Light, Life & Increase

Shane Willard

Page 4 of 9
My dad has progressively gotten up earlier through history. When I was a kid it was 5.30, then it went to 5.15. Now he gets up at 4.15. I swear if he lives 15 more years he's going to have to eat breakfast the night before. My dad - he got in my closet. My closet opened like this you know, there's a sliding door. He put himself in my closet - on a crucifix. So I get up in the morning to choose my clothes - and there's dad. Issues!

One time dad dropped me off at junior high camp, and there were 108 of us going to junior high camp. That's two full length buses full of seventh and eighth graders. He pulled up next to the buses, and he said: son, I hope you have a really good time, I love you. I said: I love you too dad, and so he leaned over to give me a kiss, and I said: dad, not here, not in front of my friends! He said: okay buddy, have a good time. So I get on the bus, and I think everything's well. Well the whole bus is full, and next thing I know I'm towards the back of the bus, and I look up and my dad was walking onto the bus. What he had done is, he had pulled his pants up about this high. He had shorts on. He pulled his socks up like this, and he had his hips out, and he's walking funny. He grabbed the mic to the bus, and he said: this bus isn't leaving until my Shaney-Waney comes up here and gives me a kiss! So the whole bus started screaming: kiss him! Kiss him! Issues.

You say my dad was a certain way - I understand! You say: my family had tension in it - of course it did. You have a man and a woman trying to live together! Are you kidding me? Like men and women, they're just - I mean you take something like marriage; I mean the Bible has all this advice about it, like there's one place where the Bible says: a person who finds a wife, finds a good thing. There's another place where it says: he who marries doesn't sin, but he's signed up for a life of pain. So Solomon, you've got a guy with 1,000 women going: this is fantastic! You've got Paul going: why bother? Why, because men and women are just different. Even if there's basic mental health, and basically good-hearted, they're just different. Our language is different. A woman cooks a meal, and she tests it before she serves it up, and she's not real happy with it, but that's all we've got, so she serves up the meal, and she says: this is the worst meal I've ever made; and the man says: no it's not. He's trying to help. He's good-hearted.

The woman says: can you believe how much weight I've gained over the holidays? This dress makes me look fat. Doesn't this dress make me look fat? I could tell you - men have no idea what to say. If we agree with you - it's bad; if we disagree with you - we're invalidating your feelings. So we just... So we hear this, and so this good hearted man goes to the Christian book-store, and he's browsing around, and he's looking around and he sees a book: Lose Weight God's Way. He thinks: I'm helping! He brings home the diet book - of course if a woman brings a diet book home to her man, he looks at it and goes: that's nice, what's for dinner? It doesn't bother us at all. If a woman brings a diet book to a woman - what do they do? They make a workout plan, and they work out together.

Men and women aren't wrong typically, they're just different. Language - a woman says: I have nothing to wear. The man says: you have three closets full of nothing to wear, what are you talking about? But every woman in the room knows what she means. When a woman says: I have nothing to wear, what she means is: I have nothing new - let's go shopping. When a man says: I have nothing to wear; what he means is: I have nothing clean, please do the laundry. Two totally different things, same words.