Proof The Bible Is True

Maybe I should have stayed home, I thought, bobbing my head to the music, scanning the party for familiar faces. When my friend invited me to come watch her husband’s band play at a retirement dinner for local teachers, I figured it would be fun. But now I just felt out of place. It didn’t help that my mind was somewhere else, worrying about the situation I was in.   I’m the director of Eaglecrest Alaska Missions—a Michigan nonprofit that helps needy families in the Mat-Su Valley of Alaska. It was almost time for our 10-week summer program to help needy [More]

Beans and rice again. Can’t really blame the kids for not cleaning their plates, I thought, scraping off the dishes into the sink. I was sick and tired of having the same thing night after night too. It was cheap and filled our bellies, but each sad supper made me feel emptier inside.   “Lord, we’re really struggling here,” I prayed. “I want some real food. Not tomorrow, Lord. Today!”   Read More: Mysterious Ways: Prayers Answered While You Wait – Guideposts

“God is concerned even with out small problems.” Admin   “It was one of those days I had anxiously awaited all summer—September 5, 2009, the opening day of the Florida Gators college football season. My husband and I, however, were in Vermont performing volunteer construction work on a church. Fortunately, we had a satellite dish connected to our motor home. No way we’d miss Tim Tebow and the Gators.   “Just before game time, my husband turned our television on. We could get no picture. We flipped through the channels. Nothing.   Read More: One Fan’s Inexplicable Tim Tebow Experience

Graceann passed her driving test in January and received her license. She immediately began driving herself to school each morning. No more getting up super-early to wait at the bus stop, no more squeezing into a big yellow box as it wound through the city picking up kids on its way to Calvary Christian Academy.   She’d driven herself to school for more than a week—then one morning she woke up early and decided to take the bus again.   Read More: New Driver Performs a Miracle … and Saves Lives – Guideposts

Oh, how I love my morning coffee! Can’t seem to start the day without it. So imagine my distress when I pulled my can of fresh coffee grounds from the kitchen pantry shelf. It felt a little light. I looked inside. Not even enough for a single cup.   Just one more downbeat note in my life, I thought. First my painful divorce. Then the pressures of having to raise four children on my own. And now this. My salary as a bookkeeper had been stretched to the limit as it was, and coffee wasn’t in the grocery budget this [More]

Sleep is supposed to release you from your worries, your worst fears. Yet as much as I wanted and needed sleep, I doubted it would ease me. My 12-year-old daughter, June, had just emerged from a coma. Now the doctors were telling my husband and me that she’d need a series of brain surgeries if she were to survive.   Lying in bed, wrung out after another long day sitting at her bedside in the hospital, my mind replayed the horrific accident. One moment, June was riding on the back of our farm tractor with her daddy, squealing as dirt [More]

Amy Jung of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, didn’t plan on adopting a cat. She only went to the Door County Humane Society on February 8 with her son, Ethan, to play with the animals.   But one feline caught her eye. A hefty orange-and-white furball, lying on a counter. Amy asked an employee about the cat. Pudding was 8 1/2 years old and had two previous owners, a family who gave him up because their son was allergic and an older woman who had passed away.   Read More: How an Adopted Cat Saved His New Owner’s Life – Guideposts

In northeast Scotland, where I live, the Gulf Stream brings warmth to what would otherwise be a frigid climate—but it can also cause high winds. One day the weather service reported gusts topping 100 miles an hour. I almost blew away when I left for work that morning.   Fortunately, I would be spending most of my day inside at my new job assisting John, a mortgage and financial services broker. I sat at my desk, looking out the large front window, awed by the sheer power of Mother Nature. Were the brick chimneys of the old houses around us [More]

The frozen, snow-covered lake sparkled under my feet in the bright noonday sun. It was the first Saturday in March, still cold enough in Michigan for a coat and gloves even for a short walk. I’d learned to love the rugged Midwest winters during my four years at seminary, one of many adjustments from where I grew up in South Korea.   My eyes traced my footsteps back across the ice, to the trees, then to the retreat center on the bluff, where I’d started my hike and had been staying since the evening before. Other than the caretaker, Robert, [More]

“A child like faith, something we all can use more of.” Admin   I stood and buttoned my coat after the Sunday morning service, steeling myself to face the January chill, the dreariness of another long winter setting in.   David, my five-year-old, came running. He grabbed my arm, pulling me down the hall. “Mom, you’ve got to see this,” he said.   I hadn’t seen him this excited since, well, Christmas morning. But that seemed ages ago. I’d long since boxed up the Nativity, the ornaments and lights, and dragged the tree to the curb. All the work of [More]

There’s one good thing about being on the road Christmas Day, I thought, driving from my parents’ house in Richmond, Virginia, back to Charlotte, North Carolina. No traffic. I’d barely seen another car on the interstate all day.   Most people were home with their families. But not me. I was a policewoman, new enough on the force that I didn’t get a choice of shifts. I’d managed to score time off Christmas Eve, but I had to be back on duty tonight.   My sergeant made it clear: “Be here for roll call before the midnight shift.” It was a four-hour [More]

I was rummaging through my attic for the Christmas decorations when I saw it. The tree. Not a real tree of course, but an artificial one I bought the year before. It stood about 18-inches tall and had it all—glimmering ornaments, fiber optic branch tips that emitted a hypnotic array of blue, pink, green and gold sparkling lights, and a gold base that rotated the entire tree while playing Christmas carols. At least that’s what was it was supposed to do. It might as well be called a lemon tree—it never worked. I’d almost completely forgotten about it.   My [More]

My wife Angela and our children were deep in slumber when I arose before dawn and walked down to the lake behind our vacation cabin at Lake Mohawk. I began pulling weeds, one of my favorite ways to unwind — quiet and simple compared to my job as a cardiologist. This was just what I needed, a two-week getaway from the stress of 14-hour days, seeing 45-60 patients, with few breaks in-between.   Unfortunately, on the drive down the night before, a disagreement had started our vacation off on a bad note. My mind was running in overdrive as I [More]

Today’s hard economic times remind me of the time 20 years ago when our own finances were tight. My husband, Steve, and I woke up that crisp fall morning in 1990 knowing exactly how broke we were. Our finances were in worse shape than the hobbyhorse lying on its side on our front lawn, broken loose from its springs.   We had no money in the bank, no cash in our pockets, not much food in the house and we were out of diapers for our baby. I added up everything we needed in my head. Diapers—about ten dollars. Baby [More]

Family tells us a Stallings man is doing well after receiving a kidney from an Indian Land woman who until recently he’d never met.   It turned out the woman, who is also doing well, was such a perfect match for him, it’s as if she’s his sister — even though they’re not related at all.   David Ensley of Stallings has suffered from polycystic kidney disease since 2001.  Things took a turn for the worse in 2009 when his kidney failed.  He needs a new one or he says he will eventually die.   But finding a donor proved difficult.  His siblings were [More]

Money slipped under the door of a man struggling to support his family brings about a Christmas miracle.   When you’re a freelance cameraman like I am, you can’t always pick and choose your assignments. Often, you accept work not out of any particular affinity you have for the subject but because you have bills to pay and a family to feed.   Sometimes, though, you’re fortunate enough to land an assignment that you can really get into and feel passionate about, even learn from. You pray for jobs like that. Well, I do anyway.   That’s why I was [More]

I’ve always enjoyed rummage sales, antique shops, flea markets, and garage sales. Whenever I go to one, my eyes inevitably drift over to the jewelry. Not because I need any fancy things, but because I’m “looking” for a bracelet that had been given to me by my parents when I was a young lady. It was a beautiful gold link bracelet with delicately carved pink flowers. For years, I wore it for dressy occasions—before I lost it. Of course, I never saw anything that quite compared, but I could hope, couldn’t I?   Recently, my husband Roger and I were [More]

From Genesis to Revelation, pages of my beloved leather-bound Bible fell to the floor every time I opened it. The once camel-colored leather was worn and faded. It broke my heart to see it in such sad shape. The NIV Thompson Chain-Reference Bible, red-letter edition, was a gift from my husband, Rick. It had lasted through his teen years and Bible College, where we’d met and he’d given it to me. I used it for Bible study, teaching Sunday school and reading daily devotions. I didn’t want to replace it, but 17 years of wear and tear had taken their [More]

Margretha had been terrified of storms for years, ever since a strong one caused a large tree to fall on her home. After a record-setting month of severe storms in Mississippi, she was on edge. She’d slept little in the last few days, worried about the weather reports warning more tornadoes were on the way. “It seemed like I had been saying weather-related prayers almost ceaselessly for the last several weeks,” Margretha says. But they didn’t ease her fears.   Read More: A Mysterious Sight in the Sky – Guideposts

It was one of those dreadful nights we get here in Minnesota in the middle of winter. The moisture in the air gets trapped and a curtain of fog descends all around, mixing with the snow on the ground and the flurries falling from the sky to white out everything. Normally I wouldn’t drive in that kind of weather, but I’d been at a Tupperware party all evening, I was eight months pregnant and I was so exhausted I just wanted to get home already.   I was only on the road for a minute before I regretted my decision [More]

It was August 1969, a hot, humid night in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam. I was stationed with the US Army as Communications Chief in charge of all radio communications, located inside the Command Post, a four-room reinforced concrete bunker, surrounded by sandbags.   I got undressed and into my bunk, hoping to get a few hours of sleep before I was on duty again. I rolled over and looked at the clock: 11:30 p.m. Seconds later I heard a voice say, “Get up out of bed now and get fully dressed, steel pot, weapon, everything, and go down to the [More]

 I sat in church, the pastor’s words a blur of sound. I knew I should be listening, but instead I wondered what was waiting for me at home. Sunday dinner was the one meal all week when my family sat down together, and that meant facing my father. He’d usually get drunk, and that meant a whole meal of him humiliating me. Especially because of my stutter. I was ten years old, and had done nothing to deserve my father’s scorn.   Even trying to keep my sentences short, I always got caught up on the first few syllables as [More]

I love being an EMT. Nothing makes me prouder than serving the community and helping folks in need. So when the local volunteer fire department asked me to monitor their members at trainings and on fire scenes I didn’t hesitate to say yes.   “We could really use more firefighters,” said a volunteer one day. “The certification class is coming up. Why don’t you take it?”   Helping out was one thing but me? A firefighter? I didn’t think I was strong enough. Plus, I’m afraid of heights! Although it would be nice to be able to help out in a [More]

Bill, bill, another bill, I thought, sorting through the envelopes I’d carried in from the mailbox outside to read to my husband, Bob. Complications of diabetes had robbed him of his eyesight, and now it seemed as if our financial obligations were going to rob us of much more.   Read More: Mysterious Ways: God Will Provide – Guideposts

A family relies on faith and prayer to bring loved ones home in this heroic tale of survival.   KEISA: Not a cloud in the sky, sunlight kissing Charleston, South Carolina’s downtown market. This was the perfect way to spend the Saturday before Labor Day, shopping with my mother, sister-in-law Paula and our three girls, while the guys were off deep-sea fishing.   It was all my husband, Rex, had talked about for weeks, from the moment he got the new boat—a 38-foot cabin cruiser. He’d had it out only a few times before. I checked the time on my [More]

  Walking the beach alone wasn’t how I wanted to spend that Saturday. I worked hard all week, and I looked forward to the weekends with my family. Unfortunately my grown kids didn’t always want to sit at home with me. I’d hoped by this time in my life I’d have grandkids to visit, but it wasn’t to be.   I strolled slowly up and down, digging my toes into the wet sand. The smell of the salty air and the roar of the surf soothed me. What a delight it would be to have a little companion on my [More]

What a waste of time! I’d been ahead of schedule on my drive from Florida to Virginia for a family reunion, but that was before my impulsive detour to “Trader Jack’s Fireworks and Gifts.” One of those tourist traps off of I-95 in the Carolinas, selling sparklers and multicolored rockets in addition to kitschy shot glasses, snow globes and, of course, Trader Jack’s t-shirts. I didn’t need anything like that, and a quick look around confirmed there were no special finds to be made. I left the store and shook my head. Why had I followed that strange urge?   [More]