Ken Blanchard (One Minute Manger) and Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren appeared on Larry King Live last night to talk about the Southern California fires. Blanchard will be speaking at Saddleback tonight.
Here’s what Blanchard had to say:
I was in Florida when it happened. And on Monday morning, 4:30 time-out here, my son Scott who owns a house a third of a mile down from me said, “Dad, we just had to evacuate the house, and I’m down on the side of the road and flames are coming from my house and I think yours is gone, too.”
And so, it was a double hit potential, Larry, and it was really interesting. My thoughts really went more to my son and his loss because he had just built this house and redone it with a new blended family, and they were just had so much love and hope in that home.
And so, you know, as a follower of Jesus, I just, you know, tried to quiet myself because I knew that He wanted me to have peace and joy and righteousness. And the way I felt I could do that was to, you know, focus my energy on my son Scott. And when I talked to my wife Margie (ph), she said her real pain was for Scott, too, and so we just prayed that maybe his house would be saved. But there was three eye witnesses, Larry, including a policeman that said his house was gone. And on Tuesday, he calls me and he says, “Dad, you won’t believe it. I’m standing in our house. It’s standing, he said, but yours is gone.”
And I just cried with joy because that’s what I hoped, you know, because I wanted it for him. And so, it was tough, you know, to lose our house, but it would have been so much from our standpoint tougher on him. …
We get such great compassion in this country when there’s a crisis. But we don’t seem to get it in good times.
You know, good times, all the political people are fighting with each other. And tough times, everybody pulls together and are servant leaders. How can we keep that going? You know because I’m trying to lead like Jesus’ ministry to say we ought to be serving each other all the time.
I am so proud of this country in crisis, but I really want and hope and pray that when times are good, we can have compassion and love and serve each other.
There’s more in the transcript.
