What a world! Surprises! This year, for a lot of us, surprises were not limited to reading about changing world events. For some of you, surprises were not always welcomed. A position opened up in your company, and you expressed an interest in it. But when your boss...
When the 21-year-old spacecraft, Columbia, disintegrated on its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003, a new pantheon of heroes was born—men and women who knew the risks they were taking yet chose to take that chance. With that understanding of the...
What do you do when you are afraid? That is the question that Andrew Brunson asks. Brunson is a soft-spoken man with a kind-looking face. He is also a man that knows something about fear. Brunson is an American pastor who was unjustly imprisoned by the Turkish...
A good marriage has a lot of things in common, while unhappy marriages are as different in as many ways as there are unhappy people married to each other. Yet the factors which make for either being happy or unhappy are often far more predictable than most folks...
God works in and through the difficulties and problems that confront you in ways that you seldom see except in retrospect. That's when you look back and say, "Ah, now I can see the hand of God leading, guiding, and protecting me; but I certainly didn't see it at the...
New Year's resolutions! If you make them, can you keep them? John always gets out his pencil and paper and starts jotting down those bad habits and little shortcomings with a determination that "this time I'm really going to keep my resolutions." His January diary...
Today is Christmas Eve, at least in most places in the world. It's an exciting time for children who may have left cookies and milk for Santa whom they hope will come down the chimney. For them, sleep will not come easily. But for the parents who look at the scene...
"My sole purpose in going to Florence," wrote Mark Twain in his book, A Tramp Abroad, "was to see this immortal 'Moses,' and by good fortune, I was just in time, for they were already preparing to remove it to a more private and better-protected place because a...
It's December—the twelfth month of the Gregorian calendar. If you live in the northern hemisphere, Jupiter and Saturn are visible at dusk in the eastern sky, and in the southwest sky, a brilliant Venus soars from excellent to magnificent. On the 21st of this month,...
Draw a line and then write four words from left to right: optimist, realist, skeptic, and cynic. In so doing you move from sunshine to partly cloudy, to the sodden gray sky, to near darkness. The young woman who is an optimist says, “Hey, there are lots of handsome...