Proof The Bible Is True

02/06/19   I was making my morning coffee in the kitchen and wondering how I would get through the day, especially with the rain coming down, when Tony’s picture toppled from the mantle in the family room. Again. Ever since my husband died two years earlier, that gold-framed photo—Tony posing with his prize hunting dogs—kept falling. That wasn’t all that was happening. Sometimes the TV would turn on out of the blue. And I’d get this feeling that Tony was still with me. Was it just the wishful thinking of a lonely widow? I couldn’t be sure.   I picked [More]

Wind whipped through my hair as I flew over the snow. It was glorious! Until my snowmobile sputtered beneath me. Not again. I slowed to a stop. My friends zoomed ahead on the snow-covered trails through the woods, maneuvering easily, dodging trees and rocks.   I’d never ridden a snowmobile before today. But when I met some folks who invited me up to the trails outside Twisp, Washington, I jumped at the chance. Excitement? Count me in. I went scuba diving, climbed mountains, even jumped out of airplanes. Did I ever worry about hurting myself? Never! I was young and invincible. I’d [More]

I lifted the heavy lid of our old freezer in the garage and peered inside, looking for some vegetables to make for dinner. For the past year, we’d scraped by on my small teacher’s salary while my husband, Mike, was away at graduate school. With three hungry teenagers to feed, it was a challenge to stretch our grocery dollars. Now, one glance at the half-empty freezer made me question what I’d done on impulse a week earlier.   The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Kathy, my 14-year-old, blurted out that one of her friends wasn’t celebrating the holiday because her mother couldn’t afford [More]

I stood outside my sister’s house that cold March morning trying to understand how everything had changed. Police cars lined the driveway. An ambulance drove away and a coroner drove up.   How was this possible? We had all been together the night before eating Sunday dinner at my mom’s house. Could it really be true that my sister was dead?   “What do you think happened?” I looked at my mom, shivering. Neither of us had grabbed a coat in our urgent dash to my sister’s house on the other side of town.   Mom shrugged and shook her [More]

I watched in horror from the stair­case as the water gushed through the front door. The smell of salt water filled the air, mist hitting me in the face. I stepped off the last step into the ankle-deep flood and gasped. The level was rising. And fast.   I had to get help. I sloshed through the flood to the living room. That’s when I saw him. Sitting in the middle of the room on top of a pillow, with­out a care in the world. A baby in a white bodysuit. He was about seven months old, chewing on his [More]

Are you all right?” I said.   The middle-aged woman next to me on my flight home had been teary-eyed when we boarded, and now she was visibly crying.   I wasn’t doing great myself. My 22-year-old son had recently died of a blood clot in his brain. I was returning home to New York after clearing out his apartment in Phoenix, Arizona, where he’d only just moved—he hadn’t even had time yet to buy me a cross for my collection. I had one from every other place he ever lived. It was our ritual.   “Yes, well—” the woman [More]

I grew up believing that Christmas was a time when strange and wonderful things happened, when wise and royal visitors came riding, when at midnight the barnyard animals talked to one another, and in the light of a fabulous star God came down to us as a little Child.   Christmas to me has always been a time of enchantment, and never more so than the year that my son Marty was eight.   That was the year that my children and I moved into a cozy trailer home in a forested area just outside of Redmond, Washington. As the [More]

Call Karyn. Those words startled me from a sound sleep. I sat straight up, rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock: just after three in the morning.   My younger sister Karyn was a senior at Eastern Michigan University and was used to pulling long hours studying in her tiny on-campus apartment… but she had to be asleep by now.   My alarm wasn’t set to go off for another two and a half hours. There was so much to do tomorrow.   Get my two little girls to school, work a 10-hour day at the office, take the [More]

   I sat on the bed and gently rocked my nine-month-old Gary Jr. in my arms, watching my husband dress for work. Gary Sr. looked well-rested, ready to start the day. I was still exhausted from what had happened last night. After three kids—Gary Jr. was my fourth—I thought I’d experienced every parenting nightmare there was. But last night had terrified me.   “Go check the baby.” Those words jarred me awake at one in the morning, like they had for so many nights since Gary Jr. was born. Before bed, as usual, I swaddled the baby and put him [More]

The world was a terrifying place for nine-year-old Beth Praed. She was afraid of everything. Worms, spi­ders, even little roly-poly bugs. Thun­derstorms. A car driving slowly by her house in Indianapolis. You name it.   The dark scared her the most. She wouldn’t go to bed unless her mother first checked the room, turning on the light in her closet and the one on her nightstand.   Her mother would tuck her in and kiss her goodnight, then switch off the light by the bed.   “Leave the closet light on,” Beth pleaded.   “Yes, dear,” her mother said, and [More]

I didn’t know what to write. I sat at my computer on the verge of tears. My hands hovered over the keyboard, throbbing in pain. My diary was a happy place, a file I opened up only to type in cheerful thoughts and small miracles I’d witnessed – but I didn’t have any of those now.   I had a migraine and my fibromyalgia was acting up. The pain was so bad I hadn’t been able to eat more than a few bites of breakfast before I felt nauseous. Days like this, there just wasn’t much I could do, the [More]

It was before dawn when I felt someone pulling at the bed sheets. “Too early, go back to sleep,” I mumbled. The tugging continued. I cracked open my right eye. The blurry figure of my five-year-old son, James, climbed beneath the covers. Strange, I thought. He never asked to sleep with his dad and me before, and now he was too big to fit comfortably in our bed. I wanted to shoo him away. But a voice in the dark argued against me–“Keep him with you, it’s only an hour.”   Was that my husband, Ed? I turned towards the [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]

My wife, Mary Ellen and I have been married 53 years, and we always try to spend Thanksgiving with our kids. Some time between the turkey and the pumpkin pie, we’ll share the story of the first Thanksgiving that Mary Ellen and I spent together and how it could have turned out a whole lot differently. If I hadn’t answered the call.   It was Thanksgiving eve, 1959, and I was in my dorm at Miami University in Ohio, about to set out on a long drive to pick Mary Ellen up from her school, the College of Wooster, three-and-a-half-hours [More]

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28.”  Admin “I heard that today is supposed to be the best day for fishing this entire month!” Jeff called to me from his home office last Monday. “Want to go this afternoon?” “Yes!” I responded without hesitation. I love to go bass fishing with my hubby, and it had been far too long since we’d taken a break to enjoy the great outdoors. We both finished up some projects, and he readied the [More]

“Yes, God is indeed concerned even about the “absurd” prayers we need answered.”  Admin I stood crookedly in the middle of High Street, one hand holding onto my six-year-old daughter, the other clutching my busted shoe. We’d been enjoying a beautiful summer day shopping in Stevenage, a town 40 minutes from our home in southeastern England. Until I stepped off the curb and stumbled on the uneven pavement. I didn’t fall…but the sole of my shoe had torn off the heel. What now? I couldn’t walk around barefoot! My daughter had laughed that morning when she saw my shoes, battered [More]

C’mon, Kathy, keep going. My legs burned with every stride, sweat dripped down my face as I ran outside in the scorching Florida heat. The desolate country road ahead of me seemed endless. How long had I been out here? Was I making good time? Would I really be ready to run a marathon? I had no way of knowing. I was completely lost without my training partner—my hot pink iPod, ruined on my last run thanks to an unexpected rainstorm. My 50 th birthday was coming up, and my daughter and I had decided to celebrate the milestone with [More]

“You never know how a good deed will be paid back!”  Admin I cruised down the wide-open freeway in my red Chevy pickup and glanced at the dashboard clock. 5:30 AM. Only a few hours till I’d arrive in Ellsworth, Michigan, my hometown. After a weekend in Detroit visiting my fiancé’s family, it was time to get back to work. I had a plumbing job at 9:00, sharp. I stepped on the gas, picked up speed, and… Pop! That noise didn’t sound good. My eyes darted to the rearview mirror. A black rubber strip had whipped out from underneath my [More]

I first met Vera in 1983, when I moved to my little farm with the somewhat dilapidated farmhouse. Her40 acres adjoined my 25 acres, so she was my neighbor. Already in her upper seventies and a widow of ten years, Vera was one of those memorable women who live out their lives on their beloved homesteads. “My Dwight passed on ten years ago,” she told me on her first visit, when she came to greet me with a freshly baked peach pie and a welcoming smile. “And my two girls moved on to live their lives in cities,so I guess [More]

”Lift your bra up,” the female prison guard ordered. Finally satisfied I wasn’t carrying contraband, she let me get dressed. My husband and I had come to a state penitentiary in Tennessee to visit our son, Jeffery, sentenced to seven years on drug and gun charges. I’d never felt so violated, humiliated—and resentful. I wasn’t the criminal. Jeffery had been in trouble ever since elementary school. Even a residential intensive therapy program didn’t help. By the time he was 18, he’d spiraled into a dangerous life of crime. Until he was arrested during a drug deal. When I saw Jeffery [More]

A miraculous experience restores a couple’s souls and washes away their fears. My husband was gravely ill. In desperation, his doctors prescribed bypass heart surgery, a new and untested procedure at the time. Bob and I were both frightened and needed a reprieve. A week before his surgery, we packed a picnic and on a glorious California day drove out to the Mojave Desert. Bob loved the desert air, it was so dry and easy to breathe. We traveled aimlessly on back roads lined with desert flowers, yucca and the lovely palo verde tree. And then, on an off-road track, [More]

Early Sunday mornings I take an hour’s walk before church and often find myself pondering my many blessings. This Sunday—Mother’s Day—I had a lot to be grateful for. My daughters had both sent lovely cards, one from Arizona, the other all the way from California. Back when my daughters and I lived in the same place the girls used to bring me flowers. How I loved seeing my daughters at the door with a bouquet of fresh blossoms just for me. Of course I knew the girls didn’t love me any less now. They never forgot me on Mother’s Day! [More]