Proof The Bible Is True

We needed to find a nurse to help care for my mother, Mary Pittman. And not just any nurse. Mother had been an RN herself. The world’s best, people said. She worked for Dr. Zdanis until she was almost 80 years old. She practically ran that office. She was the best caregiver I’d ever known. She could soothe a crying child or calm a worried parent. Everyone felt better after she was done with them. And that was even before they saw the doctor.   But then she got Parkinson’s disease and had to retire. Now she was the one [More]

My 70-year-old father-in-law jumped in the water first. But he couldn’t get to my daughter. His arms flailed, tangled in the camera strap around his neck.   “Mommy!” three-year-old Jinny cried, her eyes wide with panic. She’d started swim lessons at 18 months and did fine in shallow water, but she’d drifted into the deep end of the motel pool.   Jinny reached frantically for me. She was in the middle of the pool, too far for me to pull her to safety from the deck. Before I could do a thing, she went under.   Read More: Lifted Out [More]

Daylight was just spreading across the horizon. My best friend, Jennifer, and I stood on the beach, gazing out at the ocean. It was our last day on Maui—we had a plane to catch in a few hours. But I was glad we’d gotten up early for one last breathtaking view, a visit to a mysterious spot I’d heard about from our hotel’s cultural advisor, Clifford, the night before. A place called Makalua-puna Point.   “I don’t want to leave,” Jennifer said. I didn’t either. Hawaii felt like heaven. Even more than I’d imagined it would when Maui’s tourism board [More]

Should I open it? Should I wait? Should I…?   I sat in my Nissan in the hospital parking lot, holding the envelope with my MRI results, frozen with indecision. My appointment with the neurologist wasn’t until the following afternoon. Should I wait for him to open the envelope? Then again, I’d been a nurse for more than 40 years. I didn’t exactly need a doctor to understand what the radiologist had found. And whether or not my worst fears had come true.   Since I was 15, I’d suffered from neurofibromatosis, a neurological condition that causes painful, but usually [More]

“Stop the car!” Deb King said to her husband, Jim, that Thursday afternoon. She didn’t mean to shout, but it came out that way so she squeezed Jim’s arm to reassure him.   “Honey, I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gone this way. I should have taken a different route.”   “No, it’s okay, Jim. Just stop the car. Now. Please. It’s important.”   Jim pressed down on the brake and pulled the car over to the shoulder of the interstate. It was the exact spot where he and Deb had had the accident.   Jim is a pastor, [More]

“A lost cell phone on a cold, rainy day in the woods turns out to be blessing in disguise.”   Cell phones can be a pain in the neck. Whenever I seem to need mine, I can never find it. And this was one of those times, standing by my SUV shivering and wet.   It was whitetail hunting season—a day my three buddies and I had been anticipating for months.   We parked our SUVs on a private, rural lot just after dawn and hiked two miles—lugging rifles and backpacks filled with food, water, flashlights, extra clothing, twoway radios [More]

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]

My date, Lisa, and I were huddled in the pitch black on a wooded ridge in the Colorado Rockies. All around us were rocks and sheer drops. We’d lost the trail. We were still a mile or more from the car. And it was getting colder by the minute.   I couldn’t believe I’d gotten us into this mess. I’d met Lisa through a family friend and invited her to hike Eagle Peak with me as our first date. I felt responsible for our safety and guilty that I’d put both of us in danger.   After all, I should’ve [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]

It happened in the blink of an eye. It was 2004. A normal day for professional race car driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. He was at California’s Sonoma Raceway, practicing for the American Le Mans Series race later that day. No one saw the accident coming.   Dale miscalculated and took a turn too quickly. The Corvette he was driving spun out of control, clipping the wall and catching fire. It was later determined that the car’s fuel line had ruptured, leaking gasoline everywhere. All that was needed was a spark. As cars continued to drive past, the car burst into [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]

Take a gun and end it all, Sheryl, said a dark, mocking voice in the back of my mind. End it and all this pain and worry will be over.   I didn’t even own a gun. I had been in the middle of my nightly routine when the strange thought popped into my head. Now I just sat on my bed, staring blankly at the wall. It felt as though a literal weight were pressing down on me.   Suddenly something else snapped into focus in my mind, like mental whiplash. Not a thought, exactly, but an image. An [More]

I’ll never forget the story of how my neighbor, Ben Martin, came to help my mother one fall evening on our Oklahoma farm. I’m forever thankful to him… and to the mysterious ways that brought him there.   The sun was going down, the weather was turning cold. Ben had driven into town that day to pick up his mail. From there, he intended to continue on to Tulsa, 55 miles away, to see a show.   Ben pointed his pickup toward the highway. But just before he reached the on-ramp, the strongest feeling came over him. You’re needed back [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]