A Word With You

They break in and say it's breaking news. More often than not, it's heartbreaking news. We just get numbers that just quantify a lot of hurt in a lot of lives. I mean, there's jobs lost, and homes lost, and loved ones lost, record numbers living in poverty, and struggling families, and devastating disasters, and always, always, people dying. I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You to...

It pays to book your airline reservations in advance. You've got to get that two week or three week in advance fare. I missed booking one of those fares 14 days in advance before! I booked 13 days in advance. Well that cost me a chunk more money. I put off booking my flight waiting for all my plans to come together, and it cost me. The longer you wait, the more it costs. I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I w...

Ken really felt he got a promotion when he left the business world to enter full-time Christian ministry, and I think he did. But it wasn't so much because of the salary. Oh, I'm sure you thought it was because of the great money that he would make in Christian ministry. No, it wasn't because of the great benefits, but his job before had been handling consumer complaints. Now, he was definitely a...

It was Fall, and my wife and I were making our annual pilgrimage to go "Falling" in northwest New Jersey. We had our cider, we had our donuts and we saw the great autumn art show. We had kinda strolled along looking at everything and now we were in a hurry to get home. I wasn't happy when I came over the hill and saw bumper-to-bumper. I was forced to do something I can't ever remember doing on tha...

Our friend Betty had an unusual little personal business: she put on birthday parties for kids. She brought a pony for the children to ride, and a petting zoo of baby animals, including some little yellow chicks...which you don't ride. Actually she would rescue those chicks from a company whose business is chicken. They've told her that they have to remove any chicks that are speckled or spotted,...

I was a pretty little guy, and my dad thought I should meet Paul Bunyan. You know, the legendary giant lumberjack. We were vacationing in Minnesota and there was this tourist attraction there, in Brainerd. Inside was this huge animated figure of Paul Bunyan. I mean, he's massive! He's sitting down with his giant ax and his giant ox next to him and a little log cabin at his feet. My dad paid for ou...

As kind of a life-long, off-and-on dieter, oh, how well I know the things we do to maintain or lose weight. And sometimes, I mean, you can't just have water, fruit, and lettuce all the time. Maybe throw in a little celery for dessert. You can lose weight that way, but you know what? You can't keep that going. What you have to do, I've learned, is you have to make friends with your metabolism. And...

At Disneyland or Disney World there's this little boat ride that goes through this long canal where you're surrounded by animated dolls from all over the world. French children, Eskimo children, Arab children, Indian children. You get the idea. And they are all singing to you It's a Small World After All. Don't you want to sing it with me? Probably not. You say, "monotonous lyrics." You hear it ab...

Now don't accuse frogs of being dumb. Not that you ever would. I mean, I've been told that if you take a frog and you put him in a pot of boiling water (which, why would you do that?) he'll be smart enough to jump out. He knows he's going to die there. On the other hand, if you put that frog in some lukewarm water, he's going to start swimming around in there. He's going to go, "Oh, it's cool in t...

Voicemail I guess is better than nothing. It doesn't respond, it records. One friend captured how I feel in what he recorded tongue-in-cheek. You call, then you know, you get the little click and you hear the friend's voice saying, "In a world of cold and uncaring humans, isn't it refreshing to be greeted by a warm and friendly voicemail?" No! You just can't automate a personal response! I'm Ron H...

When I was little, my bicycle and I spent a lot of time together. You would see this little fat guy chugging all over town; that was my way to get around. There was only one thing that compromised my total enjoyment of biking - the dog on the corner. Yeah, since our street ended right after our house and our house was just beyond the corner, there was just no other way to approach our house. So, o...

Have you ever been to the mall and seen one of those mall walkers? They're going at a steady clip, getting their mile or their three miles for the day. One of those mall walkers actually made the national news a few years back. He was power walking, which means "Don't get in my way! I am coming fast." He must have looked away for a moment, because he walked full-speed into a metal pole in the midd...

When I used to go places with my two sons, people would often say, "And who are these young men?" And I'd say, "Oh, these are my bodyguards." We'd all get a good laugh at that! Of course, you know, these guys of ours grew up pretty fast, and it was believable that they could be my bodyguards. Actually, if I really felt that I needed one, well I would look to, you know, a professional wrestler or g...

Dino and Nanette are dear Navajo friends of ours and they became Mr. and Mrs.! Oh, we wanted to be at their wedding because they are two very special friends, very special Native American Christian leaders. Now this was years ago but we couldn't be there, but our son attended, and that afternoon he described the wedding to us, as well as any man can describe a wedding. I choked up when I heard abo...

It had been a frozen and freezing winter in New England and Canada. They got walloped with a mega ice-storm that left two inches of ice on everything. In Montreal, for example, power lines and poles and trees just collapsed under the weight of the ice, and thousands of people were without power for days; which means many were without heat in the middle of a Montreal winter. In one neighborhood, on...

Missy hated suitcases. Our Shih Tzu puppy - she had great radar. I should explain that Missy had multiple masters. There was our youngest son, who was her first master. He lived in Arizona and Missy only got to see him occasionally. But he was still an important person in her life. Then there was my sister-in-law who often picked up Missy's care where my son left off. And then our daughter also re...

Our family was driving down the Interstate and I saw this familiar bumper sticker. I said, "Oh, that's nice." And then I began to pass the car. I could tell from behind, that it was obviously a mother and a child in the front seat. But the significance of the message on the bumper didn't hit me until I pulled alongside. I glanced over and it was obvious that the child had an evident disability, an...

If you've flown commercially a lot. Well you've got to get used to the little presentation by the flight attendant and it can kind of get boring. Your attention might drift a little bit. There was this one flight - we had a flight attendant who kept throwing in humorous surprises and fresh ways of saying things, everyone was listening to him. For example he said, "Now, we're preparing for landing...

I should have realized I was never going to make it as a tennis player. Oh, I played the most with my son. And, I think I had a decent serve for a beginner. But I had trouble returning my son's shots. Now, I think you'll agree that is a basic skill for succeeding in tennis. You do have to get it back to the other guy. For example: volleyball - you lose the point when you can't return the shot; pin...

When you eat in a hurry you sometimes leave some traces of the meal on your face, and you sort of wear your food. There are some crumbs maybe, or some tomato sauce, or this little spot of chocolate. Of course, you don't know it. Now I have to eat on the run a lot of times, and that means sometimes you might be able to tell. Of course, I don't mean to carry it around with me. I mean, you know, my w...

Forgetting can get you into a lot of trouble. Like forgetting someone's name, or maybe forgetting an appointment, or maybe you forgot your homework. Or, "The dog ate it." Yeah, uh-huh, or you wouldn't want to forget your wedding anniversary. Oh, no... No, that can cause trouble. But forgetting is a basic skill for people who want to be emotionally free and spiritually alive. Oh, some kinds of forg...

I had a busy schedule of speaking in the Chicago area that week. But I had one night free. It happened to be during what they call Founder's Week at Moody Bible Institute. That's the annual conference that commemorates the birthday of the founder, D.L. Moody. When I heard that one of my favorite speakers was there that night, I told my wife I wanted to attend. And we did, along with some of our mi...

Whether you're in your car, or in your home, or almost anywhere you are right now, I think you probably have available to you what you're going to need for our next few minutes. Yeah, because you're either near one or you might even carry one. Now, some people use this object too much, other people could afford to use it a little more. Maybe you've guessed what it is by now. Yep, it's a mirror, an...

Now, I've had a chance to see gridlock a lot in New York City. Vehicles choking at every intersection and literally nothing can move. I even saw gridlock in a grocery store. The weatherman had forecast a huge snowstorm for our area which was supposed to begin during the night. Well I stopped by the store late that evening (dumb!) and I ended up trying to find the end of the line for the cash regis...

Remember the good old days when we used to have that phone that rang a lot of times in the house and somebody had to get to it first? Telephone etiquette has changed a lot with cell phones but I wonder sometimes if people ever learned telephone etiquette. You know you kind of cringe when a child answers the phone. You never know if they're going to hang up, or if they're going to yell into the pho...