Catastrophe!

 

Now, That’s Talent!

 

Stories of My Life: “What Are We Doing Over WATER?!”

I have never been good at directions. My wife, the original GPS, girl pointing straight, is the one who gives directions whenever we are driving.

I remember we were having a couple days of vacation near the Outer Banks of North Carolina one time. For some reason she was taking a little bit of a nap in the front seat, and I was driving us somewhere to sightsee. She woke up from her little nap, looked out the window, and said “Water?! What are we doing over water?!” Apparently I had taken wrong turn.

On another occasion, my wife said I was going the wrong way to somewhere. So I pulled into a driveway to back up and go the other direction. I backed up, but the wrong way, and proceeded to drive the way I’d been going originally. All my wife said was, “let’s try that one more time.”

This going the wrong way or getting lost and backing up and continuing in the wrong direction happens when I think I know where to go or am simply too proud to ask her for directions. I no longer waste any brain cells on learning directions anywhere. I just ask my girl to point straight.

 

Stories of My Life: Chocolate Milk!

When I was about eight years old, my father, who was an automotive mechanic, would come home for lunch and eat his sandwich sitting in front of the TV, watching an episode of “Gunsmoke.”

My mother distinctly remembers my sitting in our booth in the kitchen as I ate my lunch. And as he was eating his lunch in his easy chair, the story line in “Gunsmoke” got especially captivating. And my dad would lean forward in his easy chair and his coveralls would kind of poke out at the back of his neck. Would Marshall Dillon win the day and shoot a couple of desperados?

As my father leaned up in his chair, he was watching how the episode would end. My mother remembers observing me finish my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, drink half of the glass of ice cold chocolate milk, and then walking and pouring the rest of my chocolate milk down the back collar of my father’s coveralls. She then watched me take my lunch plate and empty glass over to the sink as I had been taught.

As you can well imagine, my father jumped straight up, missed the ending of the “Gunsmoke” episode, and was probably thinking about ending my life. My mother, who could not help herself from laughing, intervened and saved my life.

My poor father had to take a shower before he went back to work. But if you had been there, I think you would’ve agreed, it was actually the right thing to do.

 

Stories of My Life: Life-Saving Class!

When I was in college, I took a life-saving course with about 25 other students. The Bible college I attended had a swimming pool in the basement and the young man who taught the course was not a student at the Bible college, was mean as a snake, and apparently had to teach us how to rescue drowning swimmers as community service of some sort.

I remember his telling us one night to come wearing a pair of pants over our swim suit because he was going to teach us how to use our pants as a flotation device.

He had us jump into the deep end of the pool, pull our pants off, blow them up, and then use them as a kind of buoy. My only problem was that that night I wore a pair of tight, bell-bottom jeans, and I couldn’t get mine past my ankles. I began to drown — in lifesaving class! No one noticed my predicament. I saved my own life by doggie-paddling to the side of the pool.

The instructor taught us how to rescue someone drowning when we had nothing to reach out to him with, or no rescue buoy to throw to him, but had to swim out to the drowning person and physically rescue them. He explained that a drowning person will climb on our heads and drown both of us. So he taught us to dive down when we got within 8 feet of the victim, grab them by their hips, spin them around, and come up holding them in a head lock. If they struggled or panicked and tried to climb on top of us, we should take them to the very place they did not want to go — under water — so they would give up and let us rescue them.

After the month’s worth of grouchy classes, our instructor said, “Your final exam will be next week and it will be simple. I will jump in the deep end, pretend to be a drowning victim, and your job will be to rescue me. I WILL TRY TO KILL YOU!”

Each of us, one after another, rescued the instructor. Each of us took the instructor to the bottom of the pool — whether he struggled or not. It was a glorious ending to a grueling course.

 

Stories of My Life: Declining Greek Nouns

I had the privilege of teaching New Testament Greek for about 30 years. Students would begin the class with a terrified look on their faces. And it was my joy to get them to relax, laugh at their — and my — mistakes, and have fun.

I remember one young lady whose sentence included the Greek word for “of the apostles.” You may or may not know that Greek nouns, like German and a few other languages, have gender. A noun in Greek may be masculine, feminine, or neuter. And every Greek noun has case, which refers to the form of the word showing its function. And they have number (singular or plural). Okay. Enough of the grammar lesson. Except to say that the four cases in Greek are nominative (the case for the subject of a sentence), genitive (the case usually showing possession), dative (the case often translated “to” or “for”), and accusative (which is not the case which points fingers at others, but indicates the direct object of a sentence). Whew!

So this young lady had to decline the noun apostolōn in her sentence, which meant she had to thoroughly identify its gender, number, and case. Instead of saying “masculine, plural, genitive,” she said, “masculine, plural, genitals.” Which made sense ‘cause it was a masculine noun!

 

Stories of My Life: Darth Vader Christmas Socks!

My feet are always cold. I’m not that tall, so I don’t know why my heart won’t send warm, cozy blood to my feet. But it doesn’t. Ever. We’re talking ice cold. When my coke gets warm while I”m watching a NFL game, I simply stick my foot in my drink (I use large glasses) and my coke is instantly frigid again.

So, we’re at our condo (yes, we have a condo at Hilton Head that we rent out to friends and family. And strangers who pay money) and I’m out of socks. And underwear. But the pressing need is the socks. So my wife helps me find the washing machine, load my dirty laundry in it, retrieve a laundry pod, and hit the right buttons on the washer. But I put all my socks in the washer, so my feet are bare. Then I go rummaging around my wife’s clothing bag and find . . . tada! Darth Vader socks. Which I hastently, hastedly, uh, quickly put on. Ahhh. Slightly warmer feet. I think I’ll keep them on today even though my wash will be done in a half-hour. Gonna wear them to church this morning!

 

Momics! Adult Complaints!

 

“I think we took a wrong turn back there!”

 

“And a Good Morning to You!”