it doesn't have my name on it. It says, "J. Pearse, Crew." Now, having the name of someone who was really there that night, I guess, made what I saw a whole lot more personal.
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