Last month while I was at a party, I ran into a man that I had assisted with some legal problems in the mid-1980s. (For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call him “Mark.”) When I saw Mark at the party he didn’t look very well to me. In addition to being extremely thin, his skin looked dull and pasty.
About five years ago, I was attending a weekday Mass at a local church. Halfway through the Mass, two women in their sixties snuck in the side door of the church and ran over to the nearest pew. Both women were wearing gray sweatshirts. The way they scurried over to the pew reminded me of the animated mice you would see in a Disney movie — because the women were short, pudgy, cute, and grinning from ear to ear.
Imagine you are driving on University Street in Peoria and in the distance you see a large crowd of people gathered in a parking lot. As you drive closer to the crowd, you see a man who you have met before tied to a telephone pole. To your horror, you see two young, well-built men taking turns at beating the man with leather whips that have sharp pieces of metal attached to the ends of each whip.
The recent tornado that ripped through Washington, Illinois, destroyed the home of my office manager, Kenna. When she heard the sirens and realized what was going on, she barely had enough time to wake her daughter and get her out of bed to run down to the basement of their house. As soon as they got down the stairs, the tornado took out her daughter’s bedroom and then tore through the rest of the house. If Kenna had delayed her decision to get her daughter out of bed by five seconds, neither one of them would be alive today.
There’s a business on Main Street in downtown Peoria, across the street from the courthouse, called The Nut House. The inside of the business consists of a tiny storeroom that is lined with glass display cases along three sides. Inside the display cases are numerous trays and jars that contain different types of candy and nuts. On top of the display cases and on shelves attached to the walls are decorative jars that are also filled with candy and nuts. There are at least 200 different items on display that a customer can choose from.
You may have seen the media frenzy surrounding Pope Francis’s recent answer to a reporter’s question about homosexuality, when the pope said, “Who am I to judge?” While the worldwide media focused on this one particular response, they ignored the overall theme of the pope’s answers to questions that were thrown at him by reporters for over an hour.
The dictionary defines “crisis” as “an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending, especially one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome.”
You may have heard of Shark Tank, the television series that premiered on ABC in August, 2009. The show features business owners who make presentations to five potential investors, who are referred to as “sharks.” Each of the sharks is an experienced entrepreneur who became wealthy by inventing products or by successfully starting and growing one or more businesses. Shark Tank is now in its fourth season, and is the most watched television program among 18 to 49-year-olds on Friday nights.