I was a little stunned when I heard that we were celebrating not long ago the 20-year anniversary of the first Gulf War. Man, time flies! And it brought back to my memory an interview with a soldier who was there as they were about to go to war from Kuwait and into Iraq. She said, "You know, we had gotten training when we were in boot camp in chemical warfare." And she said, "We kind of dozed off, and you know, didn't take notes, threw paper wads, whatever. It was just boring stuff." She said, "Now they're covering chemical warfare again, because we're about to go into Iraq where they have them." She said, "We're taking notes, we're asking questions, we're staying late after class." I thought, "Wow! What a big difference; same material, same information." What was different? All of a sudden soldiers knew that their life could depend on what they were learning, and they were going to need it, not just know it.
Up in Maine, where the roads run out, it's logging country. Now, the loggers will tell you that once you get a tree down, the next challenge is getting that big, old log where it's supposed to go to the mill. The answer? Well, you're not going to carry it there probably. So, you use natural power. They float those logs right down the river, until of course; too many logs decide to have a meeting in one place. And they call that a log jam. Suddenly nothing's moving. The answer? Explosive power. Dynamite breaks that jam and gets things moving again. Well, that's how real life log jams are. It takes something explosive to get them going.
When I'm on a plane I usually don't have much time for looking out the window; I usually have a lot of work to take with me. But one night I caught a view that was very distracting. My son happened to be with me on this trip, so I pointed it out to him. There was literally a line in the sky. On one side there was the glow of the setting sun. It was day in that half of the sky. The other side was pitch black, and everything on that side, of course, was like very night. Now, I don't know all the scientific explanations for this; I'm not going to get into the meteorology. I just know what I saw. I poked my son, I got his headphones off his head so he knew what I was saying, and I pointed excitedly toward that startling contrast. And I said, "Look! It's the line between night and day!"
You actually didn't have to wait for the Fourth of July to have fireworks at our house. You just had to be one of my sons declining an assignment with certain explosive words, "Nah, that's woman's work!" Oh, now my wife and daughter are nowhere near being women's libbers, but they had a real problem with that idea that there are certain jobs that a man is above. Actually, I have a problem with that idea. Actually, I think God has a problem with it.
When our kids were living at home I couldn't believe people actually paid to go to the circus. We had a circus right there! It was free - a three-ring circus. Now the most exciting issue was usually, "What am I going to wear today?" And then that cry by various experiments with different combinations until some outfit finally looks right. Does that sound familiar? Of course it's always punctuated by these discussions of who's wearing whose shirt, or whose pants, or whatever. Actually, whether you go to school or to work, what to wear is kind of a challenging choice. Unless of course you're one of the lucky ones; you just wear a uniform. You don't have any decision to make; somebody else made it for you. You have to consider the weather, and what season it is, and what mood you're in, and what people you're going to see, and do the colors match, which is hopeless for me. Well, in the process, you might overlook the one item you have to wear to school or to work every day.
It happens a lot in sports - especially when there's one of those games they like to call "The Big Game." Two rivals go at it in a game that's really important in the standings, and one team blows out the other team with this huge, lopsided victory. You can almost predict what's going to happen to the winning team in their next game, even if they play some pitiful team that loses a lot more than they win. The guys who totally dominated their rivals in the Big Game may very well lose the little game that follows. It happens a lot. You win big and then, for some reason, you lose big.
It had been one of the architectural glories of a historic city in England; a majestic cathedral, now deeply scarred by the relentless German bombings of World War II. Slowly but surely, it was being restored, except for the statue that had welcomed people to the cathedral for so many years. It was actually a statue of Jesus with outstretched hands. The inscription on its base was a compelling invitation, "Come unto Me." Sadly, the statue had been destroyed by the bombing. A group of German medical students decided that they would make it their mission to rebuild that statue. Piece by piece, it began to come together. But restoring the hands? Well, that one was was hopeless. They'd been smashed to powder. What were the rebuilders to do? They ended up having a great idea. The statue of Jesus now stands without hands and an inscription that simply says, "Christ has no hands but ours."
Many years ago, one of the 20th Century's great Christian leaders, Peter Deyneka, was immigrating to America on a long Atlantic voyage with only a few coins in his pocket. When he got hungry, he reached into this little bag he'd brought with him to eat the same thing every meal - a few dry crusts of bread and some water. He was pretty hungry when his ship finally docked in New York; not to mention pretty sick of bread crusts. That's when he realized something that he'd wished he had understood at the beginning of the voyage - three full meals a day had been included in his fare. They were all included in his ticket!
A close friend of ours was in China recently on family business. In the process, he had a wonderful opportunity to worship with some Chinese believers in a Sunday church service. It was a not-to-be-forgotten experience. They pointed him to something he didn't know existed in China - a Christian bookstore. It was the only one in this large city, and it's hard to find, and it's stuffed into this very small space on the fourth floor of a nondescript building - but it's a Christian bookstore in China. Our friend commented in an e-mail about the small number of Christian books that were available there in Chinese. In addition to books, they also had a small selection of Christian bookmarks and refrigerator magnets with verses or inspirational thoughts on them. There was one fridge magnet that our friend absolutely could not, and cannot, get out of his mind. Here in the midst of this great city in this great land where Christians have paid such a price to follow Jesus was a magnet that simply said, "Pray for America." The only comment our friend had was this: "How humbling." I guess.
Several years ago, there was a blockbuster movie called "Independence Day." From what I heard, it wasn't about Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. It was about an alien invasion of Planet Earth. There's a unique concept. As this alien force moves across the world, the American military throws its most sophisticated weapons at it. They can't stop it. Even the White House gets destroyed and the President barely escapes with his life. Other countries try to resist with their military. No one's even close to a match with this invading force. Well, something very interesting happens. The world's leaders begin to wake up to the fact that suddenly they all have a common enemy and it isn't each other anymore. Allies and enemies begin to work together to defeat their enemy, and sure enough, they win big!
Comments (4) 
