Proof The Bible Is True

Maybe a 1986 Mercury station wagon wasn’t the best vehicle to drive across the Mojave Desert, but it was all I had. And I won’t have it for long, I thought as my engine coughed and sputtered. God, just let me make it to the next town.   I’d left my teaching job back in Colorado and was going to San Francisco to stay with my sister Joyce for a while. I packed my clothes, my books and my old guitar into the back of the Mercury and headed off.   I’d first taught myself to play folk music as [More]

I hugged my husband’s picture to my chest one day while I wandered from room to room, alone in our big house. “Bruce, I miss you so much.”   Missing him was nearly unbearable, but it only accounted for one layer of my grief. Bruce and I had rarely been apart during his long and valiant battle with cancer. We’d fought the disease side by side for years. But when my husband passed from this world, I had been sound asleep. Less than two feet away from him, I was oblivious in his last moments on earth. That wasn’t the way [More]

My family moves a lot. We’ve lived in 10 different houses in the last 19 years. My husband Mike’s career had taken us from Puerto Rico to Pennsylvania, and to our newest home near San Antonio, Texas, to name only a few of our stops. I have relocating down to a science, with garage sales before and after each move, letting go of anything that isn’t practical. Even so, with each house, there’s an adjustment period, a time for settling in and hoping the place will feel like home. Reality can be cause for second-guessing.   That was the case two moves ago, [More]

I sat in the car, tapping the steering wheel as I waited for my wife and our daughter, Raegan. We had a lot of miles to cover, and we needed to get going.   It was the summer before Raegan’s senior year of high school. Time for her to pick a college. She knew she wanted to study social work and stay in the state—much to my wife’s and my relief—but that was about it. So we’d planned a three-day road trip to visit Raegan’s top choices: the University of Illinois Chicago, Northern Illinois University and Illinois State University.   College [More]

One summer evening when I was a little girl, I sat with my grandmother on her big front porch, listening to her stories about long-ago cotillions and balls. I could hear lively music coming from the apple orchard nearby. “Is someone having that kind of party now?” I asked.   “Not exactly,” Grandmother said. She explained that the man who owned the orchard employed migrant workers to gather the apples and care for the trees. “The days are long and hard,” she said, “but the workers are enjoying some free time before they get their rest.” She believed the workers deserved more [More]

Getting home from Eastern Europe was an arduous journey, but my traveling companions and I would make the most of our two-hour layover in Paris. We didn’t have time to venture out into the city to sightsee, so Mark, John and I found a charming airport restaurant that might as well have been a bistro on the Champs Élysées. I decided to take a picture of the menu as a memento.   I reached into my backpack for my camera. I rummaged around for it, expecting my fingers to brush against the familiar shape of my passport. I’d kept it close [More]

“We’re starting a fundraising campaign to help with the cost of the new Family Life Center. And to make some renovations to the church,” my pastor announced after his Sunday sermon. “Please consider donating—no amount is too small. Anything would be a help.”   I didn’t have a lot of extra cash to burn, but I was dropping more than $30 a week on cigarettes. If I quit smoking, I could donate that money. After church ended, I left with that thought still on my mind.   At that point, I’d been a smoker for most of my life. I had picked up the habit when I [More]

The sun was just beginning to set as I drove along the highway. I had only about 50 miles left to go before I arrived at my friend Eleanor’s beach house in Panama City, Florida.   This was my first vacation since my divorce. It was exactly what I needed. The problem was that I lived over 800 miles away in Texas. Money was tight, and driving was cheaper than a plane ticket, so I chose to drive myself there. I’d never taken that long of a road trip alone before, and I’d been somewhat anxious about the 12-hour drive. But things [More]

Gas. Brake. Gas. Brake. My foot was starting to cramp from switching between the pedals. Typical for prime rush hour.   My office was 30 miles from home. Before my first day, I’d mapped several routes. I discovered that no matter when I left or which route I took, my commute ended up the same—a total nightmare. Aggressive drivers, bumper-to-bumper traffic, construction delays. Evenings were the worst. After a long day at work, I wanted to relax, not inch along the highway while car horns blared.   I’d taken to praying during my drive. I asked God for traveling mercies—the tranquility to stay calm [More]

“We’re all finished,” said the doctor. “But you’ll have to lie there another twenty minutes or so before you can go.”   I felt my body relax. The hard part was over, now I just had to wait. I was used to waiting. After all, infertility itself was a waiting game.   Beside me sat my husband, Eli. He’d been there throughout the procedure, his comforting presence giving me strength. Once the doctor had left the room, Eli took my hand. “How do you feel?” he asked.   “Okay,” I said. “It didn’t hurt at all.” I’d read as much when [More]

It was past midnight. I’d been lying in the dark for half an hour, unable to sleep. My mind was on my late husband, Hardy. I squeezed my eyes shut. God, please give me some kind of sign that Hardy is okay.   Hardy’s passing had been so traumatic that, six months after he passed, I still wondered if he was at peace. The weekend Hardy had died of a heart attack, I was in Michigan doing a gig with my singing group. When I got home on Sunday, I found him on our bedroom floor. It was too late. He was already gone. [More]

I sat at our small kitchen table, working on a list of the things we’d need for the adoption of four children from the Philippines. Our family was about to double in size. Prioritize! I told myself.   A larger kitchen table was definitely a priority. Unless we were planning to eat in shifts, we’d need to find seating for eight. I penciled that in, under my note for the extra freezer we’d need to store the massive amounts of food we somehow had to buy. We needed bunk beds, a minivan so we could fit the whole family in one car. The list [More]

Six years after becoming a widow, I decided it was time to leave the home in Wisconsin where I’d lived with my husband for 22 years and move back to Illinois to be closer to my daughter, Laura, and my son, Steve. It was a hard decision, and I sometimes second-guessed myself. At least Steve would be helping me search for just the right place. He remodeled houses in Illinois and knew what to look for.   The night I put my house on the market, I said a quick prayer. God, I trust that you are able to guide me to the [More]

My wife, Jennette, had dropped me off at the Atlanta airport that day to catch a flight to Jacksonville, Florida. I had my guitar with me and my gig bag. I’m a composer and singer, and I had a show that night. Back then, just eight years ago—it seems like eons—there wasn’t any Wi-Fi on the plane, so I would be out of touch en route. No problem. Jennette was used to being in charge at home. We had three boys. The youngest, Micah, was at summer camp, and the older two, Josiah and Ricardo, were swimming at a friend’s [More]

I checked my ski boots and took a wary look at the gray, wintry sky. Dime-size snowflakes had been coming down for two days now to the tune of about three feet of fresh powder at Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park. Great for recreational skiers, but those of us on the park’s volunteer ski patrol had to be on alert. Weather like this could mean search-and-rescue operations—everything from lost skiers to trapped avalanche victims. The challenge, as always, was to reach people while they were still alive.   I felt at home in the park. I’d hiked here for 30 [More]

On the plains of northwest Oklahoma, you can see for miles: nothing but prairie grass, clumps of cedar trees and rugged red-rock canyons. But even with my binoculars, I could barely make out the helicopters, one after the other, dumping water on a wildfire at the horizon. I wasn’t concerned by the small plume of smoke snaking skyward. It had to be at least 50 miles away, across the South Canadian River even.   That afternoon, my uncle Larry and cousin Tony and I had driven to this 4,000-acre ranch for a planned three days of turkey hunting. Larry had [More]

Zach Short: Harvest time. That’s when it gets crazy busy for farmers. We work from first light until dark, not stopping for anything. All that matters is getting the crop in. My family’s been farming for four generations here in Kansas, and I can tell you, it’s not just a job. It’s a life. It’s in your blood, your soul.   We raise milo, corn, soybeans, wheat and hay. We also run a shop where we rebuild combines, and we use our equipment to harvest crops for other farmers. On that day, October 25, 2014, we’d been hired to cut soybeans. [More]

A thousand feet. Just over three football fields lined up end to end. But at 28,000 feet above sea level—an altitude climbers call the “death zone”—a single step can require an exhausting effort, even when breathing supplemental oxygen, which I was.   I prayed nothing would go wrong with my equipment on this final, solo push to the summit. Without gas the climb would be almost impossible.   There are very few places on earth where a man can stand at 28,000 feet. Mount Everest is one. It was where I stood that May night last year under the brilliance [More]

At 4 p.m. last June 14, my brother Jack Sullivan was just crawling down into a ten-foot-deep trench, which ran down the center of Washington Street, a main thoroughfare in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.   It was near quitting time. Jack is a welder, and he wanted to finish one particular part of his job before he left. Jack said goodbye to the other men as they quit, took his welding lead in his right hand, lowered himself and his electric power cable into the trench. His head was well below the street surface.   Traffic up above was heavy. Jack [More]

This late in December, the cow path near our house in Tennessee was still covered with leaves, but I knew snow would be falling soon enough. My younger brother, Buddy Earl, and I were on an important mission: Go to Uncle Tommie’s place and get a goose. The trek over Little Mountain and back to get there would be worth it. Uncle Tommie raised the best geese around, and he’d offered to give us one for Christmas dinner.   Dark clouds were gathering in the sky above and a cold wind came in from the north. As usual, Buddy Earl lagged [More]

I tossed and turned, sweaty and in a panic, gripped by my dream. My barn cat, Two Socks, was fleeing some four-legged predator, running for his life. I chased after them, out of breath and helpless. The dream cut abruptly to a different scene. I was in the yard working in my flower garden on my acre on Blue Mountain in northwest Colorado. It was a bright, sunny afternoon. I looked up from the flower bed when a huge bird cast a shadow over me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Two Socks nonchalantly strolling out of the barn. [More]

Eight o’clock on a May morning, and Micah, my 17-year-old daughter, had already retreated to our bonus room upstairs. It had been her makeshift eleventh-grade classroom ever since schools had moved to remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic.   From the kitchen, I listened for the sound of her tapping on her laptop or her and her classmates talking in their Google Meet sessions with their teachers. Nothing. I resisted the urge to check on her. Way too often for my liking, Micah was texting friends and commenting on their Snapchat and Instagram posts about the fun they were having together. [More]

“Tiki!” I yelled frantically.   Our little white poodle mix, Tiki, had slipped out the door earlier that evening while I was carrying groceries into the house. Now I was scouring the neighborhood trying to find him. My seven-year-old son, Jordan, and my three-year-old daughter, Julia, were in tow.   Please, God, I prayed. Bring Tiki home. The kids have lost so much already.   The last few months had been difficult. After getting divorced, I could no longer afford our house in Indianapolis. The kids and I moved in with my parents in northern Indiana, 150 miles away from the city. Change [More]

I awoke, startled. Who were these people crowded in my bedroom? What were they doing there?   “Lois.” It was my mother, hovering anxiously near my bed. “It’s a flash flood,” she said. “The kitchen has already flooded.” She was holding a box of soda crackers—what I’d later learn was the only thing she’d managed to grab in her rush to escape the rising water.   June 4, 1940. I was 12 years old. It had started raining earlier that day, a sudden and unrelenting downpour on our little town of Homer, Nebraska. By that afternoon, our basement had flooded, [More]

My room at University Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, was crowded. I gazed up at the faces of my pastor, William Cox, and deacons from our church, including my husband, Brooks, who were gathered around my bed.   For more than a year, I had been fighting a losing battle against a strange liver ailment and had recently lingered in a hepatic coma for three days before coming around. It seemed I had been on the critical list more often than not. But that day I felt relatively good, if weak, and my mind, thankfully, was clear. I caught Brooks’s eye [More]

In July 1973, when I was 17, a drought struck my family’s farm in Burnsville, Minnesota. It began with several days without rain. Normal for summertime. But the hot, dry days stretched into weeks. Our farm was our livelihood. We counted on the profits from the corn crop to get us through the year, and the corn was dying before our eyes.   My father was a man of faith. He prayed before every meal and firmly believed God would look out for our family. Each day, Mom and I would get up, hoping for rain. Each day, Dad would expect it, even [More]

I looked over my holiday shopping list. Two weeks until Christmas and I had everyone in the family covered—except for my daughter, Christel. I was a little stuck on her present. The one thing she wanted, I had no power to give.   Christel and her husband, Mike, had been trying to have a baby ever since they got married, 10 years earlier. Now, at age 33, after countless treatments and consultations, she didn’t know if she could take one more failed pregnancy test.   I looked back at my Christmas list and Christel’s name with nothing beside it. God, [More]