Proof The Bible Is True

My 10-year-old, Donna, burst through the front door. “Mom, I made a new friend at school today,” she said. “Can she come over tomorrow?” Donna was a shy kid and I had been praying for her to make some friends to bring her out of her shell.   “Sure, honey, that sounds great,” I said, thinking back to my own best friend growing up.   Lillian and I lived across the street from each other in Washington Heights, New York. We met at age 10 too, and were instantly joined at the hip. Like my daughter, I was introverted, but [More]

My mom, nearly 80 years old, fell and suffered an injury. After several days in the hospital, she moved to a rehab center to begin a long recovery. As a registered nurse, I couldn’t help myself from closely observing everything the nurses did. Questioning them on every little detail. I didn’t want to get in their way, but who could look out for her better than I could?   The day after Mom moved into the center, I came to check on her. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. Good, she’s sleeping, I thought. Mom had been in so much [More]

“She’s a good kid, and it’s only for a few months,” my friend said, pleading for me to let her cousin’s daughter from Washington live with me and my husband, Mark, while the girl attended her first semester at Oregon State. Normally I would have said yes, but it hadn’t been long since Mark’s heart attack, and we needed some peace and quiet. “I’ll think about it,” I said, hoping the girl would find other arrangements.   Mark’s heart attack had been quite an ordeal. I still shuddered every time I thought about receiving the call that my husband had [More]

Opening the blinds early that morning, I wondered if I’d be able to catch a glimpse of Mount Baker 40 miles away. The 10,000-foot peak dominates the Nooksack River Valley. At least it does on the days when you can see it. Western Washington isn’t known for its clear skies. Even in late May, clouds can sometimes shroud the landscape for weeks at a time. But that morning, the view looked postcard-perfect.   All spring Chad Gruizenga, a part-time employee at my company, Pacific Pumping, had been after me to join him for a snowmobile run on Mount Baker. “I [More]

Elmer Hambaugh will never forget that Easter weekend. Especially that Monday morning when the doctors came to operate on his foot.   Good Friday morning, thinking to take a short work break, Elmer parked the city bus he drove for a living in front of a suburban Cincinnati police station. As he chatted inside, Elmer was dumbstruck to see his empty bus start slowly rolling downhill, straight for an intersection packed with rush-hour traffic.   Read More: An Easter Healing – Guideposts

My mother was forever doing me “favors.” One Sunday morning in June 1959 my mother walked into my room. “Surprise!” she said, proudly holding up a yellow dress with black and white stripes. “I made it just for you. What do you think?”   I bit my tongue. How could I tell Mom it was the most hideous dress I had ever seen? The too-intense colors, the gaudy rhinestone buttons, the shiny patent-leather belt, the hopelessly out-of-style billowy skirt.   “It’s perfect for church,” my mother continued blithely. “I wish someone had made a dress like this for me.”   [More]

Driving through an icy rainstorm, we were headed to a mountain resort for the weekend. Wipers slashing, shoulders tense, I focused on the winding six-lane highway ahead. A dozen cars zipped past us, but I held my speed down. With my wife, Kathy, and 13-year-old son, Jeff, in the car, I didn’t want to take any chances.   As I approached a sweeping right-hand curve, the car suddenly skidded. We spun across the highway, hurtling straight for the steel guardrail. I glimpsed the fear in Kathy’s and Jeff’s faces. I said a prayer and braced for the crash.   Read [More]

One of my former students passed away suddenly. Had I made a difference in his life?   I was enjoying my last few weeks of summer vacation before returning to my job as a high school teacher, when I received a terrible shock. While reading the local newspaper I discovered that a former student of mine, a 19-year-old named John Becker, had died of a serious illness.   I pictured him in my sign-language class—a bright youngster with wire-rim glasses and a baseball cap. His enthusiasm was surprising for a second-semester senior. He didn’t seem to have any hearing-impaired friends [More]

He thought he was lost. But thanks to God’s grace he was right where he needed to be all along.   I was part of a missionary group that traveled to Craiova, Romania, after the fall of communism. One thing I relished was my morning prayer time. I found an out-of-the-way overgrown cemetery, the perfect place for meditation. I memorized the path: Turn right at the yellow fence, go up the hill toward the smell of baking bread, turn left at the rose garden, pass the two barking German shepherds then cross the sidewalk stained with mulberries.   One morning, [More]

Just another dreary March day, I thought, looking out the kitchen window. Not a bit of color. No hint that spring might arrive soon. And it had been a long, long winter.   My husband, Raymond, was sitting at the table in his wheelchair while I cleaned up after our breakfast. “Are you the lady who’s keeping me here?” Raymond asked in a testy voice from behind me. “I want to go home.”   I turned from the window and walked over to him. “You are home, honey,” I said, patting his shoulder.   This may have been the toughest [More]

All she wanted was to make one child’s Christmas wishes come true. But was it too late?   Christmas was just a few weeks away, and I strolled through the department store, picking up a few items for someone special. Every year I pick a needy child’s wish list from the “Angel Tree” at my local mall, hoping to spread a little of the holiday spirit.   Wristwatch, check. A pair of athletic shoes, size six, check. Finally, I grabbed a yellow fleece jacket off the rack and brought everything to the register. It made me feel good picturing that [More]

A surprise scrap of love, found in a thrift-store bargain bin.   Aunt June was always there for me growing up. She wasn’t really my aunt—she was one of my mother’s best friends. But she was more like family. She saw me through dance recitals, first dates, and made sure I was well-polished in table manners and full of southern charm. I loved to watch her knit, her hands deftly gliding the needle in and out, turning mere yarn into beautiful things.   When I was pregnant with my first child, Aunt June told me she wanted to knit a [More]

It was a strange Christmas package: a large plastic mailbox.   A present from Susan, a woman I’d worked with. “I didn’t have a box or a gift bag, so I packed your gift in that,” Susan explained, giving it to me outside my office that morning. I tried to laugh. I could definitely use some cheering up, especially after the night that I’d had.   It was supposed to be the big night for our Christmas tree trimming, and I was determined to make it extra-special this year. My husband had walked out on my three kids and me [More]

Mom grew up with two deaf parents. A lot of people might be frustrated by that situation, but Mom embraced it. She devoted her life to helping the deaf as a sign-language interpreter. From the time we were little, my sister and I picked up all the signs, especially the one for “I love you”—the two middle fingers bent inward, the index finger, pinkie and thumb extended. That’s how we always said goodbye.   When she was in her forties, Mom got sick. Cancer. Even so, she cared more about me and my sister than she did about herself, always [More]

The woman at the airline ticket counter in Munich, Germany, just shook her head. “I’m sorry, but there’s no more availability on this flight,” she said. Great, I thought. My husband, Bob, and I had enjoyed every moment of our dream vacation, two weeks in Europe, but I was ready to go home to Shreveport, Louisiana, and sleep in my own bed. Bob could see how frustrated I was. “We’ll just have to try to get on the flight tomorrow,” he said. “Let’s enjoy the extra day.”   Bob’s right, I thought. There were more important things to be worried about—my son [More]

I wasn’t looking forward to substituting at the preschool that morning. Five months had passed since my two-year-old daughter, Hannah, had died, and I knew it would be hard for me to be around kids her age. I only said yes after the preschool director promised to assign me to the class of older kids. But I couldn’t help feeling the emptiness around me as I drove to the school without Hannah. I longed to feel one of her big hugs, letting me know that everything would be okay.   Somehow, I managed to make it through the morning session. [More]

Ten o’clock and I’m still at the office, I thought. I’d been putting in a lot of extra hours lately. I barely had a moment to think, pray, talk to my friends—just to relax. Everyone else had left hours ago. I’d promised myself I would get home early tonight. So why was I still at work? Just one more fax, I told myself. Then I’ll leave.   I put the papers on the machine and punched in the number of a client in Los Angeles. Then I pressed the “send” button. An error message flashed on the display beside the [More]

Zach, our 12-year-old, woke up the day after Thanksgiving last year and let out a loud whoop. It had snowed. Not just a dusting either, but a thick blanket. He bugged his older brothers, Jake and Mike, until they finally agreed to take him sledding.   Later that afternoon the phone rang. It was Mike. His voice was tense. “Dad, you need to get here right away. Jake’s hurt. He can’t talk. He can’t move. Hurry!”   But Mike didn’t know where they were. Jake had driven and Mike hadn’t paid much attention to where they went. The only landmark [More]

I’d once been an active man, a man who knew how to walk in the woods. Even in the dark I could find my way to the wild brook, where I’d be fishing by dawn, able to see deer come down from the mountain to drink.   By 1980 those woodland days were over. For more than 15 years I’d been confined to a wheelchair, a victim of crippling rheumatoid arthritis. I did my best to live a full life, and I still felt loved by God. Just the same, when November’s sporting season came ’round, I tended to be [More]

I was working the 3-to-11 shift at Miners Hospital in Spangler, Pennsylvania, when a patient I was feeding asked, “Why don’t you have a little pin on like the other nurses?”   “I do,” I said, reaching to show him the golden, wreath-shaped R.N. pin on my collar—one of my proudest possessions. It had been given to me when I graduated from nursing school in Altoona, and it stood for years of hard work and study. But now, when I looked down, the pin was gone.   I knew I had pinned it to my uniform just before I left [More]

In the winter of 1944 during World War II, I was in France, a platoon sergeant in the Yankee Division under General Patton. About mid-December I received a letter from my mother back in the States.   “Can you remember,” she asked, “where you were on Thanksgiving Day?”   Could I remember? How could I forget the odd thing that happened that day. At dawn I was sent to check out a crossroads where an enemy strongpoint was suspected. Normally I would have had my men fan out so that they could move with the cover of the trees. But just [More]

I didn’t see her, but my friend sure did. God’s grace stepped in.   On a gloomy day years ago, my sister and I were driving back home on the old Columbia River Highway. As we went past the beautiful Multnomah Falls near Larch Mountain, Elva said suddenly, “How odd. Why is that woman sitting there with an umbrella? It isn’t raining.”   “What woman?” I said. I had seen no one. I thought Elva must have dozed off and dreamed it.   “She was sitting on the ground beside the road, her feet out in front of her, looking [More]

We were sitting at the table in our Florida home and talking to our next-door neighbors. This young couple had helped us a lot in the past year and a half, after my stroke and my husband’s leg injury.   Unexpectedly, the husband began telling us the story of his troubled past. At 16 he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd in his hometown of Greenwood, South Carolina, and had spent a year in a reformatory. When he was released he’d had good intentions but, because of his record, he couldn’t find a job.   He became desperate and decided [More]

It was the night before Christmas Eve, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even my golden retriever mix, Lucky. She was sleeping peacefully, curled up on the floor. My small artificial Christmas tree was set up on a table in the corner of the room. Its lights twinkled merrily.   The rain was coming down hard outside, creating a soothing melody. I decided to take a cue from Lucky and turn in early. As I drifted off to sleep, visions of sugar plums should’ve been dancing through my head. Instead, I woke to a strange hissing sound.   [More]

“3 mysterious ways stories.” Admin   I was at my mother’s house, sorting I through her things. It was my birthday, but I was too sad to celebrate. Plus, there was so much to do. Mom had passed just two days earlier.   I felt the loss deeply, even though Mom and I had had a complicated relationship. I was the youngest of nine. She’d told me she thought she was done having children when she got pregnant with me, and she’d hoped for a boy. Sometimes I wondered if I’d been a disappointment.   Read More: 3 Miraculous Birthday Gifts from [More]

Did you know that in the Bible, there are 139 references to the healing power of God’s love?   Indeed, when Jesus walked on earth, he brought a two-pronged message of good news. First, he preached the message of forgiveness, offering imperfect people reconciliation to God and the promise of eternal life.   Secondly, he healed people. Physically, emotionally, relationally and spiritually, Jesus healed people.   Forgiveness and healing: two sides of the same coin that, according to the Bible, pretty much sum up what God is all about. I discovered it in a surprising way.   I was 24 years [More]

There were two ways I relaxed: quilting and smoking. Quilting was my passion. Smoking was my addiction. I was a nurse. I knew cigarettes were slowly killing me. But I just couldn’t stop. My good sense couldn’t stop me. My husband couldn’t stop me. My kids couldn’t stop me. I was a smoker, and that was that.   I loved the ritual: Take the cigarette out of the pack and put it in my mouth, flick the wheel on the lighter and watch as a spark becomes a flame, suck in and taste that first drag of smoke. A ciga- [More]