One of my more anxious moments related to air travel, and it actually had nothing to do with an airplane. It had to do with my two sons, who at the time were pretty young. We were going through the security checkpoint on the way to our gate, and all of a sudden they started joking about the one word you don't mention at airport security.
My next door neighbor in our dorm in college always wanted to preach like Billy Graham. I mean he really wanted to preach like Billy Graham. He would tape Billy Graham on his radio program, and then he would listen to the tapes over and over again. He would copy everything, including even the inflections of Billy's voice. And then he would watch Billy Graham. He studied his gestures; he'd try to get them down and gesture just when Billy Graham would. He'd hold his Bible like Billy Graham. Now you are going to think he was really a fanatic, but this really is true. He told me he even counted the words per minute that Billy Graham averaged and tried to get the same pace. Wow! That's a crazy way to approach ministry, huh? Well, it's more common than you might think.
At first, Rob's friends thought he was avoiding them. They'd ask him to go somewhere and he'd say, "Sorry, I can't." Eventually he told them why he couldn't go. He had something much more important to do. He would just say, "I've got to go to my meeting." Not too many teenagers would choose going to a meeting over going with their friends, but Rob made a good choice. See, Rob is a teenage drug addict, and he's being rehabilitated through a 12-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. One important key to fighting his problem is attending that support group meeting several times a week.
When our family got ready to leave for a trip, I usually had some pretty good help loading the car, because everybody was eager to leave. Now, when we pulled into the driveway at the end of the trip, it was a little different. All of a sudden I noticed that I was carrying a lot of things and I didn't have much company. There are five members of our family, but invariably when it was time to unload, I ran in the house and found...let's see, there's one on the phone, one in the bathroom, one opening the mail, one in their room, and one carrying the load. That was me. I'd be in the kitchen yelling, "Help!" as I staggered in with things hanging from both shoulders - doing my impersonation of a mule, things in my arms, my hands, my teeth. It's frustrating to have a load to carry and nobody there to help.
I guess it's possible to get lost in a computer. I'm lost as soon as I turn on a computer, but that's not what I mean. What I'm describing happens to people who really understand computers. There was a Newsweek article a while ago that talked about how some business leaders were complaining about this emerging problem with some of their computer people. They were talking about computer technicians who just kept going deeper and deeper into programs, and spending lots of time on sophisticated functions that didn't really have anything to do with getting their job done. One of them had an interesting name for it - "the rapture of the deep" they called it; lost somewhere in that computer; making the computer an end in itself rather than what it's supposed to be, which I think is a means of getting a job done. You know, some people get lost in the Bible too.
Now, as a good football coach prepares his high school players for the season, he's going to bring up the dangers of what he will call playing tentatively. I know no one's anxious to get hurt, and so there's a natural tendency to hold back a little in a contact sport; to hold back when you hit, when you block, when you tackle. But the coach is going to tell you that the best way to get hurt is to play tentatively, half-heartedly. Either give it all you've got or don't play.
I was reminiscing with my son the other day about when he was four and learned to play baseball. He was standing there in his little shorts, and he had his Wiffle bat and his Wiffle ball. (I mean when he was little; not the other day.) And I stood just a few feet away from him and I gently threw the ball underhanded. And he would sort of chop at it like an ax, and I didn't know if he'd ever learn to play.
I had the opportunity to spend 24 hours of my life in the city of Athens in Greece. I was on my way home from a teaching mission, and if I only had 24 hours, well, I knew what I wanted to see. I wanted to see the Acropolis, and there it was on a hill that just dominates the entire city. That's where the ancient Greeks built a temple to their goddess, Athena, after whom, obviously, the city was named.
People become like the environment they spend their time in. At least that's what I've heard. For example, if you work at IBM, you become amazingly well-organized for some strange reason. If you live in a college town, or if you work around a college, it's amazing how your vocabulary can change; sometimes increases. Oh, and your clothing? Yeah, it becomes a little bit more collegiate. You know?
It's pretty exciting to travel with my wife - well, just that alone is - but with my wife and her camera. She sees things that I don't see. Oh, I know sometimes I have to stop the car for what appears to be no reason because she goes, "Stop! Quick!" And when I see the pictures, I realize why we had to stop.
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