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Oh, it was a great time to be traveling out East! I got to be there at cherry blossom time this year. I was where those pink beauties were popping out everywhere we were traveling. One of the gals on the Weather Channel was broadcasting from Washington, DC, and she had this beautiful backdrop of these exploding cherry blossoms at the Jefferson Memorial.
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I remember the night I was asked to speak at an adult couples thing at our church. And they did this auction sort of deal; in fact it was sort of a "Let's Make a Deal" game. I think some people call it a White Elephant Auction or something. It's the kind of game where you go to your garage and you get something you really want to throw away, and then you wrap it up in real pretty paper and you bring it to the auction. And what happens is this: One person goes up and has to pick one of those packages, and they open it and then they have it. From that point on everyone can either take an unwrapped package and take their chances on that, or they can trade for something that's already been unwrapped that looks interesting.
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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.
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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.
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I was on an airplane flight and I overheard a conversation in the seats behind me. Okay, I eavesdropped on the conversation behind me. All right! In any case, there was this little boy flying with his Dad and he was full of questions...the little boy that is. He said, "Daddy, what are all those lights for? Daddy, why did part of the wing go down? Daddy, why is it called Lake Erie?" See, the pilot told us the name of it, but he didn't necessarily tell us why.
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One severe weather system behind us, another one coming. Yeah, well, that's like spring living in Tornado Alley. Uh-huh... You know, I can look at our children and know that they are going to have, when those warnings go up, probably young children in bed with them before the night is over. And I can probably count on the fact that l will be waking up during the night to the annoying alarm on our weather radio and that robotic voice of NOAA radio. But that's OK. There's a reason all those weather guys strongly urge you to have one of those life-saving radios. And why I strongly urge me to respond when the warning comes!
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Over the years in campus ministry, I always put on a special push to reach football players, because, you know, they're pretty strategic people on campus. And there was one event that football players always enjoyed. We called it "The Great Cheerleader Put-On." What we would do is we'd invite in four cheerleaders and then four football players to be their coaches. You say, "What? Coaches for what?" Well, we brought in most of the pieces of football gear: shoulder pads, knee pads, hip pads, helmet. And then we wanted to see which cheerleader could get fully dressed in a football uniform first.
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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.
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Twice in a little over a year we were stunned by news of major earthquakes, and the images we won't soon forget. But they were in two very different parts of the world. The first one was in Haiti. When the ground was finished shaking...well, you remember. The homes, the businesses, even their President's palace were in total rubble. The second quake hit Japan, and for those areas that didn't get the tsunami—just got hit by the quake—most of their homes and businesses were left standing. What's the difference? The materials their structures were made of. You know, a quake has a way of exposing the strength or the weakness of what you're building on.
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Teenage boys aren't known primarily for their neatness and organization, as you probably know. When my oldest son was that creature called "a teenage boy," he had one area that defied the messy stereotype. I said just one area, right? It was his baseball card collection.
Oh, everything else may have been in a state of total chaos, but oh not the baseball cards. They were neatly put away in plastic holders, filed in notebooks, categorized. Why? Well, as he said, "Dad, they're only valuable if they're in mint condition. I want to keep these cards in mint condition."
