A Word With You

I spent my seventh through tenth grade in a small town in Illinois. So I went to junior high there and my first two years of high school. And I hadn't seen my friends from there for 28 years! I was speaking in a city not too far from that town, and one of those old friends called and said, "Do you have time to get together with us before you go speak?" Well, we did. And after we figured out who ev...

Every New York television station you turned to had the same bold graphic that just said Blizzard of '96. I still remember it. It was barely 1996; we were only six days into the new year when anywhere between 20 to 30 inches of snow unloaded on the Metropolitan New York area. It was like a mega-ton snow bomb. Everything was shut down...bridges, the city. City workers were told not to come in. Some...

Not long ago there were pictures all over the news of these spectacular colors painting a breathtaking scene in the night sky. It was the "northern lights," also known to scientists as the aurora borealis. Now, I'll tell you what! It's worth checking out that view any time you can or at least those pictures. I guess the approach of solar flares from the sun's turbulence sometimes just adds a whole...

A Pope's visit to Cuba is not an everyday thing by any means. Pope Francis more recently visited. When Pope John Paul II made the very first visit in 1998, he saw a very different Cuba than Pope Francis saw. All visits captured the attention of the entire world. The 1998 visit was unprecedented. Here was one of the world's last totally Communist countries - an officially atheist state - welcoming...

At first, they were frightened, even bruised faces appearing on Iraqi TV. Early in the Iraq War, there were seven American soldiers and pilots who had been captured by Saddam Hussein's forces and then they were paraded on television for all the world to see. After that, none of us could be sure whether they were hurt or healthy, or dead or alive. Since then, in many wars, there have been too many...

Most of the courtrooms I've been exposed to are on TV. But there was a moment in a courtroom I will never forget. It began when we learned the whereabouts of a young Native American friend we had been trying to locate for a while. Let's call her Cathy. We learned, almost miraculously, that after a dark time away from God, Cathy was in jail in Nebraska. We got that word on Friday as I was leaving M...

We were sitting on the runway at O'Hare Airport for a long time, in an airplane that is. I thought we were on our way when we left the gate. I said to myself "Okay, in a couple of minutes we'll be in the air and on our way." And then they routed us across the backside of O'Hare, and I saw some lovely storage facilities. We finally ended up in a long, long line of aircraft. I've got a little proble...

Now there are happy video tape recordings. You know, audio recordings of our kids when they were little before their voices changed, Karen and I giving our vows to each other at our wedding. And then, there are not so happy tapes. Like the ones of former President Richard Nixon years ago, after the Watergate scandal. The accusations flew back and forth without any fatal damage until an aid testifi...

Years ago I had some friends who lived near a heavy industrial area where the mills filled the air with a shall we say very distinctive aroma; well, actually, smell would be a better word for it. It was sort of a sulfur-like, rotten eggs type of odor. When you first went there, you would sniff and you'd go, "What is that?" And the people who lived there would say, "What's what?" See, they'd lived...

I once spoke for a large youth conference at one of the East Coast's most popular vacation spots: Ocean City, Maryland. The boardwalk, the hotels, the restaurants, the amusements seem to stretch for miles there. My friend told me he'd been coming to Ocean City since the 1970s, when most of what I was seeing wasn't there. Not that many folks used to come to Ocean City at all. I asked my friend what...

Back in my old school days, we used to do an experiment in science class. When I told my then teenage sons about this, they were very surprised to find out that there was a science class when I was in school! But there was and we used to dissect the triceratops and the tyrannosauruses. There was this little experiment we would do for real. Maybe you remember it. There's this little hand crank. You...

There was a young man we knew who was pretty distraught over a death in his family. He acted it out by deciding to just delete a bunch of Facebook friends. And think we all know someone that has been "deleted" or "canceled." It's just the world we live in today and it hurts! You can delete a relationship with a stroke of your finger. Sometimes it can be really brutal. People have been deleting oth...

Some people have wall-to-wall carpet. Me? I have a wall-to-wall schedule. Maybe you do too. It was like that even when I had to take my daughter to college years ago. She had just returned from a mission trip to Manila and so had I. We had one day to get her to Chicago for college. Not only did we have to get her to school that day, but on that particular Friday, I had to produce some of these rad...

So there have been several Supermen, well, you know, men who have played Superman over the years. From TV to all the movies. The first one was George Reeves, on the TV show many years ago. Some supermen have had tragic lives. George Reeves who played Superman from 1951 to 1958 actually committed suicide after his career had stalled. He was forever typecast as Superman. Then another actor, Christop...

Hundreds of thousands of Kurdish people had fled Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, and they were spread over miles of mountainside on the Turkish border. Christian agencies were flooding in with food, medical help and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But most of the Christian workers connected with the people there only from trucks and distribution points, where they handed out food and bl...

If you've always been skinny, you can just give it up because you're not going to understand what I'm about to say. But if you're like me and you've battled over that scale your whole life, if you've ever been overweight, you'll probably understand this. Once you've battled that, you always tend to think of yourself as overweight even if you're not any more. Now, I've managed to lose some of it. O...

If you've ever spent a lot of time in the city, you may have had the experience of waiting for a bus. You've got a couple of packages, it's cold, some weird people are starting to cruise by for the second time, and suddenly you see the dim outline of a bus on the horizon. Biblically "your heart leapeth within you" as you see the bus approaching. Finally it gets close enough for you to read the sig...

My son was a shrewd and wise baseball card collector. There are certain ones he kept really really well in these plastic folders. He would let anybody get near them. Why? Well, he said, "Dad when they're in mint condition they're really the most valuable and then they're really rare. And rare means valuable." You know, there's a word that's becoming increasingly rare in our societies and our cultu...

When you have three children, of course only one can be the first, and that one becomes to the others the measuring stick for all privileges, all fairness, and all comparisons. Now, in our family, our daughter is the oldest. The three kids would be getting along perfectly one day, and then suddenly the boys would learn about something their big sister got. Then I would hear the march of determined...

Throughout military history, the Army Rangers have been there in some of the most dramatic, most heroic combat events, like scaling the cliffs at Normandy Beach on D-Day. They were climbing right into the face of enemy fire. It's no surprise that the Rangers played a part, along with other Special Forces, in the rescue of that Iraqi prisoner of war years ago, Jessica Lynch, during Operation Iraqi...

When my grandson was playing Upward basketball as a boy I told him about Jeremy Lin who at that time was lighting up the scoreboard for the New York Knicks. Now, he was not your typical professional basketball star, that's for sure. He was a Harvard grad. He was Asian-American. He was refreshingly humble. Oh, and you could tell that he unashamedly loved Jesus. I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have...

There was a miracle in the wildfire that night on an Indian reservation where we have many dear friends. We watched the news with growing concern that summer - and with intensifying prayer - as the path of that fire's destruction grew steadily. We learned that some of our kind of unofficial "family" there had their church and some loved ones in a town that was surrounded by the flames. And they to...

When my son was a teenager he used to read the Sunday cartoons, and I heard him laughing out loud one day. He called out to me, "Hey, Dad, come here. They got this one right!" He could really relate to this particular cartoon, and knowing that this was something that would help my intellectual development, he let me read it. There's a young man standing at his locker in school and he says, "Could...

It's interesting when your kids become parents they start to tell you how you parented. You get a review whether you solicited it or not. Sometimes Karen and I found it hilarious. Sometimes convicting. Sometimes affirming. Sometimes even touching. An observation from our oldest son really got to me. He said, "There's something you guys did that made a difference in the way we turned out." Well, I...

It was a 2004 American League Championship Series. I remember it because my Yankees were in it. One big reason the Boston Red Sox triumphed over my New York Yankees (Boo!) was a veteran pitcher named Curt Schilling. He was selected to pitch the opening game in the New York series, and although he had torn an ankle tendon in his previous start, he thought he could gut it out. He was wrong. Losing t...