On The Road Again

Well hello friends, this is Dick Foss with Stories from the Road. I haven't been around to do podcasts for quite a while. I actually have been around but I haven't done podcasts because of a project that I've been working on but I'm back now and I'm sitting on my back porch. That sound you hear, I'm going to pause, maybe you can hear it. That's a brisk fall wind. It is mid-October and the view is spectacular. The greens carpeting the ground still and the gold of those trees. Some of it ban go yellow. A few reds here in there is just spectacular. It's the marking of the season, isn't it? Well the reason that I haven't done many podcasts this summer and I've done a couple but I haven't done very many is that we've been working to wrap up a project that started a year ago. Here's the backstory. This won't be a long podcast but here's the backstory. Is that several years ago? Some folks asked, do you have another book in you? Ruth and I had written a book that was published in 2017. Random House is called Known Finding Deep Friendships in the shallow world and you know I've read parts of it to you on this podcast but we were thinking about another one and we were just stuck and we had a lot of ideas. We were just stuck in it. A course of conversation with family. One of our family members said, pop, here's the deal. You're an okay writer. People read it and so forth. I'm not a Tim Keller. I'm not a Max Locato or a batterson or you know any of those folks who naturally write even though it's work probably, not probably it is work. But he said, you're sweet spot of speaking and within that you're sweet spot of storytelling. When he said that, something resonated in my heart. As you know, I love stories. That's why this website and podcast is called Stories from the Road. But since our brain is built for story, it's how we remember, it's how we pass values on generationally. It's set around the dinner table over camp fires, whatever. It's got all of these pieces to it. And our own stories are the one place in our lives. We always get an A plus because no one else has our story. It's just us. And so he said, I think that you should do a few events that would be just telling stories with a live audience. Long story short, we did that a year ago this past week in Washington DC. The place called Capital Turnaround. For an hour and 40 minutes, just told stories. We recorded it both audio and video with the idea of putting out an audiobook. And I'm just here to announce that in a few weeks, hopefully, an audiobook called Stories I Love to Tell to give us hope to help us do hard things and to bring us back together again. That book will be released on Audible. And just as a point of reference, some of these stories have deep profound spiritual significance and some of them are just fun stories. So for this podcast, I just wanted to give you just a little piece of the book. Part of the evening was spent telling stories about children and in particular our children. And these are a couple of funny ones, if I can, yeah, funny ones. And here they are. Chapter three. He was a stranger and I took him in. Just for fun, here are a few stories about our own kids. But kids are so cool. I had this thought when I was thinking about Anna and all the, you know, 400 kids over 52 years. That's a lot of table conversation. That's a lot. I mean, because kids say just funny things. I mean, you know this. Very few filters. They just boom. They just say whatever it is. We have four kids in Eric or eldest happens to be here tonight, right there. In Eric, when you were 10, we were driving across town in Urbana, Illinois. We were passers back in the late 60s and into the 70s. And I turned to you. And I said, so, Erica, what do you want to be when you grow up? And you just looked at me and said, I don't know, Dad, what do you want to be? And I'm saying, where did she get that smart mouth? I mean, her mother's very kind. I can't figure out where she got that smart mouth. And then later Chris, who is, he's our youngest, all of our, all of our children are now in their 50s. And Chris is four years old or something. He walks into the front room. And, and kids, you know, sometimes you don't know what you know. And he, he just walks into the front room. He says, Dad, I want you to help me with my numbers. I said, okay, what do you want to do? He said, I want to count to 10. I said, okay, I said, what's two plus three? Look at his hand. I said, five. I said, what's five plus two? I said, seven. I said, what's, you know, whatever the number was. And then I said, what's 10 plus two? And he looked at his hands, said, I can't tell you that. I said, how come? He said, well, because I'd have to have 12 fingers to tell you that. I said, my kid, the rocket scientist, you know, you didn't know how much he knows. And I'll never forget, I was in my tennis season as a young man. You know, you go, sometimes you are the weights and sometimes you're the running thing and then you break something and then you, it was my tennis season. And I walked in one day and I, I was sweaty from playing tennis and I put my tennis racket down and we had this split level house. And I look up in Jenny who's like three is at the top of the stairs. And as I put my tennis racket down, I hear her say, catch me, daddy. And I whirl and she's in the air. And she hits me in the chest and I grabbed her and just held her close. And I just said to her, Jenny, don't do that. Daddy could drop you. And she just put her face right up against my sweaty face and said, oh no, you're my daddy. I'm going, yeah. And then there was the day I came home. And Susanna, our youngest daughter was there. And she, she had a cat, a little white cat. And she was actually lying on the floor by the washing machine in the laundry room. And she had something there. And I said, so what's going on? She said, nothing. Get dead, give away. She said, stand up. And when she stood up out from under her shirt, came the head of a little white kitten. Somebody had been giving away kittens outside Safeway. And mother was complicit in that. And I said, Susanna, you know the rule, no cats. And it isn't that I hate cats. They're just not my favorite. I'm a dog guy. Dogs know that you're there and you're the master. Cats consider you staff. I'm just putting that. And so I just, I just said, I said Susanna, you know the rule, no cats. And she looked at me, she has big brown eyes. She just said, he was a stranger and I took him in. Don't you like hate it when they quote scripture to you? You know, every, at the last time you're going to study school. And I, whatever. Every time I tell those, every time I hear those, I just chuckle because it's like, it's like, I'm there again. And they are there again. And their personalities have not changed. That, you know, they've added years to their lives as we all have, but they still have that kind of effervescence and joy and spontaneity. And we just love being with them. And I think we need to understand or hear again what it means to take in a stranger. If I can just hitchhike on Susanna's quote, there is a word in the scriptures for hospitality. And literally it's two words put together and it's love of strangers, love of people who aren't like us, engaging people who are different than we are. And I have found that in my life that if I, if I see strangers as strangers, then there'll always be distance, there'll always be judgment, there'll always be potential threat if you will. Because if I haven't heard your story, I don't understand why you think the way you do or why you respond the way you do or what your values are. I don't. So I get a choice. I think there's a spectrum that if I see strangers, people I don't know as strangers, not to be engaged then or even as a threat. One end of that spectrum is the threat. If I see them as designed in the image of God, if I see them as potentially walking books to be read, then then they are gifts. So I can choose, I guess. Well, I know I can choose that I can live under fear and threat on the one end or I can see people as potential gifts. And if that's true every day is Christmas. So here's a stranger and I took him in and apparently it applies to the little white cats as well. I think I've come to peace with that along the way. Well, that's it for now except to say that if you want a heads up or an alert when that book stories I love to tell, to give us hope, to help us do hard things and to bring us back together again. If you'd like a heads up on when that's being released unaudible, just go to the website thickfoath.com and you can leave your email address and we'll ping you. No obligation at all on your part but we'll just ping you and let you know when it's going to happen. That's it for now signing off. Heading for a road trip actually with adult children going across the country because we did those storytelling evenings. Oh yeah, this is a PS. The storytelling, we did that first one in Washington, DC. Then we did one here in Fort Collins, Colorado adjacent to Colorado State University. And a couple of weeks ago in Charlottesville, Virginia had the privilege of sharing stories with 330 University of Virginia students. It was a wonderful moment, totally selfish on my, but it was just a wonderful evening. And we're off now to Urbana, Illinois, 135 miles south of Chicago home of the University of Illinois and the place that grounded us as a couple helped shape us when we were there for a dozen years doing a church plant working with university students trying to figure out life. Lots of you say, well, that's me. I'm trying to figure out life, well, I'm 82 years old still working on the edges at least. But anyway, we're going home in a very real sense to be with some friends in a few days. And hopefully each of those evenings that I'm speaking about storytelling evenings will be a volume, will be a book, but for now we just have the one being released in a few weeks hopefully. That's it. I'm out. Now I got to run. God bless. Bye bye. Are you really buying a car online on Auto Trader right now? Really? At a playground? Yeah, really. Look at these listings from dealers. Wow. Your search can really get that specific. Really? And you just put in your info and boom. Cars in your budget. Mom needs a second, honey. You can really have it delivered? Really? Or I can pick it up at the dealership. One sec, sweetie. Mommy's buying a car. Mommy's buying a car. I think kid is walking up the slide. Kyle, again, really? Auto Trader. Buy your car online. Really?