Trusting God’s Foresight
While driving us to an unfamiliar location, my husband noticed that the GPS directions suddenly seemed wrong. After entering a reliable four-lane...
Fleeing from Turkeys
Two wild turkeys stood in the country lane ahead. How close could I get? I wondered. I slowed my jog to a walk, then stopped. It worked. The turk...
True Change
Raised in a turbulent home in south London, Claud started selling marijuana at fifteen and heroin when he was twenty-five. Needing a cover for hi...
Heart of Anger
Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s most important political painting, was a modernist portrayal of the 1937 destruction of a small Spanish town by t...
Choosing Compassion
God in the Details
It had been an awful week for Kevin and Kimberley. Kevin’s seizures had suddenly worsened and he’d been hospitalized. Amid the pandem...
Reasons to Rejoice
When Ms. Glenda walked into the church commons area, her infectious joy filled the room. She had just recovered from a difficult medical procedur...
Beyond Words
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is one of the church’s most celebrated defenders of the faith. Yet just three months before his death some...
God Spoke
The Indwelling Christ
English preacher F. B. Meyer (1847–1929) used the example of an egg to illustrate what he called “the deep philosophy of the indwelli...
Signs of Life
When my daughter received a pair of pet crabs as a gift, she filled a glass tank with sand so the creatures could climb and dig. She supplied wat...
Baby Boy
For more than a year, his legal name was “Baby Boy.” Discovered by a security guard who heard his cries, Baby Boy had been abandoned&...
Will You Still Love Me?
Ten-year-old Lyn-Lyn had finally been adopted, but she was afraid. In the orphanage where she’d grown up, she was punished over the slighte...
Life Expectancy
In 1990, French researchers had a computer problem: a data error when processing the age of Jeanne Calment. She was 115 years old, an age outside...
Your Part, God’s Part
When my friend Janice was asked to manage her department at work after just a few years, she felt overwhelmed. Praying over it, she felt God was ...
Happy Thanksgiving
A study by Robert Emmons divided volunteers into three groups that each made weekly entries in journals. One group wrote five things they were gr...
The Power of Scripture
Stephen was an up-and-coming comedian, and a prodigal. Raised in a Christian family, he struggled with doubt after his dad and two brothers died ...
Self-Control in God’s Strength
A 1972 study known as the “marshmallow test” was developed to gauge children’s ability to delay gratification of their desires....
Birds of the Air
The summer sun was rising and my smiling neighbor, seeing me in my front yard, whispered for me to come look. “What?” I whispered bac...
Envisioning a Different Future
The three hundred middle and high school students of the small town of Neodesha, Kansas filed into a surprise school assembly. They then sat...
Grieving and Grateful
[THIS IS WAY TOO LONG. SEE SUGGESTED EDITS IN WORD DOC] After my mom died, one of her fellow cancer patients approached me. “Your mom ...
Our Heart’s True Home
“Bobbie the Wonder Dog” was a collie mix separated from his family while they were on a summer vacation together over 2,200 miles fro...
Mirror Test
God’s Gentle Grace
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” the poet Emily Dickinson wrote, suggesting that, because God’s truth and glory is far &...
