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Friday, July 11, 2008

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When my airplane flight is over, it's not really over. You see, there's that closing chapter of a trip that you get to spend at baggage claim. At my home airport they have these big carousels where suitcases are dumped out and where they circle until their owners claim them. Now, my bags seem to have a knack for waiting until almost all the other bags are out, for some reason. So I just keep watching those suitcases of all shapes and sizes and conditions appear, and waiting for one I like - no, no, no. I mean, one I recognize. But there always seem to be some phantom bags there. They just keep circling and circling and circling. And since the luggage carousel is all I really have to look at, the show gets pretty boring! Yep, there goes that baggage again!

Thursday, July 10, 2008

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OK, so I fought it for a while and I lived in denial for a while. At least I have faced reality now; I have bitten the bullet. I finally broke down and got glasses - mostly for reading. I had been the 20/20 kid my whole life. I just couldn't face the fact that the world was getting blurrier and blurrier. I just thought my arms were getting shorter. But finally I couldn't hold my reading material far enough from my eyes to make things stop blurring. So, hello, glasses! And what a difference! All those little words that were fuzzing out on me suddenly look big and clear! Including what I'm looking at right now! It's amazing how clear things start to look when you're seeing them through corrective glasses!

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

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A while back, some of my ministry friends decided they would accept what some might call a challenge to your manhood. They signed up for a rigorous, two-week stress camping program that is called, euphemistically, Character Building. It is - if you make it. They usually just refer to this program in descriptive shorthand - the wilderness. For two weeks, my friend Jim climbed mountains, navigated some serious whitewater, hiked for hours at a time with a heavy backpack, ate off the land, and even endured the final exam of a solo in the wilderness where you are totally on your own for a couple of days. Well, Jim's outlook on life was different after that experience. Whenever some major stress or intimidating problem would come up, he would just smile and say the words that were on one of his favorite shirts, "I can handle it. I've been to the wilderness."

Monday, July 7, 2008

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Once upon a time, there was a heifer named Muffet. She lived on a little dairy farm in the Ozarks. So did my wife - who wasn't my wife then. She was the farmer's young daughter then, and she tells me that Muffet had a harder life than some of the other heifers, but it was her own fault. See, Muffet was a stubborn heifer. Would she stay inside the fence that was there for her protection? Oh no! She found ways to crawl through that fence. Which meant Muffet got a yoke attached to her head - basically a sturdy Y-shaped branch that made it impossible for her to get her head outside that fence. Now, it was a nuisance; a nuisance made necessary by Muffet's stubbornness. Other times, they would try to get Muffet to move, and without serious coercion, she would just plant her feet. Then there was the time she refused to stand still to be milked, and she started to charge toward the door. My wife's Mom - whose job it was to keep the cows inside that little shed - quickly slammed the shovel across the door to keep her in. Well, Muffet ran into the shovel and lost part of the cap on one of her horns. They tell me that from that day on, she went right in and stood there quietly for milking.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

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I had spoken in a church that has two morning services, and I went into that little room off the sanctuary where you meet to pray with the church leaders. But the people who were there when I went in weren't praying, they were playing - their trombones, that is. Actually, they were warming up to play in the brass section of the church's worship band. Now, there were some very interesting sounds coming from that room, in fact. I was almost afraid to go in, but I did. And I got involved in a conversation with the men behind the music. One of them had just made a minor goof in what he was practicing. Of course, how would I know - Mr. Music Dork? But that led to George telling me why he would much rather play with a band than play a solo. He said, "You know, it's so much easier when the band is there to support you." When I asked him what he meant by "support you," he said, "Well, the rest of the band sort of carries you along, and they cover up your mistakes!"

Monday, July 1, 2008

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Not long ago I was in downtown Oklahoma City, and had the privilege to visit the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing back in April 1995. I don't think any of us will ever forget the images of the day that that Federal Office Building was destroyed by a terrorist bomb. The images of that devastated building and of the frantic rescue efforts there, of a baby in a fireman's arms. It was a day of heart-wrenching tragedy and it was a day of incredible heroism, too. Literally, an entire city dropped everything to respond in whatever way that they could to this life-or-death situation. The job was clear that day: rescue the dying whatever it takes.

Monday, June 30, 2008

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My father-in-law gave my wife and her sister Grandma and Granddad's little farm house in the mountains, and so we had to do some restoring on that little special spot. And since we were able to be there only occasionally, my wife decided to plant accordingly. She said, "I'm planting perennials." Now I'm sort of horticulturally challenged, so my wife had to explain a little further. See, I grew up a city boy, and cement doesn't grow much of anything, as you know. As I'm beginning to understand better now, you can actually plant annuals or perennials. Annuals will bloom for a little while - let's say, geraniums - and then they'll be gone. Unless you replant geraniums next year, which is extra work, and hard to do when you're not there. Nope. We need perennials. So my wife planted things like crepe myrtle (that's actually the name of a plant, not some long-lost aunt), she planted azaleas, she planted honeysuckle. Now as you might guess from their name, those perennials are not going to die on you; the perennials will always be there for you! And that's what we need!

Friday, June 27, 2008

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A while back I heard a comedy routine that suggested some humorous ways to finish this sentence: "You know you're having a bad day when..." Well, I heard on the news about a man who might be a finalist for the "baddest day of the year" award, and there's nothing humorous about what happened to him. You may remember an Avianca Airlines plane that crashed on Long Island a few years ago. It was a flight from Colombia to New York. Well, this particular Colombian man was seriously injured in the crash. That is a bad day - that's a really bad day. They rushed him to the hospital where it was determined that they would have to do abdominal surgery. And when the surgeons opened him up, they found little plastic bags in his stomach full of cocaine. He was a drug courier, and he had ingested those little bags of cocaine to smuggle them into the country. So after he crashed and then was operated on, he was arrested. Now who would have ever thought he would be found out? He was.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

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If you're going to be a great coach in sports, you generally need to be a great motivator. The team rises to the level of the coach's motivation. Now, when your team is an entire nation that is under heavy attack, the coach had better be one incredible motivator. The nation was Great Britain. The time was the beginning of WWII, when the team seemed like it was losing badly and the coach was the Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He may have been the most inspiring leader of the 20th Century as he motivated his nation to make tremendous sacrifices and win a seemingly unwinnable victory. In those early days of the war, he desperately needed the cooperation of the leaders of Britain's coal industry. Their extra sacrificial efforts would be critical to keeping the war effort going. The way he did it was masterful. Churchill asked those industry and union leaders to picture the parade at the end of the war. Look at the proud British sailors who kept the sea lanes open, and the soldiers who valiantly fought the land war, and the airmen who heroically won the battle in the skies, followed by the coal miners of Britain whose work made those victories possible. Churchill said, "They will not be in military uniform, but they will have won a place in the victory parade."

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

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Let's see, there was Gilligan, the Skipper, too, the movie star, the millionaire and his wife, you know, the cast of that eternally rerunning sitcom, Gilligan's Island. You probably remember the story, they boarded the S.S. Minnow that day to take a what? A "Three hour tour." Little did they know a storm would come up and they would end up shipwrecked on some desert island, and they'd have to stay there trapped forever in rerunland. When they boarded that day, they had no idea how far they were going to go, or how long they were going to stay. Some three-hour tour!

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