Random Robby Ramblings

A toddler saw a heavily-tattooed man and exclaimed, “I bet his mother took away all HIS markers! With that Merry Go Round Tattoo he looks Fair Skinned

Whoever said “Out of sight, out of mind” doesn’t know my wife when a spider disappears in the bedroom.

If a coffee mug and a shot glass had a baby would it be a mug shot?

A short nap once in a while can prevent old age… especially while driving.

Common sense is not a gift. It’s a punishment because you have to deal with everyone who doesn’t have it.

Even if you’ve been fishing for 3 hours and haven’t gotten anything except poison ivy and a sunburn, you’re still better off than the worm.
For those who watch my life and gossip about it, don’t give up! Season 2 is coming.

A mobile home with a flat tire is just a home.

Stalking is when two people go for a long romantic walk together and only one of them knows it.

I took a picture of rice but I decided to delete it…It was too grainy.

Greetings

A little boy had been pawing over a stationer’s stock of greeting cards for some time when a clerk asked, “Just what is it you’re looking for? A birthday greeting, message to a sick friend, anniversary or a congratulations to your mom and dad?”

The boy shook his head and answered, “Got anything for a bad report card?”

Bountiful Prayer

A little boy said he wanted a baby brother. His Dad smiled and suggested he pray for one.

The boy prayed earnestly, night after night, but after a couple weeks with no baby brother, he didn’t bother to ask anymore.

A few months later Dad said Mom was in the hospital and had a surprise. When they got to the room, the little boy saw Mom holding two babies!

“Well, what do you think about having twin brothers?” Dad asked.

The little boy, in awe, said: “I’m glad I stopped praying when I did!”

Debting On It

A man went to his Accountant and told him, “My neighbor owes me $500 and he won’t pay up. What should I do?”

“Do you have any proof he owes you the money?” asked the Accountant.

“Nope,” replied the man.

“OK, then write him a letter asking him for the $5,000 he owed you,” said the Accountant.

“But it’s only $500,” replied the man.

“Precisely. That’s what he will reply and then you’ll have your proof!”

Fort Peeking

An old wild west fort was about to be attacked. The wily old general sent for his trusty Sioux scout.

“You must use all your thirty years of skill in trying to estimate the sort of army we are up against here.”

The trusty scout laid down and put his ear to the ground.

“Large war party,” he said, “maybe three hundred braves, four chiefs, two on black stallions, two on white stallions. All have war paint; Many many guns. Medicine man also with them.”

“Good grief!” exclaimed the general, “you can tell all of that just by listening to the ground?”

“No,” replied the Indian, “I can see under the gate.”

Self Justice

Taking his seat in his chambers, the judge faced the opposing lawyers.

“So,” he said, “I have been presented, by both of you, with a bribe.”

Both lawyers squirmed uncomfortably. “You, Mr. Leon, gave me $15,000. And you, Mr. Campos, gave me $10,000.”

The judge reached into his pocket and pulled out a check. He handed it to Mr. Leon. “Now then, I’m returning $5,000, and we’re going to decide this case solely on its merits.”

Hard Question
John: What’s the difference between a lemon, an elephant, and a bag of cement?

Philip: I give up, what’s the difference?

John: You can squeeze a lemon, but you can’t squeeze an elephant.

Philip: What about the bag of cement?

John: I just threw that in to make it hard.

MOMMY Test
I was out walking with my then 4-year-old daughter. She picked up something off the ground and started to put it in her mouth. I asked her not to do that.

“Why?”

“Because it’s been laying outside and is dirty and probably has germs.”

At this point, she looked at me with total admiration and asked, “Wow! How do you know all this stuff?”

“Uh,” I was thinking quickly, everyone knows this stuff, “Um, it’s on the Mommy test. You have to know it, or they don’t let you be a Mommy.”

“Oh.”

We walked along in silence for 2 or 3 minutes, but she was evidently pondering this new information.

“I get it!” she beamed. “Then if you flunk, you have to be the Daddy.”

Freezer Order

I have my own system for labeling homemade freezer meals.

Forget calling them “Veal Parmigiana” or “Turkey Loaf” or “Beef Pot Pie.”

If you look in my freezer you’ll see “Whatever,” “Anything,” “I Don’t Know,” and, my favorite, “Food.”

That way when I ask my husband what he wants for dinner, I’m certain to have what he wants.”

Who’s Ami

My wife and I were planning a vacation down to sunny South Florida from Atlanta. We were going to visit her parents and they really wanted to see their grandchildren, Chris (4 yrs old) and Becky (2 yrs old).

We had been telling the kids, that we soon would be “going to Miami to see grandma and grandad.” We explained that it would take two days to drive there and that we would stop at different neat places along the way. They were really excited.

A couple of days before we were to leave, Chris came up to me and asked me, “How many more days before we go to Your Ami?” I just died laughing.

Truly Physics – A True Story

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:

“Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.”

One student replied:

“You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.”

This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer which showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.

For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn’t make up his mind which to use.

On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:

“Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer.”

“Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper’s shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.”

“But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T = 2 pi sqroot (l / g).”

“Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up.”

“If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.”

“But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor’s door and say to him ‘If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper’.”

The student was Niels Bohr, the only person from Denmark to win the Nobel prize for Physics.

The Drunk and the Fire Truck

As a drunk guy staggers out of the bar one Friday evening, a fire engine races past, siren wailing and lights flashing.

Immediately, the drunk starts chasing the engine, running as fast as he can until eventually he collapses, gasping for breath.

In a last act of desperation he shouts after the fire engine, “If that’s the way you want it, you can keep your darn ice cream!”

I Was Filming a Dangerous Action Scene When I Gave My Life to Christ

Some people complain that their jobs are boring and mundane. That was never a problem for me. Beginning in my 20s, I worked for decades as a film and television stuntman, facing injury and even death for a living. On the set, I rubbed elbows with celebrities and movie stars—and sometimes made more money in one day than previous jobs had paid in a month. I was living my dream.

My philosophy in those early years was to go as hard as I could, as fast as I could, for as long as I could. Outwardly, I maintained a façade of indestructibility, suppressing any fears or anxieties with various forms of distraction and self-indulgence.

At age 26, however, I received a gut punch when my 32-year-old brother suddenly collapsed dead from a heart attack after Thanksgiving dinner. For the most part, I successfully buried my pain by working and playing even harder. But in rare moments of quiet, usually after a considerable intake of alcohol, I would ponder the senselessness of his death. I also recalled a 10-year-old nephew who had perished years before from a deadly reaction to a children’s aspirin tablet.

When I was around my nephew’s age, belief in God had come easily. A neighbor had introduced me to Jesus, and I had attended church camp for a couple summers, absorbing the message that nothing bad will happen to you when you believe in him. Sometimes, in my search for answers, I would try to summon up that believing little boy, but he was nothing but a distant memory. At least, until I heard the name of Jesus in the last place I would have expected.

The Stone in My Shoe

It happened after moving across the country for film work. One day, I overheard someone talking about God with one of the stunt guys. To my utter surprise, it was none other than the movie stunt coordinator himself. Eavesdropping on that conversation conjured up some old memories and questions. Did I still believe in God, or had I outgrown the childishness of Sunday school stories?

For one film gig up the coast, I caught a ride with the stunt coordinator —a man I dubbed “the Preachernator.” When conversation inevitably turned to religion, I told him I was doing fine without God, and I began regaling him with stories of my close calls and narrow escapes on set. There was the time, for instance, when I was tapped for a fire stunt at a monster-truck rally. The idea was to paint myself with a flammable substance, drop from the rafters, and land on the roof of a waiting car, whose driver would reach out the window, set me on fire, and peel out toward a wooden wall.

But nothing went according to design. First, my rope line snagged, and instead of rappelling down to the car, I had to cut the rope and plunge a long way onto its roof. Then the fire wouldn’t light, and after the fifth or sixth attempt, I gave up and signaled for the driver to floor it. When he stomped on his brakes, I went flying through a wooden wall, only not on fire as planned.

As I picked myself up to the cheers and groans of a confused audience, my heart leapt into my throat. I realized I had completely forgotten to apply the protective stunt gel to my head and face. Had I actually been set ablaze, I almost certainly would have sustained serious, possibly fatal, injuries.

The Preachernator listened to my story and said, “Sounds like God was still looking after you.” His words cracked my pride; I began to question whether skill and occasional luck were really responsible for keeping me alive. Could God have been looking out for me, even when I was so far astray?

We had more conversations over the following year, and he would ask what was holding me back from committing to Jesus. I told him I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I knew I couldn’t go from being a perfect sinner one day to a perfect Christian the next, so why even try? “Who’s perfect?” he said, laughing. “The Holy Spirit changes you over a lifetime, not right away.”

I remained hesitant. But the Preachernator’s words were like a small stone lodged in my shoe—a persistent irritant to my comfortable but godless lifestyle. As time went on, I found myself thinking about God on a daily basis. Is he real? Could he really love me again after I had turned my back on him?

Everything came to a head one dark and rainy night. I had been hired to jump off a 50- or 60-foot-high catwalk, grab a large dangling chain with one hand and slide down the chain to the cement floor below while firing a pistol with the other. This was dangerous enough before factoring in my hatred of heights. Fear began to overwhelm me, and I couldn’t shake the thought of possible catastrophe. I wondered if the moment to give my life to Jesus had finally arrived.

As I took a brief walk off the set, an internal debate raged within. One side of me said, “You’re only doing this because you might die, you hypocrite! Do it after you finish the stunt.” But another side said, “No, the whole point in giving my life to Jesus is in case I die. It’s smarter to do it right now.” So that’s what I did.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but there was no immediate change—no obvious physical, emotional, or spiritual sensation. Had God heard me? In any event, I didn’t dare tell a soul, just in case what I thought had happened hadn’t really happened.

The following weeks confirmed two things: God had indeed heard my prayer, and the stone was gone from my shoe. Before long, I worked up the confidence to evangelize my fellow crew members. And there were sudden changes in my behavior, too. Among the first things I noticed was that my go-to indulgences no longer held any appeal, and the dirty humor I once relished no longer struck me as funny. Meanwhile, my habit of cursing like a drunken sailor had vanished. After smashing my knee into a steel bolt at work, I started to swear and then stopped myself mid-expletive, surprising everyone within earshot.

I couldn’t explain these changes; neither could anyone else. Some accused me of pretending to be righteous, but deep down I knew the Holy Spirit was at work. The Preachernator was right.

The Gift of Struggle

God granted me dramatic change in some areas, but in others he gave the gift of struggle. In fact, I have experienced some of the greatest grief life has to offer.

Once, during some downtime on the set, a crew member asked me why his friend’s child had died. Where was God in this tragedy? I tried explaining God’s heart to him. The crew member said that much of what I shared made sense, at least compared to other religious people who trafficked in platitudes about God working in mysterious ways. But he also wondered whether my faith would survive the death of one of my own children. So did I.

I think of this conversation from time to time, because the question has been answered. I have lost children since that day. I watched my wife’s heart crumble as she rocked our 19-day-old son while he died in her arms. Three years later, my wife watched me cradle our newborn daughter as she met the same fate.

God never promises us a life without pain and suffering. However, he more than sustains us through challenges. From the tremendous joy of a beautiful, 20-year-old daughter to the depths of deep sorrow, my life attests to the truth that absolutely nothing can separate me from God’s love (Rom. 8:39).