Proof The Bible Is True

I already had four dogs. But I couldn’t resist the adorable furry face in my Facebook feed. A chocolate teacup poodle who’d been liberated from a puppy mill down South. I contacted the Maine-based rescue agency that had posted her photo, said I was interested in giving her a loving home. I was honest about my concerns, though. Would she and my other dogs get along? What if the puppy mill had left her so traumatized that she needed an owner’s undivided attention?   The rescue coordinator told me not to worry. The poodle would be among a group of [More]

Nurse Sarah Pemberton has heard it all. She works in the surgical recovery room at Mountain View Regional Medical Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. People coming out of anesthesia “are pretty chatty and say all sorts of things,” she says. Personal problems, embarrassing revelations. “I always say, ‘Why go to the movies when we can hear people’s stories here?’”   But one thing she’d never heard was her name—first and last—uttered by a patient she’d never met before.   It was a late summer afternoon when Denise Fajardo of Silver City, New Mexico, was wheeled into Pemberton’s recovery room. [More]

Snow fell three days before Christmas, covering the barren ground with a lovely white carpet. The temperature was just cold enough to freeze all the nearby ponds. School had let out early that day, and Joanne was home by noon. She told Mom that all her friends from school were going ice-skating. She wished she had some skates, so she could join them. At those words, Mom pulled a present from under the tree and handed it to my sister. An early Christmas gift— skates! Joanne wasted no time. “Can I go skating now?” she asked excitedly. “Yes,” Mom said, [More]

In just over two hours, I was expecting 100 people at my house for my father-in-law Larry’s seventieth birthday. I was right on schedule, putting the finishing touches on my corn casserole, when I froze. Where was the can of corn? I ran to my pantry, thinking I might have left it there. No luck.   Did I buy frozen corn instead? I rushed to my freezer and rummaged through bags of icy vegetables. Nothing.   Larry’s health wasn’t great, and I really wanted to make this party special for him. I’d planned meticulously, making a list of ingredients I’d [More]

I could feel her staring at me, the woman sitting next to me in the waiting area. Do I know her? I wondered. This is getting uncomfortable. I glanced over. Like me, she was getting tests done. X-rays, blood, whatever. “Have we met before?” I asked.   “No,” she said, and paused. “I’m actually very shy. I’ve never done this before. But God is telling me to pray a healing prayer for you.”   I must really look sick for some random stranger to want to pray for me, I thought. Or maybe this woman just went around to different hospitals praying for sick people. [More]

It was 2:30 a.m. on a cold November morning and I was wide awake in bed, my wife sound asleep beside me, my three children slumbering in the loft above us in our tiny rented bungalow. Winter was beginning to wrap her icy, bony hands around my throat, and anxious thoughts about the cost of Christmas gifts and our rising utility bill overwhelmed my mind.   Suddenly, a small but shrill voice pierced the quiet. Only a few muffled words, then silence again. One of the kids, mumbling in their sleep?   I turned toward the drop-down ladder leading up [More]

“Please help, Mom,” I whispered. “Show me that everything’s going to be okay.” It was a quiet Wednesday night, and I was in bed, trying to fall asleep. My husband, PJ, was already asleep beside me. The past three months had been hard for us. It all started when a terrible flu triggered a mysterious pain in my right side. It continued to worsen by the day. Is this the beginning of the end? I wondered. Am I going to meet the same fate as my mother?   Read More: A Sign from Heaven Comforted Her During Her Illness | [More]

I liked structure, things going according to plan—my plans. But lately there had been so much upheaval that I hardly recognized my life, or myself, anymore. I was going through a divorce. My dad had a terminal illness. I couldn’t focus on my job as a labor and employment lawyer, and hard work was something I prided myself on. (Even in law school I’d worked a side job as a cheerleader in the NBA and NFL.) I put on a smile for my daughters—Gabby, four, and Gigi, two—but I cried in the shower. I woke up in the middle of [More]

I drove slowly back from the store, content to go below the speed limit. I was in no hurry to get home. No one would be there waiting for me. Only a few weeks into my new life as a single woman, my studio apartment was still a maze of stacked cardboard boxes and chaos. It felt so empty. Especially now that Ginger was gone.   My dachshund had come to live with me after the divorce. Ginger had always been an anxious little thing with boundless energy. Deep down, I knew she wasn’t cut out for apartment living. But [More]

I was leaving work when my phone rang.   “Hello?” I answered.   “Hey, Dusty,” said a voice. “It’s Martha.” Martha? She was an old work acquaintance, someone I hadn’t spoken to in years. “I know this is random,” she said, “but I believe I found a Bible that belongs to your family in a secondhand shop.”   I froze. It couldn’t be? Could it…?   “What does it look like?”   “It’s bound in green leather,” said Martha. “There’s a family tree on the inside, and your name is written on it! The pages are also a little singed—” [More]

Both my parents had died in the autumn, and every fall I felt melancholy. This day—one week after the anniversary of my mom’s death, 11 years earlier—I sat on the porch, missing her even more than usual.   A widow for two decades, Mom devoted herself to her family—my younger brother, Bill, her three grandchildren and me. We saw each other every day and enjoyed going to flea markets together. “I’m praying for you,” she liked to say. “I’m asking God to watch over you.”   One Christmas, my brother bought her a gold-tone locket. He had her initials engraved [More]

Call Danny. I was cleaning my kitchen one Saturday morning, and the impulse just came over me. It was strange. My younger brother, Danny, and I weren’t close. We didn’t talk much. Plus, it was 11 a.m. He was probably already halfway drunk. Pointless trying to talk to him.   It was hard to remember a time when Danny hadn’t been an alcoholic. He’d tried everything to quit. Gone to countless AA meetings. Tried quitting cold turkey. Even tried “controlled drinking”—only one or two drinks a night. Every attempt failed. Married and with two teenage kids, he was still drinking. [More]

Here in Texas, it takes an effort to control the alligator population. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department manages the population by having licensed people collect alligator eggs once a year. This is not an easy job.   I know because I did it part-time for years. I worked at a chemical plant and used my vacation time to go out in the marsh during alligator season.   One day in July of 2004, I was planning to collect eggs at Tigner Reservoir, which once provided water to irrigate rice fields. These days it was home to hundreds of alligators. I’d [More]

My dad never talked much about his days as an Army private during World War II. The only time he really opened up was when we visited my grandparents. Then Dad and Grandpop would chat on the living room couch, while I played with my dolls on the floor. There was one tale they retold often. One of a strange miracle that changed the course of our family’s history completely.   Read More: The Mysterious Voice That Saved a Soldier | Guideposts

Beauty and the Beast! Live on stage! I slowed the car to read the sign more clearly. The same sign that was posted on practically every telephone pole along the whole block. My old high school was putting on a musical.   Mom would love this, I thought. I’d been searching for something to cheer her up since my dad’s death. She’d already been living with dementia for a while. In some ways we were lucky. Mom could still live at home with my brother, where I visited her several times a week. She still recognized her family, even if she’d forgotten many [More]

I was removing the last of four apple pies from the oven when a voice inside my head abruptly urged: Take Carol a copy of your story.   I stopped dead. “Where did that come from?” I wondered aloud, surveying my cluttered counters and dirty dishes. Until that moment I’d given little thought to when I might take my longtime neighbor Carol the Woman’s World issue in which a mystery story of mine had recently appeared.   I’d purchased an extra copy, and I had every intention of delivering it soon. But at that moment, all I wanted to do [More]

Three-thirty in the morning. I lay awake in bed, bleary-eyed from a night of drinking, exhausted yet unable to sleep. I hated living like this but felt powerless to stop.   I was a 27-year-old physical therapist who worked with burn victims at a hospital in central Florida. From the outside, I seemed on my way to success. I owned a boat and rented a three-bedroom cottage by the dock. But I was drinking myself to sleep every night. I’d begun showing up for work with traces of the previous night’s party on my breath. I’d recently crashed my friend’s [More]

The phone rang. It was my son, Ryan, calling from West Virginia University, where he was finishing out his final year.   “Dad, I’m not going to be able to make it home for Father’s Day this weekend,” Ryan said. “Some of the guys and I are going to go to a friend’s wedding.”   “Sure, son,” I replied after a beat. I may have seemed pretty mellow, but inside I was devastated. Twenty-two years of tradition—gone. Our family was close, and we’d always spent holidays together. Father’s Day was my favorite. We’d go to church in the morning and [More]

I was about halfway up a cliff face on Mount Thompson, with California’s Sierra Nevada spread out behind me. But I didn’t have time to enjoy the panoramic view. I was focused on reaching the summit. I was free-climbing—scaling the cliff face without safety ropes. I’d gone 70 feet so far. I had about 100 feet left to go.   I swiped the sweat from my forehead and prepared for my next move. This section was tricky; the cliff face was smooth and flat. Not many places to grip, save for a baseball-size handhold just within reach of my right hand. I’d use [More]

I walked into the tag sale, excited to find a treasure. The first table I came upon was full of railroad memorabilia.   “Fantastic, aren’t they?” another early bird said, admiring some old Chesapeake and Ohio Railway calendars. “Are you a train buff too?”   “Not really,” I said. It was a complicated question. Trains had always been part of my life. My father worked for the Chesapeake and Ohio for most of his life. He wasn’t an engineer or a conductor or even a ticket seller. Daddy had a job few people even knew about: railroad telegraph operator. He [More]

My three-year-old son’s cries jolted me awake. I rushed to his room. Michael was sitting up in bed and crying.   “Bramble, Mommy,” he said through tears.   I pulled him to me and stroked his soft hair.   “It’s just a dream, Baby,” I told him. “Bramble isn’t real. He can’t hurt you.”   For weeks now, my son had been having the same recurring nightmare—about a bald man called Bramble. In the dreams, Bramble stood in our backyard, staring in Michael’s bedroom window. He never tried to harm Michael in the dreams, but my son was terrified. It [More]

“Teddy’s gone!” I cried.   My husband, Gus, pulled me into a hug. We stood, surrounded by shattered glass from our back door. While we were at the gym, someone had broken into our house. We’d searched all of the rooms. The only things missing were our wedding bands and some other jewelry—and our seven-year-old toy poodle, Teddy Pooh Bear.   Gus and I didn’t have children, so Teddy was our baby, our little girl. We usually took her everywhere, even to church. But that night, we’d left Teddy at home for just an hour while we went to work [More]

12/08/19   The little girl looked familiar. She sat in the corner of my hospital room, staring out the window. She wasn’t looking at me or saying anything. She seemed serene. I found her presence uplifting after a harrowing week of being severely ill. But who was she? And what was she doing here in my hospital room?   I’d been admitted to the hospital a few days before, diagnosed with septic shock from a urinary tract infection. I was in my mid-twenties and too focused on my job in viral research to pay attention to my symptoms. It didn’t [More]

12/08/19   It was Christmas Eve morning, and I awoke with a mission: to find my lost cat, Baby-Girl. As I got ready, I could hear icy rain pelting the windows. I said a quick prayer for Baby-Girl. She was out there somewhere in the storm, I could just feel it. Sure, it had been six months since she’d gone missing, but I still had faith. It was the season for miracles, after all.   That summer, my sweet kitty had disappeared from my parents’ house in Indiana. Baby-Girl had been staying with them while I was between apartments. I’m [More]

12/08/19   Your house is going to be struck by lightning today.   The voice woke me up. It was a late-summer night in Wisconsin, 1993. The air was thick. My sheets stuck to me as I rolled over, trying to ignore the strange statement. Tomorrow was my third day as a high school freshman, and I needed all the sleep I could get. This farmhouse had been where Grandpa lived his whole life. Our family had moved in five months ago, after he’d passed away. Lightning had never struck.   BOOOOOM! Thunder rattled the windows. I opened one eye [More]

I had just walked in the door after a long commute from downtown Toronto. The bus had been late, and I was tired. It wasn’t easy working three jobs and raising four active teenagers.   Mine were good kids—three girls and a boy—but they were still a lot to handle. Especially for a single parent. I had hoped to come home and find them all quietly doing their homework. That was the deal. But they were running around with the five next-door neighbor children instead. I sighed.   My oldest daughter rushed up to me. “Mom, can they stay for [More]

  One cold winter morning as I looked out my bedroom window at the gray, bleak landscape. I wondered, What is my life worth? Where do I fit into the scheme of things? I felt completely overwhelmed by rejection. I couldn’t see any hope in my future. And when I considered my past, I didn’t like anything I saw. I was 45 years old, and had recently lost my job. I was getting no response to the dozens of resumés I sent out.   The idea of taking a drink occurred to me, but I had already been down that road. Alcohol had wreaked havoc on [More]