Proof The Bible Is True

I’ll start by warning you that you might want to grab a tissue for this one. I’ve watched this video 8-10 times and I’ve cried every time I’ve seen it. WTVR in Richmond, Virginia, shared this wonderful story that originated with a Facebook video by Becky Miller. The Texas mom posted about her daughter, Bailey, who had been paralyzed for 11 days from the waist down—and there were no answers as to why. Just to set the scene for you, on the day this video was taken, Bailey was waiting on her favorite nurse, and she had a big surprise [More]

For months my husband, Mark, and I had been saving up to get a third family car so that our daughter Anne would have something to drive when she turned 16. With four children, another car—and another driver—in the family would be a godsend. Then came the bad news: Our well had dried up, and so did our savings when we drilled a new one. “I guess I’ll just have to pray for a car,” Anne said when we told her. Anne wasn’t just being a good sport. She really prayed for that car. “I’m praying specifically, just like you [More]

I have always prayed about everything. Big things, small things—they all matter. I trust that God takes an interest in everything going on in my life. But even I didn’t know what to say when my teenaged son, Alan, announced late one night, clear out of the blue, that he was going to bake a lemon meringue pie. Really? “Alan, that’s ridiculous,” I said. “It’s bedtime. I just cleaned the kitchen and did the dishes. Besides, you have school tomorrow. If you want to bake a pie, bake it when you get home in the afternoon. We won’t be able [More]

A coastal wind ruffled my hair as I sat outside our small stucco tract house in Lompoc, California, and I wondered for the millionth time if we should move. The house seemed to squeeze tighter around us as our three active sons, ages thirteen, ten and six, kept growing. I longed for more room. My husband Patrick and I often looked at larger homes, yearning yet hesitant. The question hounded me again: Should we try to move? I prayed for guidance. While reading my Bible one day my heart quickened when I came across Psalm 18:19 (NIV), which read, “He [More]

Has God ever impressed on you to do a big project for Him, and you worked hard on it for years—and yet it seemed like nothing was happening, and God was a million miles away? That’s where I’ve been lately with a huge dream God placed on my heart. Some good things have happened, but the big provisions from Him haven’t arrived yet. I’ll be honest, I’ve been a bit discouraged. Then during my devotions recently, I read a verse in Isaiah 7:11, “Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God.” Those words glared from the page at [More]

In this story from January 1982, the acclaimed actress tells of her first encounter with God, when a prayerful plea received a response more immediate than she could have expected. When I was 18 years old, I had an experience that was to affect the rest of my life. My parents were divorced. Starved for family love, I ran away at 16 to marry my childhood sweetheart. At 17, I had my precious son. Then the war came along, and soon my young husband was drafted and sent overseas. During his long absence, I lived with his very religious parents in [More]

My younger sister Diane has come out from California to help care for me as I recover from this mysterious lung infection. Her prayers have been added to your prayers and the prayers of so many people, so many friends, so many strangers, so many who care and believe in God working through us. My toughest days in the hospital were in that first week. I struggled, at times, over every breath. The doctors put me on the the strongest antibiotics they could send through i.v. drips in my arms. They worked hard to send oxygen in my lungs, giving [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]

My 63-year-old dad had been in love with my mom ever since he saw her at a Christmas party at church when he was 17 and she was 14. She was his best friend, the one constant in all of his memories, his dreams, his motivation, his adolescence; she was his planning partner for the rest of their days on earth. Mom was essentially Dad’s entire life. That’s why, when one morning she ironed my dad’s work shirts, straightened up the house, and walked out the door of their home while he was at work—never to return—it waylaid my dad [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]

We worked on pronunciation, inflection, tone, pace and body language. He taught us the importance of making eye contact with the audience. Perhaps the most crucial thing he taught us was what we were doing when we were giving a reading. “When you participate in the church service, you are giving people a gift from God. That’s why we work so hard to open ourselves to the words on the page.” Under Father Rivers’s guidance, I learned to stop thinking of myself as a woman speaking in public. I was the tool God used to share good news with others. [More]

I lay perfectly still on the hospital scanning machine table with my arms and legs strapped down. Heaviness surrounded my heart like a shroud, but I purposely didn’t cry because I couldn’t wipe away the tears. My doctor had ordered a thyrogen scan to detect thyroid cancer. As I waited for it to begin, many questions raced through my mind: Did the radioactive iodine treatment work? Had the cancer reappeared and spread? Would I need surgery? After 23 years in remission, my bloodwork had shown a possible recurrence of thyroid cancer. Over the next year and a half, I endured [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]

I’ve always loved the idea of angels: messengers of God who guide and protect every human life; offer forgiveness, comfort, grace and aid; and love us as God does–unconditionally. So I was thrilled when I got hired at Angels on Earth almost 10 years ago. From my first day on the job, I felt like God intended for me to work at this magazine. After being at the magazine for about a year, one evening on my subway ride home from the office I wondered silently: Do I really believe in angels? I enjoyed that readers got so much reassurance [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]

Who held his hand after the devastating car accident? Most people who know me know I died on January 18, 1989, went to heaven, and was prayed back to earth about ninety minutes later; however, many don’t know the rest of the story—a part I didn’t know until more than a year afterward. One powerful element came out when I ate at a Chinese restaurant with Dick and Anita Onerecker. We had just come from church, where Dick served as the senior pastor. They had invited me to preach. My first encounter with Dick and Anita had been in the [More]

Little did they know that they were visited by an angel who bore a message from heaven. Sometimes, early in our marriage, for no reason at all, my husband would stop at a flower shop and buy me a dozen roses. “A whole dozen!” I’d say, overwhelmed and aghast. “Oh, Dave, they’re too expensive.We can’t afford this.” For a while he didn’t hear me. If he saw twelve roses, he’d buy them all. To the Italian romantic, more was better. But finally, my Scotch-Irish nature got through to him. “Oh, Dave, they’re so wonderful–but I just can’t appreciate more than [More]

Bang! The door slamming jolted me awake. The sky outside my bedroom window was pitch-black. It wasn’t anywhere near morning. Whatever time it was, my father was awake and furious. “Those no good…They’re gone!” he said. Then he yelled, “Everybody up!” I scrambled out of bed and followed my older sister, Geraldine, into the kitchen where my parents were. “The field hands have deserted us!” Dad said. “Snuck off in the middle of the night!” Why would they do that? I thought sleepily. Then I remembered. The afternoon before I’d been tucked up in the hayloft and heard Dad fight [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]

Click! I buckled my son, Gregory, into his car seat and hopped into the driver’s side. Gregory had a pediatrician appointment, and I was running behind schedule. I glanced at the dashboard clock. Please don’t let us be late. Cynthia with her son, GregoryI followed the speed limit, going not a mile over or under, and headed for the highway. Since the Eagle Ford shale oil boom, the roads near my west Texas town were busy. Highway 277 used to be wide-open for miles. Now it was packed with 18-wheelers. It got a little crowded on that tiny, two-lane Texas [More]

Any minute now, I was going to die. I gripped my blanket and peered out the hospital window, the cold December wind howling in the darkness. My heart thumped in my chest, fast and erratic. Not the strong, steady heartbeat of a normal 18-year-old. But I wasn’t normal. Three weeks earlier, I’d had a kidney transplant at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where I was still recovering. I had hydronephrosis, a disease that damages the kidneys. When I had one of them removed at the age of four, my doctor warned my parents I’d eventually need a transplant. We weren’t prepared [More]

Out in the yard trimming a tree, I thought, Fred should see me now. We’d been married almost 50 years when lung cancer took him from me. In the four months since, I wondered every day how I’d go on alone without him by my side. I threw some clippings into a pile and felt a presence behind me. A deer stood stock-still, staring at me from three yards away. I’d never seen such a noble-looking animal before. She was almost entirely white, except for a bit of brown on her forehead. But not just white. Immaculately white. Her coat [More]

“Who do you want to sign it, Georgie?” one of my friends asked that Friday as we stood in a circle in the schoolyard, holding our little autograph books for our friends and teachers to write in before eighth grade graduation. It was exciting figuring out who to approach next. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” I said, flipping through the pages of my book. “Just so long as I get all my friends and favorite teachers.” The group nodded in agreement, but I wasn’t being totally honest. There was one of those who mattered most: Mrs. Lucky. She was my teacher [More]

From her perch atop El Panecillo hill, the 148-foot winged Virgin kept watch over the city of Quito. I lingered in her shadow long after my classmates had snapped their photos and left. When the coast was clear, I stuck a crumpled note into a crack at the base of the statue. I’d scribbled five simple words across it, my heart’s deepest desire: Please send me an angel. It was week two of my college study abroad semester in Quito, Ecuador, 6,000 miles from my home in Norway, and I was desperately homesick. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for travel. [More]

My job as community relations manager for a United Way after-school program involved providing information to parents’ groups, but while I was comfortable on the phone or speaking one-on-one, presenting to large crowds terrified me. I’d started attending weekly Toastmasters meetings, trying to get over my fears. My boss misunderstood and assumed I was a pro. She decided I should give a fundraising speech to a stage agency of 400 employees, hoping they would make a payroll-deduction pledge. I nervously composed my speech, incorporating attention-getting techniques and humor, just as I’d learned. I developed visual aids and compiled anecdotes. I [More]