Proof The Bible Is True

I stepped out of the federal prison in South Dakota after a decade behind bars and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d served my time. But I wasn’t just free. I was a new man. Honestly, I doubted anyone who knew me before would recognize me. I hardly recognized me.   My home life hadn’t been great growing up. My dad died in a car accident when I was just 10. He’d been abusive and violent. An alcoholic. When I was 16, my mother remarried. Another alcoholic. My stepfather handed me my first beer at 18. “Drink up,” he said. [More]

December 1974. The road ahead was dark and winding, lined by pine trees. I was 18, on my way home to Wisconsin for the holidays after my first semester at college in Minnesota. Legally I was an adult. Yet thinking of the future I felt like a lost child. Did God have a plan for me?   Six months earlier, in a tiny hospital chapel, I’d felt his presence in a way I never had before. A feeling that didn’t go away. But in a busy world of classes, friends, and a career path to figure out, sometimes it was [More]

It was time to start my afternoon run on the school bus. I drove up to the elementary school, parked and opened the doors.   Usually I enjoyed greeting the kids as they climbed aboard. Today I kept my gaze fixed straight ahead. I’d just come from a difficult family counseling session with my oldest son, Shayn. I felt pulverized. Hopeless. How did we ever get here? I thought. Shayn was intelligent, tall, with a softness around his eyes. He’d been a pleasure to raise, active in the Boy Scouts and church. The two of us were close.   Then [More]

It’s one of the oldest pranks in the book: the “ding dong ditch.” The prankster rings the victim’s doorbell, then quickly runs away or hides before the resident answers. The unsuspecting victim drops what they’re doing to answer the door, only to find that no one’s there.   Sharon Mardis, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, a widow and mother of four, told ABC News that she suspected she’d been a victim of the prank when she responded to her ringing doorbell at 1:00 a.m.   “My doorbell started ringing, and I came to the door,” Sharon told ABC News. “There was [More]

I had picked a beautiful day to visit my daughter Amie, her husband, and my three grandchildren, five-year-old Bailey, three-year-old Gavin and baby Carson.   Their dad was at work, but the sun was shining, and the kids, Amie and I spent the morning out on the back deck.   “Nice day to be out,” Amie’s neighbor said, popping over from doing some yard work. Indeed it was gorgeous outside.   But the kids got tired and we went inside the house. “Mind babysitting while I run to the grocery store?” Amie asked me. Of course I didn’t!   Read [More]

Ten years ago, while trying to get to sleep one night, Marilyn Fowler heard a voice. It was the voice of her late mother, Charlotte. The voice told Marilyn to write the story of their family, which was first torn apart by the Great Depression and then went through periods of poverty and even homelessness.   “All the memories kept coming back to me,” Marilyn told the paper. “I rolled out of bed and I said, ‘Mom, I’ll write your story, now leave me alone.’”   Marilyn began writing about her family’s troubled history and her own tumultuous life, which [More]

I settled down on the living room couch, cradling my three-week-old daughter, Debbie, in my arms. One look at her sweet, innocent face and my heart swelled with thankfulness. I thought back to the doctor’s words to my husband, John, and me just 14 months before she was born: “I’m sorry to tell you, but you have about a one-in-a-million chance of conceiving a child,” he’d said. Debbie was truly our miracle baby.   I strapped Debbie in her infant seat and placed her next to John on the couch. She smiled as her bright eyes followed the patterns of [More]

“Hand me that feed bag,” Grandpa hollered from the cattle trough.   I reached into the bed of our pickup and lifted out the heavy burlap bag. There was no mistaking Pa’s voice. Even at his age, 75, it was commanding.   Any other Friday afternoon, I would have been in school. But the flu was going around real bad that week, and in our small town, it knocked out enough people to give us a day off. A day off for most kids, anyway.   I might have been hanging out watching TV or going fishing with my friends. [More]

I’m a CSI, a crime-scene investigator, for Los Angeles County and it’s a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year job. Even on Christmas Eve. I went to bed that night hoping to sleep until morning, when my three daughters would rush in, giddy and impatient to open their gifts. But at midnight the phone rang. “We need you at a crime scene,” the dispatcher said.   There had been a home burglary in a poor area of the city. “It can’t wait until the morning,” the deputy at the scene told me when I called for details. “You’ll understand when you get here.”   [More]

Round and round the baggage carousel turned, swarmed by the passengers from our flight to Tampa, all anxiously awaiting their luggage. My husband, Doug, leaned in and focused on the ramp where suitcases thumped and banged onto the conveyor belt.   The bright red roller belonging to our son’s fiancée tumbled out, but Doug couldn’t grab it as it whizzed past. Several more bags passed before he managed to wrestle his own off the belt and dragged it over. That’s when we all noticed… the zipper of the front pocket was open. Doug ran his hand inside.   “Chris’s hat [More]

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without sharing a giant chocolate Hershey bar with Mom, I thought wistfully, looking at the display of bars on sale at the grocery store one cold December day.   It’s not your usual holiday tradition, but it was for me. I’m not sure how it started, but every year for as long as I could remember, as a way to welcome in the holiday, Mom and I would run to the store to buy a giant milk chocolate Hershey bar. We’d keep it in the refrigerator at home and would break off little pieces in the [More]

The Christmas party had been wonderful. It was great to be among friends on Christmas Eve, sipping eggnog and singing carols. I was sorry it had to end. Finally, at a little past one in the morning, I headed home. I was almost at the freeway exit when I saw the sign:  Closed For Night Construction/Please Take Alternate Route   Alternate route? What alternate route? The 55 Freeway was the only way I knew back home, and there weren’t any detour signs. The next exit was coming up fast. Maybe this will put me on the right road, I thought, turning off. [More]

Every December our Candlewood Lions Club throws a Christmas party at a local firehouse for the special needs children of Green Chimneys, a residential school. It’s a blast!   I dress like an elf and help Santa pass out presents to the kids. There’s also a magician, a lunch buffet, even a tour of the firehouse. But driving there last year, I was in a panic. We had exactly 40 presents to give–enough for the children we usually expected. Not enough for the 60 we’d just heard would be coming. Too bad the real Santa Claus wasn’t around.   Read [More]

“Wonderful story of how God step by step worked out His plan for her life. He will do the same for anyone if we let Him.”  Admin   I looked around the office, waiting to audition. Of all the TV shows to be called for! Bathroom Renovations on the DIY Network. I was an actor, a trained opera singer, a musician. By now I’d played myriad roles in my career: from commercials, voice-overs, films, plays, operas, cruise ship entertainment…but no reality television. The producers were looking for a host, someone who could show people how to get it all done: [More]

About 15 years ago, my husband, our two boys and I were heading home from a weeklong vacation to Cocoa Beach and Disney World. It was a long drive from Florida back to where we live in Ohio. On I-75, heading north, we saw signs advertising fruit stands at nearly every exit. I wanted to get oranges to take home, so I told my husband to stop at the next exit to get some. But we had a lot of driving ahead of us, so he wanted to continue on the road for a while. No matter, there were plenty [More]

This week’s “ripped from the headlines” Mysterious Ways story comes from Grand Haven, Michigan.   Larry Ritsema was out for an early morning jog around his neighborhood Memorial Day weekend. On a quiet, shady street, he began to feel faint. Suddenly, everything went black. Larry collapsed to the asphalt.   Less than a minute later, Tom Alguire zipped past on his bicycle. He caught sight of the figure crumpled next to the curb, squeezed the hand brakes and turned to get a closer look. Tom hopped off his bike and ran over. He recognized Larry immediately.   Tom had been [More]

That night I left the newspaper office where I work and headed to the site of two dilapidated houses that stood waiting for our volunteer fire department to set them ablaze. I planned to write a story about a training exercise called a “controlled burn,” where firefighters practice battling a fire. I got to the site just in time.   One of the firefighters struck a match and lit some kindling. The first house, the smaller one, caught fire immediately. Flames licked at the night sky. The fire raged with such fury that the house was engulfed within minutes.   [More]

James Pribram was in Canada on a business trip. A pro surfer, he earns his living as a company ambassador for various youth-and-sports-oriented companies, and also spends time teaching schoolchildren to take good care of the ocean environment. The ocean is his church, he’s fond of saying. He had three days left before he was due to fly home to California.   But something was tugging at him. He couldn’t escape a nagging feeling that he had to be at home—it couldn’t wait three days. His mother had recently fallen and suffered an injury, and although it wasn’t life-threatening, maybe [More]

Victor Giesbrecht, 61, and his wife, Ann, from Winnipeg, Canada, were driving last Saturday night on Interstate 94 in Wisconsin when they spotted two women standing outside their car on the side of the road. While other cars passed by, Victor pulled over, asking how he could help.   The car had a flat tire, the women said. They were struggling to remove it and put on the spare. Victor got out of his truck, rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Within minutes, he had the tire on. Grateful, the women shook Victor’s hand and thanked him.   [More]

California couple Esther and Nelson Nieves were heartbroken. Their 15-year-old Beagle mix, Dude, had been brutally killed by an escaped pit bull outside the home they shared with their relatives.   Ever since he was a 4-week-old puppy, Dude had been by Nelson’s side, and recently, after Nelson retired, the dog had come with him everywhere. Now Dude was gone.   According to an article in the Manteca Bulletin, Nelson’s nephew, Delfino, was worried about his uncle. Two days after the tragic event, he spoke to his father, wondering how he could help lift his uncle out of his depression. [More]

Amy Jung of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, didn’t plan on adopting a cat. She only went to the Door County Humane Society on February 8 with her son, Ethan, to play with the animals.   But one feline caught her eye. A hefty orange-and-white furball, lying on a counter. Amy asked an employee about the cat. Pudding was 8 1/2 years old and had two previous owners, a family who gave him up because their son was allergic and an older woman who had passed away.   Pudding instantly bonded with Amy and Ethan. Amy couldn’t explain it. She just felt [More]

Pit bulls get a bad rap. They’re often viewed as violent, unpredicatble and poorly behaved, even though there is nothing to indicate they’re different from any other dog breed. Call it dog prejudice, if you will. One bad apple, and all the rest get called rotten.   But at least one pit bull can genuinely be called a hero this week.   On Monday night, Danna Smith of Huntington, West Virginia, was getting some much-needed sleep. The single mother had recently spent time in the hospital, and was responsible for raising her three children, who each have varying degrees of [More]

On a gorgeous summer day, Jeff and I were married on a pavilion overlooking a public beach. Cries of “Marco! Polo!” from families playing in the water punctuated our wedding vows. Afterwards, we posed for pictures with the ocean as our backdrop.   The perfect wedding for us beach lovers. Almost. Surrounded by our families and friends, there was one big presence missing. Jeff’s father, Gord. He should have been here, I thought. He would have loved this.   Read More: The Wedding Guest | Guideposts

According to The Enterprise Ledger, Vincenzo and his wife, Anna May, visit yard sales every Saturday morning, always leaving their home at 6:30 AM to get first pickings when the sales begin, usually at 7.   But the last week of June, Vincenzo spotted a flyer for a yard sale that began at 6:00 AM. The items listed for sale intrigued him. He told his wife that they’d have to get up even earlier than usual to go check it out.   At 5:30 AM, the Parisis stopped at a traffic light on their way to the sale. When the [More]

Talk to her, I thought. Talk to her. Normally, I don’t strike up conversations with perfect strangers but there was something about the woman waiting for the elevator with me at the medical complex. And after I pressed the buttons for our floors—six for her, seven for me—I couldn’t ignore the voice in my head any longer. “Nice day, isn’t it?” I said. “Sure is,” she replied. And that was that. A pleasant distraction from the backache that had brought me there, but not much more. At my appointment I received some injections to help ease the pain. An hour [More]

Never has a Bible passage spoken so strongly to me or to my husband, Jim, or so inexplicably. That’s the only word for it: inexplicable.   Something happened that Sunday when we heard our pastor speak on the passage, something extraordinary, and we both knew, separately, just sitting in the pew, that we needed to act on it. Now.   “‘Do we own our possessions or do they own us?’” Jim said, quoting the lesson as we were driving home. “When he said those words, it was like a light flashed on. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the stuff [More]

This is crazy, I thought. I trudged through the wet forest, ducking beneath dripping branches, trying not to slip, keeping my eyes peeled for movement among the trees. By my side, one of my two two-year-old Newfoundland dogs, Ruby, sniffed at muddy tree trunks.   “Nike!” I shouted into the wild, “Come here, girl! C’mon!” Only silence answered. No throaty bark, no snapping twigs or flurry of leaves that signaled Ruby’s best friend barreling through the underbrush. There’d been no sign of her for two days. Still, I hiked on. I was following a lead.   A crazy lead, an [More]