One morning at the rec center I’d stepped onto the elliptical, positioned my ear buds, and pushed up the volume on my phone. Only faint music. I cranked up the volume again. Not much more. Then the twenty-something man on the machine next to me pointed to my cord. “Not plugged in.”     
     Oops. I shoved it in, and the music blared into my ears from what had shuffled onto my playlist - a cover of an old Mr. Rogers song. Second embarrassment - the guy next to me had heard it all. I peeked up at him, and he laughed. “Hey, I was into it!”     
     I gave him a sheepish grin and began striding on the elliptical. The warmth of the song’s lyrics swept over me as they had when my kids were little and we watched Mr. Rogers on TV. Like a good father, Mr. Rogers reminded me that I’m growing inside. That I can make a snappy new day. That he has ideas for me. That each day he’ll have things to talk about, and I will, too.
​     And a thought crashed into my head: these words were not only from Mr. Rogers, they were from my heavenly Father. I’m growing inside. We have things to talk about. He has ideas for me. What a message I’d have missed if I hadn’t gone beyond the music and plugged into the spiritual realm.
     I left the rec center to make a snappy new day.
***
​     To hear the B.J. Thomas version of “It’s a Good Feeling,” click here.

     Trust me, like lilies bursting through murky waters to bloom in the sunshine, strength can blossom out of weakness.     
     Take, for instance, the life of Claude Monet. After cataracts nearly blinded him and he could no longer discern color, the French impressionist painter created some of his best loved works. He yearned to capture his waterlily ponds on canvas, but they appeared gray to him. Therefore, Monet relied on the labels on his paint tubes to know which to spread onto his palette. Through his perseverance, the artist’s shimmering pond paintings reflect not only the sky, they reflect a man who believed vivid beauty exists even when he could no longer see it.     
     Like Monet, I’ve been plagued with vision problems - near and far sightedness that forced me into lenses as thick as Coke bottles, astigmatism that distorted images, cataracts that threatened to turn everything dark. Surgeries improved my sight, but left it changing throughout the day - something not always easy to live with.     
     Yet my delight in nature grew out of this weakness. I remember when I put on my first pair of glasses and peered at tree bark. Shocking - how intricate! Years later, I still love photographing the world’s complexity, something I appreciate because it was once only a blur.      
     So what’s your weakness? Has it developed a strength in you? Don’t let that weakness overcome you. Search for the backbone of character and strength it develops in you.    
​     Because nothing in this life has to be wasted. Not even handicaps.

     First Tony’s parents divorced, then his mother underwent shock therapy. He begged his mom to set aside part of her alimony money for food, but she burned it up in cigarettes.
     Our friend Tony decided that if he was going to make it, “I had to make it on my own.” So he left home at thirteen and moved in with older guys. That dropped him into a culture of pot and alcohol.
     Yet he persisted in school, attending classes during the day and working at a Chinese restaurant at night (“I was the only white guy there.”). He graduated, married, had three kids, attended college, and joined the energy industry. Fast forward: Tony’s wife left, and he finished raising their youngest child. He remarried, welcoming his new wife’s family. Meanwhile, his expanding career moved him around fifteen countries on five continents.
    Then the bottom fell out, and Tony learned he couldn’t make it on his own. Work-related social drinking had drowned him. His greatest accomplishment occurred then when he “turned it all over to The Man, Jesus Christ,” he says. “There’s got to be a word above gratefulness to describe what I feel.”
     So how did Tony survive the odds stacked against him? As he told us about his life, I observed he never blamed others. He took responsibility. And he realized he couldn’t make it on his own.
​     That’s a wise man.

    Tony joked it was okay to tell his story
“as long as it includes that I love my God,
​rock and roll, and all people.”

     Do immigrants leech off our economy and threaten our culture? That’s what many believe. But look at my grandparents. Three of them were among the homeless, tempest-tost who knocked on Lady Liberty’s door. They arrived dirt poor, yet their descendants increased our gross national product and improved society by becoming educators, agriculturalists, pharmacists, a hospital administrator, interior designers, writers, business entrepreneurs, a therapist, a pianist, a pastor, a computer specialist, a photographer, a missionary, and an award-winning college baseball coach (can’t get much more American than that). They weren’t a drain on our country; they were a gain.
      Yet some claim that the new wave of immigrants are alien riffraff bottom feeding off our economy. Not according to recent studies:
     * Crime? Immigrants, including undocumented ones, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, according to the Cato Institute.  It’s no surprise then that states with larger shares of undocumented immigrants often have lower crime rates, as the journal “Criminology” reported.
     * Economics? Both authorized and unauthorized immigration boosts wages and reduces unemployment for native-born Americans. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reported that the children of immigrants are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population.”
     Even destitute refugees don’t suck our coffers empty. A report commissioned by President Trump determined that refugees brought in $63 billion more in tax revenue during the past decade than they cost the government.
     So let’s drop the fear hysteria. It’s not only humanitarian to welcome these newcomers, it enhances our country because they are law-abiding, economic engines.
​     Immigrants aren’t costly, they’re priceless.

     Question: Besides being pictured on nickels, what do Thomas Jefferson and this unknown Native American have in common?
    Answer: They each believed that all men are created equal with the right to choose their own leaders. And here’s the kicker: Jefferson, who incorporated these beliefs into our Declaration of Independence, adopted them from Native American culture, according to historian Tom Embert Phillips.
     Phillips, a Chickasaw artist and student of American Indians, writes that Jefferson adopted these principles from John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, where Locke states that these liberties are part of the “natural law” in Native American culture.
     “Two basic concepts of democratic government - that all men are created in some respect equal with inherent human rights, and that the concept of just power derives from the consent of the people…were inspired directly by the Native American Indians,” Phillips says.
     So as we wave the red, white, and blue on this Fourth of July, let’s remember that these liberties came into our national DNA through the example of the first Americans, not the transplanted ones. And we ought to mourn that those first Americans lost those freedoms when the transplanted Americans claimed their land, rounded them up, and forced them onto reservations.
​     Not a nickel’s worth of liberty and justice went to them.