When Sun’s husband had a stroke, her life took a dramatic turn. She found herself having to assist her husband with daily living activities and cope with his emotional outbursts. For seventeen years, she’d faithfully cared for her husband. …

It was Tuesday at the gym, so the people walking around the track were supposed to go clockwise. The first walkers my wife joined were doing that. But then another person walked onto the track going counterclockwise. A couple of her friends joined her&…

In the late nineteenth century, few people had access to the great sequoia groves in the US, and many didn’t believe the reports of the massive trees. In 1892, however, four lumberjacks ventured into the Big Stump Forest in California and spent t…

The brain is remarkably small, but stress can make it even smaller. Recent research has revealed that cumulative stress can shrink the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for managing emotions, impulses, and social interactions. This s…

As a young man, journalist Sebastian Junger traveled the US and wrote about it. One day in the 1980s, he entered a restroom in the Florida Keys and found hateful graffiti scrawled on the walls. Most of it targeted Cuban immigrants. But one message, app…

As I opened the bookshelf assembly instructions with piles of boards and tools strewn on the floor before me, I viewed a set of instructional diagrams of what to do and what not to do. One diagram—with a large X on top—depicted a person sta…

Pedro became a follower of Jesus at fifty. He’d been an angry, vindictive man who hurt those around him. As he received counseling from his church, he felt remorse over his past. “I now have less years ahead of me than behind me,” he …

Born Mary Flannery O’Connor, she’s best known as Flannery O’Connor, one of the American South’s most celebrated writers. Her stories brim with suffering and grace. When her beloved father died of lupus when she was fifteen, a de…

On May 29, 1925, Percy Fawcett sent a final letter to his wife before he ventured deeper into the unmapped jungles of Brazil. He was seeking a fabled lost city of great splendor, determined to be the first explorer to share its location with the world …

One Thanksgiving I called home to greet my parents. As we talked, I asked my mom what she was most grateful for. She exclaimed that she was most grateful that “all three of my children know how to call on the name of the Lord.” For my mothe…