Proof The Bible Is True

In 1954, when I was six years old, my family went on a road trip that has since become legend.   My parents, sister and I were driving from our house in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Mom’s hometown in Texas. As night fell, we found ourselves on a deserted dirt road in Oklahoma, nearly out of gas. We hadn’t seen a service station in hours. It was getting late. My parents tried to hide their growing panic as the gas gauge crept toward empty, as empty as the road ahead of us.   Then a gas station appeared on the horizon. [More]

Delivering boats is a regular job of mine as a professional yacht captain. I bring them from Florida and the Caribbean, up the Eastern Seaboard to New England in the spring. Come fall, the process is reversed.   The boat I was taking to St. Thomas that day was an old wooden sailing yacht. It was supposed to be a straightforward job: Sail the boat from Newport, Rhode Island, to the U.S. Virgin Islands. I would follow the coast, then jump off from Ft. Lauderdale or Miami for the offshore run to St. Thomas.   That was the plan, but [More]

Our big, scraggly mutt, Ralph, had joined the family when his original owner couldn’t keep him. In the few months he’d been with us, we had come to love him, and all signs were he loved us too. But he’d developed one habit in his former life that no amount of coaxing could break. We couldn’t get him to come into the house.   “Some dogs prefer to stay outside,” I explained to the kids when Ralph settled to sleep in our yard on summer nights. Now, looking at him out there this fall day, I worried what would happen [More]

Hours before dawn, I awoke to a magical sound: the crunching metallic clatter of rolling tires outfitted with snow chains. It’s snowing! I thought. I leaped out of bed and ran to the window. Beneath the glow of the streetlamp, our road and yard in Raleigh, North Carolina, were blanketed with pristine white snow. School would be closed today—no question—and I was going to make it the best day ever.   My friend Peggy called when it was daylight. “Bring your sled,” she ordered. “A bunch of us are meeting in the woods above Cedar Creek.”   The woods were [More]

Our temporary chapel was nothing fancy, just a plain room with a makeshift altar and candles, but kneeling in it late that Friday night, I felt myself in a very holy place.   I was at my church’s annual women’s retreat. This year, for the first time, I’d been assigned to the prayer team. In some ways the job was perfect for me. I’d been praying my whole life. When I was a little girl getting ready for bed, my mother and I always said the same prayer together:   Angel of God, my guardian dear,   to whom God’s [More]

The dinner tray sat beside my hospital bed untouched, the food getting colder by the minute. I’d been in this room at Methodist Hospital in Minneapolis for 10 days now, recovering from a broken pelvis and fractured ribs after an auto accident. The pain that permeated my body was constant and intense. At times I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, let alone eat. At 18, my life seemed over. Three months earlier, I’d lost my father to cancer. Now this. The world felt like a dark and empty place. Eating wasn’t going to change anything, and the mere sight [More]

Nana my beloved grandmother, was in the hospital with bone cancer, and I’d picked up my mom so we could spend the afternoon with Nana together. It was hard to imagine that her days on earth were dwindling. She’d lived with such exuberance.   ”I still remember those doctors who said she’d die young from a weak heart,” Mom said on the way over.   “She outlived all of them,” I said. “That weak heart never stopped her.”   Read More: A Heaven-Sent Princess Visited His Grandmother | Guideposts

The snow often fell hard and heavy during the winters I lived in Colorado. It was coming down like crazy one afternoon when my boss closed the office and sent us home. I hurried to my car. I had to stop at the sitter’s house to pick up my two baby boys.   I made it the sitter’s house without too much trouble. “Be careful,” she said, as I strapped Nick, six months old, and Jon, 22 months old, into the backseat of the car.   “You know I will,” I said.   But almost as soon as her house [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]

I was 21 years old, spend­ing my second Christmas in Korea after being drafted into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I was alone, walking back to my barracks after a night out with the guys. It was cold and dark, Christmas Eve. I wrapped my arms around myself and trudged onward.   Everyone had talked about what they missed back home. The holiday festivities. Their families. All my comrades had some­thing they’d return to. But not me. I didn’t even mind being far away for the holidays.   I’d had a rootless childhood, landing with my grandparents when I [More]

My husband, Max, had fallen asleep beside me. I was still awake. Staring up at the ceiling of our trailer, listening to the night sounds of Texas Hill Country, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened that afternoon.   I hadn’t told anyone, not even Max. I didn’t think I could. I’d been mowing the lawn, riding a tractor with a mower attached, carefully making my way around the old mesquite trees in low gear. Max was inside the house, working on a shower in the bathroom. A couple of months earlier we had bought the old nineteenth-century house. [More]

With my husband away on a business trip, I planned to spend a quiet weekend at home. But when my friend Chickie and her husband, Dom, invited me to join them for an afternoon at the beach, I was tempted. “I had an asthma attack yesterday, and it really tired me out,” I warned them. “So I’ll probably just lie out on the sand. It’s too humid for me to do much.”   A few hours later, relaxing under a sun umbrella after a picnic lunch, I was glad I’d come. Chickie and Dom went for a dip. They liked [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]

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]

“Colt, I think I’m going to die.”   My wife, Krystyna, struggled to get the words out. I had to lean in to hear her. Her voice was weak. She looked small in the hospital bed, her skin pale and shining with sweat.   “No, honey,” I said. “Don’t say that. You can’t lose hope.”   I couldn’t blame her, though. It had been two weeks since what was supposed to be a routine appendectomy, and she was getting worse, not better. The doctors didn’t have any answers. It was hard not to feel hopeless.   It had all started [More]

I drove to the hospital, knowing that today might be the last day I’d spend with my father on this earth. He was my rock, my strength, even while he grew weaker. How could I tell him goodbye?   We knew that dad’s gall bladder surgery was risky at the age of 85, especially after a previous heart surgery. He survived the operation, but complications followed, and his organs started to fail. He’d spent the last three weeks on and off a ventilator. Dad would breathe on his own for a while, then he’d need to be intubated again. It [More]

Nobody was on the beach before dawn in Brigantine, New Jersey. The shore was completely desolate. Maybe that’s what had drawn me. My life was just as desolate.   Six months earlier, in June, I’d been on my boat, the Furthermore, trying to make good time from Florida to New York when a sudden storm had blown up off the coast. Try as I might I couldn’t keep the boat away from the notorious shoals that jutted out from the Jersey Shore. I barely got myself to the life raft before everything else I owned—my clothes, my money, my livelihood [More]

  I leaned over the hospital bed in which my 18-year-old son, Art, lay in a comatose state that seemed like death. Tubes fed him through the nose; a machine breathed for him, breaking the stillness of the room with its mechanical gasps. I moved my lips close to Art’s ear and whispered, “Honey, I had a dream last night, so beautiful it seemed real. Two magnificent angels stood by your bed. It means you’ll be healed, I know it.”   Did he hear me? Can the soul hear when the body is asleep? Art didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge my [More]

Great-aunt Anna loved to tell humorous stories that highlighted the joy she found in everyday life. Sitting in her kitchen drinking tea, laughing over her latest tale, I looked at her in wonder. As a young woman during World War II, she had fled Ukraine on her own and managed to get herself out of Europe. Then she spent time in South America before my mother was able to sponsor her to come to Canada, where we lived.   “How did you manage in those war-torn years?” I finally asked out of the blue. “I imagine it must have been [More]

Horses have always been my passion, but I never thought I’d own a horse farm, one where I taught children and adults, many with special needs, to ride. God had made that possible. When I first started out, I felt like he and I were partners. He was on the farm with me as I fed and watered the animals, cleaned their stalls, talked with the riders. But over time the daily struggles of running a business made me feel as if I were on my own.   I felt the weight of my doubts on my shoulders the afternoon [More]

01/20/20   “No, Chad,” I snapped, spotting my energetic little boy racing for the front door as it closed. “You can’t go with your sister.” Chad ran to the window and knocked on the glass. Shauna waved before she ran off down the street to play with her friends. At two and a half, Chad was a handful. Trying to keep him out of mischief and danger, I’d nailed drawers shut, built a wooden box over the TV knobs and duct-taped safety plugs into the electrical outlets.   For nearly two years, since I’d suffered a slipped disk and had [More]

It was one of those perfect New York autumn mornings—blue skies, a crisp breeze. A day when I felt lucky to live in the city. I was on my way out of my East Side apartment when the doorman waved his hand to stop me.   “A plane just hit the World Trade Center,” he said.   An image of John F. Kennedy, Jr., shot through my mind. He had just crashed his private plane into the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1999. These private-plane owners really don’t know what they’re doing, I thought as the doorman pushed open the [More]

I found my usual empty seat on the school bus and stared out the window at all the other high schoolers milling about, saying goodbye to their friends. Everybody seemed to have somebody. Except me. I didn’t have any friends. No matter how hard I prayed for one. The driver pulled the door closed.   I felt someone plop down in the seat beside me. A boy had his hand out for me to shake. “Hey!” he said. “My name’s Jack. I’m new. Mind if I sit here?” I looked around to see if this happy guy was making a [More]

What better way to spend a free afternoon than sitting in the sun by the pool? It wasn’t often I had a day with nothing to do. Nothing going on. Nothing special to be ready for. My day off stretched out like the still water before me. Not even a breeze to stir the surface.   I shifted in my lounge chair, gazing out at the line of 70-foot-tall sweet gum trees that lined the property, until I let my eyes fall shut. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so relaxed and gave myself over to the peacefulness. [More]

We could barely contain our excitement as we went through the ticket booth at Kings Island amusement park in Ohio. “Let’s climb the Eiffel Tower first,” I said. “From up top we can look out over the park and see everything.”   My older brother, Luis, shook his head. “I don’t need to see the whole park to know I want to do the Drop Tower first.”   “How about we start with a family ride,” Mom said. “Something your little sister can go on too. Like the antique cars.”   Teenaged Luis and I looked at each other. No [More]

“I’ve got a really good story for you,” my editor told me the other day in the office kitchen.   I was a newspaper journalist for 25 years before coming to Guideposts. There’s not a whole lot that surprises me. But this, she assured me, wasn’t the usual fare. “This guy’s done a video,” she said. “Watch it. You’ll see what I mean.”   It had been shared to the Mysterious Ways Facebook page by Karen Byerley Knutsen. A cell phone video of her father, Kenneth Byerley. I pulled it up online. Ken was an older, affable-looking man in a [More]

Dryers were convenient, sure, but I didn’t mind not having one. Especially on a morning like this. Blue sky, warm sun, a cool breeze ruffling my hair. The smell of clean clothes and grass. I reached for a fat wooden clothespin and clipped it to the shoulder of the white blouse I’d just washed. The one I planned to wear on the plane…   I suddenly shivered. Not because of the breeze. In just a few days I’d have to get on an airplane for Florida. My sister was scheduled for gall bladder surgery and needed me to help watch [More]