Proof The Bible Is True

New Year’s Eve, 1984. My husband, our two little boys and I were visiting my in-laws in Amarillo, Texas. We watched the ball drop and welcomed the new year together. Our original plan had been to stay over, but I wasn’t feeling up to it. We decided to drive the few hours back to our home in Clovis, New Mexico. It had been a long night. A long year, really.   Grandma Marjorie, whom I was really close to, had recently been hospitalized with pneumonia. She’d been in and out of the hospital all year with breathing issues. Watching her [More]

I’ve got to remember to call Tyler today.…The thought came to me while I was waking up, still hazy from sleep. Then I remembered—our son was gone.   It had been just more than two years since Tyler, a former Marine, had lost his battle with PTSD and taken his own life. Some days, like today, I’d still wake up thinking that it had all just been a terrible dream.   I got up and walked to the bookshelf we’d made into a small memorial for Tyler. It held items we displayed at his funeral—Marine Corps mementos, medals and a [More]

BEEP-BE-BE-BEEP!   A chorus of angry horns blared at me as I sat in my Altima, stalled in the middle of a busy intersection. It was a blazing hot August afternoon. Quite the time and place for my car’s entire electrical system to give out, including the power locks on my doors and windows. Trapped inside without air conditioning, I had to wait for a police officer to arrive to assist. He pried open my vehicle, shifted it to neutral, pushed me to a parking lot and called a tow truck to transport the car to a garage.   “It’s [More]

On Mother’s Day we celebrate all the miracles of motherhood.   But back in 1959, Peggy Rasmussen didn’t feel at all like celebrating. For Peggy, it was a reminder that she might never be a mother. She’d been praying and praying for a child, but it just didn’t seem like it was going to happen.   Then Peggy received a Mother’s Day message that spoke straight to her heart. Something that told her she was meant to be a mother after all.   My husband, Milton, and I were at church. So many happy families filled the pews, moms doting [More]

Katie Mahon is a miracle expert. She’s coauthor of the book The Miracle Chase and writes regularly about her hunt for God’s wonder in the world. She wasn’t always that way, though. For many years, Katie was a self-described miracle skeptic!   When she was a teenager, she escaped the clutches of a notorious serial killer in the most unbelievable of ways. But she had trouble labeling that incredible incident as miraculous.   Here Katie tells the story of that encounter. And how one morning, 15 years later, she finally woke up to that miracle from God.   Read More: [More]

My family was driving across Canada to Montreal where my husband, Ray, and I were going to be helping out a new church there.   Ray had gotten a head start with our daughter in a rental truck stuffed with our belongings. I took my two-year-old, John, in our family car, a hardtop convertible jam-packed from floor to ceiling with piles of books to use in our work. They hadn’t been able to fit in the truck.   We crossed into Ontario, driving along a narrow two-lane road. A heavy rain fell. Suddenly a truck veered into our lane. I [More]

Something about the sea can drive men mad. How else to explain all those stories of alluring mermaids, terrifying sea monsters and ghost ships? Like the legend of the Flying Dutchman, forever floating above the waves, its long-dead crew delivering dire warnings to the spooked sailors of passing vessels.   As a writer and sailor, I find these stories fascinating, but the name of my 35-foot sailboat reflects how I feel about them–Tall Tales.   My buddy Tristan was like me, which is why I thought he was pulling my leg when he revealed his own unlikely tale. He had [More]

I squinted. Was that a pothole?   Turning the wheel, I guided the car around potential danger. It was early, still dark, and the back roads that wind over and around our creeks in Fredericksburg, Virginia, were tricky even in daylight. The children were at home, still asleep, but I was driving to meet my carpool, all of us government workers in Alexandria, about an hour north.   A hurricane had just blown through our area, but apart from getting to work on time, I wasn’t worried. We were fortunate, with no damage to our property, and most of the [More]

Purple was my twin sister Suzy’s favorite color. It was the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses on her wedding day, the color of the sweater she had worn most often, a gift from me.   And now, on a cold, rainy day in March, I stood in her driveway with my family, Suzy’s children and her husband, all of us clutching purple balloons, our eyes wet with tears. In a minute we would release our grip and the balloons would float up to the heavens. The balloons were our way of letting go. Moving on.   It had been exactly [More]

This was one birthday I definitely felt like ignoring. Sixty-five. Officially a senior citizen. Entering those golden years that once had seemed so far away. I wasn’t ready to be a geezer.   That morning nothing seemed right. The annual local gospel music festival my wife, Sarah, and I host on our property had been an organizational nightmare. And now, as I returned home from a long day of work on a dairy farm, I noticed that the wire fence I had repaired just the night before had broken again.   Of all the…. I braked my truck and climbed [More]

A few weeks ago, three children in Moreno Valley, California, released a trio of colorful, helium-filled Mylar balloons into the sky. Attached to each was a handwritten, heartbreaking letter.   “Hi Mom, I miss you,” one letter read. “I hope you come and visit me soon because I have questions to ask, like why you had to leave…”   Each of the letters carried a small expression of the children’s grief. Their mother, 42-year-old Renee Finney, had recently lost a two-year battle with cancer. She’d passed away five days before Mother’s Day.   The children, ages 16, 18 and 25, [More]

RIIING! RIIIING! RIIINNNNGG! Chimes startled me awake. I slapped my alarm clock, but the noise didn’t stop. It wasn’t my alarm. The doorbell?   Our two Labrador retrievers, Jax and Shelby, began barking along, composing a chaotic symphony that echoed throughout the house. RING! RING! BARK! BARK! I glanced at the time: 1:00 a.m. Who could be at our door this late? They’d better have a good excuse for waking the kids.   I groaned as I stumbled out of bed. It had been such a struggle to get my four-year-old, Jacob, and one-year-old, Samantha, tucked in for the night–I [More]

How could my husband, Doug, be so calm? Sitting on the edge of my bed in the maternity ward, casually flipping through the newspaper like everything would be fine. Everything during my first pregnancy in 1967 had gone fine up to that point. Doug got me to the hospital in plenty of time; six hours later, baby Liz arrived, perfectly healthy, weighing in at exactly eight pounds. I couldn’t wait to be on our way and start our new life as a family of three. Then came the hitch.   “We just need to settle your bill before you can [More]

I tapped my pen against the kitchen table and stared at my to-do list. Plan side dishes, get the turkey, tidy up the house—Thanksgiving was two days away, and there was so much to get done.   But that wasn’t why I was anxious. My son, Bill, was driving home from school for Thanksgiving break. His first visit since he’d gone off to college. And he was late.   The phone rang. My husband, William, answered it. As he paced around the kitchen with the receiver to his ear, I heard snippets of his conversation: Car trouble. Transmission. Tow truck. [More]

The U-Haul office in Grove, Oklahoma, was nearly empty that Wednesday the week before Thanksgiving. Just one other person ahead of me.   “I’ll be with you in just a few minutes,” the counter clerk said. I nodded and sat on a bench next to the desk, anxious to be on my way.   Last time I was here, seven years ago, it was to move Mom into her new duplex. Now Mom had passed away, and since I lived closer than my two sisters, I was responsible for emptying Mom’s place and driving our beloved family treasures to my [More]

It was one of those cold December evenings when there’s nothing better to do than cuddling on the couch, watching one of those heartwarming, made-for-TV holiday movies. That’s exactly the night my husband Kurt and I had planned. We live way out in the country with only our Springer spaniel for company, so it was quiet. Just the TV and the howl of the winter wind outside.   A ring at our door startled us. I glanced at the clock—8 p.m. Who’d be visiting after dinnertime on a cold night like this? I opened the door a crack. John, Dana [More]

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]

I stopped by my mother’s house to water the plants while she was in the nursing home. Mom wasn’t doing well, and the doctors had told me to prepare for the worst. But in her house, surrounded by her familiar possessions—the photographs on the dresser, the vase on the dining room table, the throw on the sofa—everything seemed reassuringly unchanged, as if Mom could just walk through the door at any minute, her old self again.   I stepped into the living room. My eyes fell on an old wooden jigsaw puzzle in the shape of a puppy. It sat [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]

Every year, thousands flock to San Francisco to walk across that fabled vermilion span, the Golden Gate Bridge. They come for the sweeping views of the city, the fog-wreathed hillsides abutting cold gray waters. The bridge rises 220 feet above the bay. Below, sharks and sea lions swim and dangerous currents churn. Tourists crowd the walkway, braced against the wind, snapping photos.   On a cool, foggy September afternoon, I boarded a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge. I wasn’t a tourist. I didn’t care about the view. I was going to jump.   I sat at the back of [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]