Proof The Bible Is True

This is a story about my dad, my daughter and a dream present. Literally.   That Christmas morning, I spotted Dad walking up our pathway, his little Santa hat bobbing up and down, his arms laden with gifts. My daughter, Megan, rushed to open the door. “Merry Christmas, Big Ralphie!” she exclaimed. She hadn’t seen him since she’d left for college that fall.   “You too, Little Ralphie!” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek.   My dad and Megan were as close as could be. Whenever she stayed over at Dad’s house, they’d get up before anyone [More]

“Thank you very much for your help. Your opinion counts. Have a good day!”   For the umpteenth time that afternoon, I delivered my canned lines, hung up the phone and sighed. Such a monotonous job. I worked for a market research company, calling people all around the country for their opinions about products they’d used—today it was a line of air fresheners. After following the same script for hours, I dialed the next number from my list and looked at my watch. 1:30 PM. Just a few more hours until I could get back home and pour myself a [More]

Another dead end, I thought, hanging up the phone. And it had felt so right this time. The JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, New Jersey was almost everything I’d prayed for. A world-class facility specializing in the treatment of young adults with traumatic brain injuries.  Everything they told me convinced me that this was the place where my daughter, Jennifer, would finally begin to heal from the skiing accident she’d suffered two years earlier. Except Jenn and her husband lived in Vermont, and all of the housing options near the Institute turned out to be prohibitively expensive.   Lord, [More]

It was just a watercolor portrait of a family at the beach. A mother and father barefoot on the sand, looking out over the ocean with their four children, the youngest perched on the father’s shoulders.   Yet this painting had somehow taken a powerful hold over my husband, Tim. He claimed it had saved him twice.   It wasn’t hanging in an art gallery. No, it was in Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn, Michigan. The same hospital where we’d spent the saddest day of our lives.   That morning, 16 weeks pregnant with our fourth child, I’d had a miscarriage. [More]

Your shoe?” my husband Michael asked. He kept his eyes on the road but shook his head. “How did you manage to lose one shoe?”   I wondered the same thing. We were on vacation, driving from Montana to Erie, Pennsylvania, and I’d taken off my favorite pair of black clogs to be more comfortable in the car. We hadn’t made a stop since lunch, hours earlier. But I’d looked under every seat, combed through the empty wrappers and maps littering the floor—all I could find was the right clog.  Somehow, the left was missing. Could it have fallen out [More]

One day in the middle of January, I was in the living room sifting through the mail when I came across an envelope addressed to my late husband, Bruce. I hadn’t gotten mail for him since shortly after he died, in 2004—a good 10 years before. Well, I shouldn’t say good. We were married 55 years and I still missed him every day.   I missed going to craft fairs with him. The carnations he’d give me “just because.” Our Valentine’s Day celebrations. That was a really special day for us because Bruce had proposed to me on February 14. [More]

Mariano Rivera’s first baseball was a rock wrapped in fishing net and tape. His glove was a flattened milk carton. Growing up in a tin-roofed house in a tiny Panamanian fishing village, he gave little hint that one day, he’d be the greatest closer in baseball history.   At 18 he was earning 50 dollars a week on a fishing boat, playing various positions for a local team. One game, the manager thrust Mariano into emergency relief. “I got results that were way beyond my physical abilities,” Mariano writes in his autobiography, The Closer. That same year, he’d begun studying [More]

I’d had a long day of teaching psychology. All I wanted to do now that I was home was go in, have dinner with my wife and unwind. But something blocked my front door. A large UPS box, addressed to me. Odd, I didn’t order anything. The label said it came from the American Bible Society.   I hefted the box through the door. “Honey, you know anything about this?” She didn’t. I cut it open. Well, no surprise—Bibles. A bunch of them. But no bill, no indication of who had ordered them.   Read More: Mysterious Ways: 19 Unexpected [More]

I drove along the Jacksonville beachfront on my way to work, getting madder at myself with each shiny new building I passed. All of them nicer and closer to my new office than the apartment I’d just leased. I should have explored the area, done my homework. Instead I’d jumped at the first place I saw. Could I get out of it? I called the leasing agent after work.   “Sure,” she said, “But you’ll be forfeiting your $500 deposit.”   That wasn’t money I could afford to throw away. I was 25 years old and had just spent a [More]

I eased my aching body onto the top step of the back porch and took a deep breath. Five months pregnant, I rarely left the house. I’d come outside for some fresh air—and some company. I felt lonely and scared. I half-hoped a neighbor would see me and ask if I was okay, show me someone cared. My husband, Bill, a Navy airman, usually did that. But today, like too many days, he’d been called away to the base.   I had no clue life as a military wife would be like this. I’d left family and friends behind to [More]

The man from Georgia Power climbed out of his truck and walked up to the utility pole. He fiddled with our electric meter for a few moments, and just like that, turned off our electricity. I watched it all from the doorstep of our old, singlewide trailer, feeling like my faith had been switched off too. For days I’d prayed for something, anything, to help us pay our bill before this happened. It hadn’t mattered.   I was a single parent with three kids, unemployed after I returned from a stint in the Army, and money had been tight. Our [More]

Wanted: one soprano for summer position. This notice appeared in the church bulletin on a Sunday morning in 1945. I was new in Washington, D.C., and I wanted to be chosen for that job. I lost no time in presenting myself to the choir director, who set up an audition for me on the following Sunday.   After a lot of thought and prayer I selected Geoffrey O’Hara’s “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked” for my audition piece. All week long I practiced. But back at the church on Sunday I made the dreadful discovery that I’d left the music [More]

Mom wanted only one thing for her birthday. “Can you find me another copy of this song?” she asked, and handed me a worn out cassette tape. I knew exactly what was recorded on it: “My Redeemer.” I heard the song played and replayed at least a thousand times growing up. After 37 years of wear and tear, the wrinkled ribbon barely played the tune. I promised her I would find a replacement. I didn’t know how difficult it would be.   “My Redeemer” had become Mom’s favorite song after my younger brother Tim was killed by a drunk driver [More]

The men’s grief-support group met one evening a week at a hospice facility, sometimes just one or two guys, rarely more than four or five. My job was to help the chaplain keep the conversation going when things got too quiet. Sharing their feelings doesn’t come naturally to most men. Some guys, their pain forms a shield and they hide behind it.   Right away I pegged Tom as one of those guys. The first night he shuffled through the doors, I recognized him. I was surprised to see him. Years earlier we’d gone to the same church. He would [More]

“Be sure to look at the sonogram picture that accompanies the article.” Admin   On Halloween afternoon, I sat at work, daydreaming: little Liam dressed up as pumpkin, going door to door in his stroller, my neighbors saying, How adorable…   I stole a peek at the sonogram photo I kept in my purse, still finding it hard to believe that this blurry black-and-white peanut was my son. For nearly two years, my life had been consumed with infertility treatments, pills, nightly injections, and surgeries.   Even at this point, there was a high risk of losing the baby. My [More]

This had to be the place. The gray, ranch-style house on the corner. Garage open like someone was expecting me. I worked for a floor-covering business and a client named Kathy had made a 2 p.m. appointment to discuss her kitchen floor. I walked through the garage and knocked on the door. An elderly man in a plaid robe and pajamas answered.   “Come on in,” he said. “I’m Ron.” He ushered me into the family room, motioned for me to sit. Where’s Kathy? I wondered.   Read More: The Right Wrong House | Guideposts

I heard cheers from the not-so-distant finish line. Brushed elbows with the runners clustered around me. But I couldn’t see a thing. Not really. All I saw were multicolored, human-sized blurs bobbing up and down on the gray streak of road, funneling into a pitch-black void ahead—the long tunnel into Nissan Stadium, home of the NFL’s Tennessee Titans and, for me, the final lap of the 13-mile Tom King Classic Half Marathon in Nashville. I’d made it this far, no easy task when you’re legally blind. I squinted for any sign of my running partner, my guide up until now. [More]

September 11th, 2001. My 10th graders and I sat glued to the news, stunned by the horrific scene. A high school math teacher in Bloomington, Indiana, I didn’t know anybody in New York. But I felt strongly compelled to help.   Straight after work I headed to the Midwest Mission Distribution Center, a mission outreach program I volunteered for in Chatham, Illinois. The center specialized in sending kits filled with anything from hygienic goods to school supplies all across the country in times of crisis. That night, all the volunteers were in a frenzy putting together emergency health kits.   [More]

I was halfway out the door on my way to a business trip in Heath, Ohio, when I spotted it. Sitting in the sink, staring me down. An empty plastic milk jug. It aggravated me to no end. Was it just going to walk itself into the recycling bin? My husband and I were both neat freaks. It was odd he’d leave a mess the one morning I was in a rush. I dropped my suitcase, picked up the container. That’s when I heard it. A voice. Fill the jug with water.   What? I shook my head. Heath was [More]

The C-141 Starlifter had just returned from a cargo run. My husband, Jeff, an airman 1st class, checked the life support equipment—the oxygen masks, the parachutes. All in working order, nothing out of place. Except for something odd left behind on one of the seats. A crocheted white cross, three inches long. It didn’t belong to any of the crew. No one knew how it got there.   Jeff brought it home for me. He thought it would provide some comfort. I’d been five months pregnant with our first child, Aurora, when we left our home in West Virginia and [More]

I was in my office between classes, reviewing curriculum, completely lost as to what to do, feeling in over my head. I had been grappling with the responsibility of a new position. I’d left the chaotic night-shift of a nurse for a tenure-track instructor position at Western Illinois University. Student office hours and crowded lecture halls were the least of my worries. It was my other new job I was concerned about.   I had been appointed committee chairperson for religious education at my church. I was in charge of choosing and implementing spiritual curriculum for children, a huge responsibility. [More]

My husband, Rich, who’d been adopted as a baby, always brushed aside questions about whether he’d like to find his birth parents, saying, “If they didn’t want me then, it’s too late now.” Still I knew that his stoic surface hid a deep ache. One night I noticed Rich crying at a TV movie about a father and son. I decided to track down his birth family so he might find some closure.   All I had to go on was the information on Rich’s birth certificate: his birthdate, October 16, 1941; his mother’s name, Ruth Hicks Casselman; and her [More]

Two days before Veterans Day, one of the churches in town had a white elephant sale. I browsed aisle after aisle of clothes, cookbooks and household goods, not looking for anything in particular, other than something to keep me occupied. It’d been nine years since my husband, Burnell, died of leukemia. Veterans Day had always been our holiday—we rarely missed a parade, memorial or marching band performance. It was still hard getting used to being alone.   Read More: Mysterious Ways: A Heaven-Sent Veterans Day Gift | Guideposts

For six weeks, Tony and Veronica Pena drove around their town of Portales, New Mexico, putting up “Lost Dog” posters, calling neighbors and shelters. But Homer, their six-month-old Maltese mix, was nowhere to be found. Tony and Veronica, praise leaders for the morning worship service at St. Helen’s Catholic Church, were losing faith they’d find their missing pup.   He’d disappeared on Thanksgiving during a family gathering. “He was the star of the evening for my nieces and nephews,” Tony says. “We didn’t realize until after everyone had gone home that he’d slipped out.”   Read More: The Miracle of [More]

“Your mother’s breast cancer has returned, and it’s metastasized to her bones,” said my mother’s doctor. “It’s…everywhere. I’m so sorry, Roberta.”   I clutched the phone, tears in my eyes. Mother’s diagnosis had no cure. Worse, as a nurse of more than 20 years who’d cared for many end-of-life patients, I knew what her future held.   Even as a health-care professional, I had never really been able to do anything for my mother. Fiercely independent, she’d always been the caretaker, one with a hugely charitable spirit. Especially when I was a teen, battling my own incurable illness. She’d arranged [More]

It was them. I was sure. I caught my breath.   My husband and I were out to dinner, and when I looked up from my menu I saw them, intensely familiar and yet different. They were older now, the strain of years showing, but those faces had burned themselves into my memory. “That’s them,” I said. “The happy couple.”   My husband looked at me, nonplussed. For about half a year I’d stared at pieces of this couple’s life, photos in an old album. We’d found it in the gutter on a street by our house. A handsome young [More]

When my husband’s father and his wife were visiting us over the summer they got into a spat that dragged me in too. One remark led to another, and I found myself saying things I wished I hadn’t. By the time my in-laws returned to Florida, they had patched things up, but I was on the outs with them.   I wanted to apologize, but instead of picking up the phone I invariably put it off. They probably don’t want to talk to me anyway, I rationalized. But the truth was I couldn’t work up the courage to dial their [More]