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The Mississippi River flood of 1993 was a nail-biter if you had a home or business near the river in St. Louis. The flood had already done unprecedented damage up river, and St. Louis was holding their breath as the crest on the Missouri River and Mississippi Rivers rose.
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I've got to tell you, it caught me off guard; tears as I was watching the news. It was all Kevin Durant's fault. The Oklahoma City Thunder star was accepting the NBA's MVP award. Nothing you'd expect to be a tear-jerker, until he dedicated his award to his mother who was in the audience. It turns out at 21, she was a single mother, on her own with two young sons. This mountain of a man said to his Mom at that ceremony, "You made us believe. You kept us off the street, you put clothes on our backs, food on our table. When you didn't eat, you made sure we ate. You went to sleep hungry. You sacrificed for us."
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Well, as usual, during our summers with Native Americans, we had a memorable time with some of our ministry team on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico that particular year. We had a very busy time of reaching people. We did have one break, so we packed as many of us into a van as we could and drove to see this spectacular canyon.
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Sports is such an emotional thing! It's a lot of thrills, but then there's an occasional tragedy. This happened some years ago, but I still remember the death of the captain of the Boston Celtics basketball team, Reggie Lewis. He collapsed in a basketball playoff game. A team of doctors said that he had a potentially deadly heart condition and he couldn't play any more. Well, they went for a second opinion and those doctors said it wasn't so serious and he could gradually return to play. He died doing practice shooting in a gym a few months later, maybe trying to make a come back. One newscaster I heard reported it this way, "He heard what he wanted to hear."
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I love high tide! It's when you can see and hear the ocean at its maximum power. It just takes over everything. I distinctly remember one powerful moment at the Jersey shore during a summer visit. It happened to be high tide and I walked out on a jetty; these huge boulders. What an experience! Everything in front of me and behind me was just covered by this surging surf, but I was standing in the middle of those rocks and in the middle of that high tide. And something fascinating occurred to me, that the tide and the ocean and the storms had beat on that for centuries, but the rocks never moved.
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I'll tell you, even the hard-core reporters were having a hard time talking about it. Apparently, that Ground Zero Museum where the Twin Towers once stood is one powerful experience. As you walk in, you hear the last "I love you" messages people sent from the towers or from the doomed planes. It's a heart-rending walk through this nation's darkest hour I guess, and the heroism and hope that lit up that darkness.
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There's one sure way to gather a crowd at our house. In fact it just happened last night. You just walk slowly through the house with a flat, white, large, square box – "Pizza!" And you will get that Pied Piper feeling. We've noticed that these pizza boxes all say the same thing. I don't know if you've noticed that. You can go to 10 different pizza places, and they all seem to have the same slogan. "You've tried the rest; now try the best." Somebody's got to be wrong about that.
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I don't know whether or not your town has a big water tank. But if it does, I bet I can guess what it says. It probably has the name of your town on it, right? I don't have some kind of gift. I've just seen a lot of water tanks, and they all look basically the same, you know, with the name of the town or something on them.
But I saw a particular water tank on one trip that really got my attention. Actually, I saw two of them. We were driving through Virginia, and all of a sudden I looked up and here are two water tanks on a mountain overlooking this town. You can't miss them. Two tanks; each one has one word on it. One says "HOT." I'll bet you can guess what the other one says – "COLD."
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Most Americans weren't around on that D-Day 70 years ago. And even though we weren't, we should be very glad they succeeded when they hit those Normandy beaches. They stopped one of the most powerful threats to freedom in history – Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Steven Spielberg used his cinematic genius to help this generation get a little taste of what that victory cost. The movie "Saving Private Ryan" carried a pretty strong "R" rating because of the brutal D-Day violence it portrayed. I'll tell you this: Hollywood has no rating for how awful it really was.
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We have three children. My wife has had four pregnancies. At the end of the third month of her first pregnancy, she had a miscarriage. It was tough but God gave us grace to deal with it. That might be an experience you've had. We were all geared up for this new life to come, and suddenly there wasn't going to be one. When people heard that we'd experienced a miscarriage, it seemed like women came from every direction basically saying, "Me too."
