Every four years the Winter Olympics roll around, and every time I see them, this memory keeps flashing back in my brain. I'm not sure which looms larger to me, the Olympic memory or the lesson I learned from it.
Our local high school football players survived grueling triple practice sessions one summer. Our sons were on the team, and I know. But you know what? It was then off season, and I noticed then that several of them were going for a relatively simple one-mile run. I mean, simple compared to those triple sessions. Well, when they got back, they were totally wiped out, they were gasping for breath, they were sore, they were exhausted. My son was among them, and he summed up what he learned that day. He kind of collapsed in the car when I picked him up after the little run, and he said, "You know, dad, it doesn't take long to get out of condition." Well, he's right—especially when it comes to your heart.
Sometimes if you're a commercial flyer, it's probably best if you don't watch the news. There was that whole string of plane incidents that where suddenly one had a hole in the roof, and then they found cracks in other planes like it after that. Oh yeah, and then there was the plane with the bullet hole in it. Yeah, that was right about that time.
A lot of people I know of have friends in Joplin, Missouri. So you can imagine that they have been feeling the unimaginable devastation and loss from that huge tornado there on a personal level. And it's always that way when a disaster has a face; it's not just a story on the news.
April 2011 - turn on the news, it was "The Prince William and Kate Show"! You bet ya! Man, forget about world crises and cash-burning gas. Who cares about disasters and deficits? The handsome prince and the classy commoner were getting married! Actually, you know a lot of ways you could remember that if you wanted to.
A few years back, the stress meters on Wall Street hit some new highs all because one man had been recording his telephone calls. Yeah, one of Wall Street's movers and shakers had been caught in the middle of some very profitable but very illegal stock dealings. And in order to reduce his possible penalty, he agreed to record his calls for a few weeks. Well, when that news broke, oh boy, they found out he had been caught and that he had been dealing for weeks with the tape recorder running, a lot of Wall Street lawyers got some very frantic phone calls.
With the era of space shuttle flights coming to an end, I was thinking back to some of those original pioneering flights to the moon - the Apollo missions. It was mind-blowing to think that we had reached the point where men like us could actually walk on that moon that had just been that distant light in the night for millennia. It really was a big deal!
You know, some people who financially support Christian ministry also like to play golf. I don't happen to be one of them. If you'd seen the one time I did play golf, when I hit my partner in the head with a club, you would understand why I've been banned from golf courses.
Sometimes something happens in the news that just leaves images you can't forget; that massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan, that was one of those. Those images of that inescapable wall of water consuming everything in its path! I mean, those are moments that are more than impressive. They're deeply moving. Sometimes even the usually dispassionate reporters get caught up in a story like that.
It's a miracle my wife ever made it through college. Not because of her grades. You say, "Yeah, probably because she was dating you." No, that's not the reason either - because of finances. You see, halfway through, her parents' financial help suddenly stopped. Now, it wasn't because they didn't want to help her get through college. Suddenly they just didn't have it. Her folks were running a small dairy farm at the time, just a little family farm, and they needed a well desperately. So they sank most of their money into digging a well. A drought came and the well came up dry. Wells have a way of doing that.
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