Proof The Bible Is True

Never has a Bible passage spoken so strongly to me or to my husband, Jim, or so inexplicably. That’s the only word for it: inexplicable.   Something happened that Sunday when we heard our pastor speak on the passage, something extraordinary, and we both knew, separately, just sitting in the pew, that we needed to act on it. Now.   “‘Do we own our possessions or do they own us?’” Jim said, quoting the lesson as we were driving home. “When he said those words, it was like a light flashed on. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the stuff [More]

This is crazy, I thought. I trudged through the wet forest, ducking beneath dripping branches, trying not to slip, keeping my eyes peeled for movement among the trees. By my side, one of my two two-year-old Newfoundland dogs, Ruby, sniffed at muddy tree trunks.   “Nike!” I shouted into the wild, “Come here, girl! C’mon!” Only silence answered. No throaty bark, no snapping twigs or flurry of leaves that signaled Ruby’s best friend barreling through the underbrush. There’d been no sign of her for two days. Still, I hiked on. I was following a lead.   A crazy lead, an [More]

My home was a two-bedroom trailer, and the winter was just beginning in my area of rural western Oklahoma when I heard the weather report on television: An ice storm was coming. In preparation, I gathered blankets, and sure enough, the power went out. I said a prayer that God would get me through the night safely and made myself comfortable on the couch, huddling under the blankets. At midnight I awoke as the TV and lights came back on. Feeling all was well, I turned everything off and stumbled to bed.   Fifteen minutes later, I awakened from a [More]

Airports stress me out. So after a short flight from San Jose, California, to visit friends in Portland, Oregon, I was anxious to escape the terminal. I’d brought only a carry-on to avoid the chaos of the baggage claim.   A quick stop in the restroom and I’d head down to the lower level, where my friends were going to pick me up.   Then I saw it. A cute little stuffed dog, sitting all by itself on a bench in the main terminal area. Some poor kid was probably heartbroken at having lost it.   Okay, God, I thought, [More]

A young mother acts promptly to save her baby daughter, thanks to divine guidance.   Read More: Mysterious Ways: Televised Message

Twelve hundred miles to go, I thought, pulling onto the highway here in Indiana, my 75-year-old mother-in-law in the passenger seat. My oldest daughter was getting married in San Antonio, Texas, in a few days, and we were anxious to get down there.   It was a beautiful, sunny March day, light jacket weather, and barely any traffic. We’d get to Texas in no time at all, I figured.   Wrong. The lamblike weather quickly turned into a lion. Flurries began to fall before we even hit the Illinois state line. By the time we got to Joplin, Missouri, we [More]

The telephone jolted me awake. It took me a few seconds to gather my wits. I’d been sitting at my computer, watching an episode of my favorite show, CSI, but I must’ve dozed off.   I glanced at the clock. Midnight. Who would be calling me at this hour? I wondered.   I grabbed the phone. “Hello?” I said. Too late. The caller had hung up.   According to the caller ID, it was a Pennsylvania cell phone, one I didn’t recognize. Probably a misdial.   I sat back down in my chair to shut off my computer, but I [More]

Fiery ash spewed thousands of feet above Mount Pinatubo. Molten lava cascaded down the flanks of the ancient volcano on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, destroying everything in its path. It was June 15, 1991.   My husband, Chuck, and I saw a news ticker about the eruption from 8,000 miles away in Niagara Falls, New York. Our daughter, Cindy, her husband, Ed, and our grandkids had been lucky to get out alive. They’d been evacuated from Clark Air Force Base, where Ed was stationed, near the capital city, Manila.   Cindy had called us earlier from a [More]

I almost didn’t see her. I was heading into Pittsburgh, across the bridge over the Allegheny River, late for work, and she was little more than a shadow by the seven-foot fence that lined the edge. But I got a feeling that I’d missed something.   I tapped the brake, adjusted my rearview mirror. Then I saw what I had missed—a young woman climbing over.   I knew the stories about desperate souls who came to the bridge to take a fatal leap. Sometimes the police talked them out of it. Sometimes. I felt my throat clutch.   I was [More]

When she found out the meaning of her cat’s name, she knew it was meant to be.   Watch Video: Mysterious Ways: Theodora

Out of nowhere the butterfly flitted across the path, lingered on a flower, darted up into the sky, then came back down to us. Iridescent wings catching the sunshine, dazzling with color. Ally followed it and we followed Ally.   We were in the Botanical Gardens in Quito, Ecuador, 9,350 feet above sea level, the snow-dusted Andes encircling us. Clouds hung over the mountains and a brilliant rainbow pierced the canopy.   I should have been happy, here on vacation with my wife, Carol. We had flown in to visit our oldest son, Sam, and his friend Ally, but an [More]

Most Christmas trees are tall and green with pine needles. Not my mom’s.   Ever since she and Dad had retired to their remote farm, she’d been working in ceramics. One of her proudest pieces was an 18-inch Christmas tree, adorned with lights. “It looks great,” she told me on the phone. “Can’t wait to show you.”   My husband, Jim, and I lived about a 2 ½-hour drive away, in Omaha, and that day we were coming to visit. She was concerned about our drive. “Be sure to pack an emergency kit,” Mom said. “The forecast calls for snow. [More]

“Administering the power of love through kangaroo care. I’m sure this type of care can be used in many different situations.”  Admin   I ran down the hospital corridor, the doctor’s words echoing in my mind–“You’d better come quick. We’re losing her.” My husband, Bert, and I burst through the doors of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and stopped short.   All those weeks of hoping, praying, I imagined the day that we’d bring our newborn girls home with us–all three of them. Never this. Two of my babies clung to life, and the third was slipping away.   The [More]

November 11, 2012, is a day Belinda Leal will never forget: the day her mother, Evangelina Garza, died. What happened next has left the doctors and nurses at McAllen Medical Center in south Texas baffled. But to Belinda and Evangelina—now very much alive—the explanation for the events that unfolded is quite clear…   Read More: Resurrected by a Hallelujah | Guideposts

Something bad had gone down. That was clear. Police and emergency vehicles jammed the parking lot outside the Fort Worth, Texas, McDonald’s. Officers took statements from traumatized witnesses. People huddled together. Parents held their children, weeping.   Detectives searched for evidence. Shell casings. How many shots had been fired? An APB was blasted out to every unit in the area. Man in a white shirt and black jeans. On foot. A crazed gunman. Still on the loose.   The scene was all too familiar. A reminder of how fragile life can be. One moment everything’s fine, boring, even, the next, [More]

I thanked God that morning for the water-stained ceiling tiles. They were as much a miracle to me as a clear blue sky. When I opened my eyes after a fitful night’s sleep and saw them above my hospital bed, I knew I was still alive. I was pretty sure there were no ceiling tiles in heaven.   I was 39 years old, and wasn’t likely to live out the week, much less see 40. As the morning dragged on, my family and the parishioners of my church came in and out of my room, praying for my recovery.   [More]

“Help! Please, somebody, help!” I looked out the window at the orchard, dark and shadowy in the pale moonlight. It was a woman’s voice. Close. But where? My son was at a friend’s house. It couldn’t be him watching a scary show on TV.   I lived in Milton-Freewater, Oregon, at the time, renting a garage apartment set back from our landlord’s house. The orchard and a small creek were behind us, not much else. Maybe someone fell in the water. Or was lost.   “Somebody, please, help me!” There it was again! A woman, desperate and very near. I [More]

Our car’s highbeams cut through the darkness of Maryland’s rural Route 50, heading westbound toward home. It was only 9 PM, but no other cars were around. Trees lining both sides of the road blocked out the moonlight, and the area was so sparsely populated, not even a streetlamp could be seen.   What a spooky stretch this route could be this late in the year, when the crowds no longer flocked to the beach. We should have left earlier, I thought. We would have had time to visit our friend in the nursing home and could have taken the [More]

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]

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]

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]