Encouragement is like oxygen—we can’t live without it. This was true for nine-year-old James Savage. The boy swam more than two miles from the San Francisco shoreline to Alcatraz Island and back, breaking the record for the youngest person …

In 1373, when Julian of Norwich was thirty years old, she became ill and nearly died. When her minister prayed with her, she experienced a number of visions in which she considered Jesus’ crucifixion. After miraculously recovering her health, she…

Commemorations of the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day in 2019 honored the more than 156,000 troops who took part in the largest seaborne invasion in history to liberate Western Europe. In his prayer broadcast over the radio that day, President Roose…

After a customer at a grocery store self-checkout station had completed her transaction, I made my way to the station and proceeded to scan my goods. Unexpectedly, a visibly angry person confronted me. I’d failed to notice that she was actually n…

The Croods, an animated caveman family, believe that “the only way to survive is if the pack [their small family] stays together.” They are afraid of the world and others, so when looking for a safe place to live they’re filled with f…

When Apollo 11’s Eagle lunar module landed on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, the space travelers took time to recover from their flight before stepping onto the moon’s surface. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin had received permi…

The magazine I was writing for felt “important,” so I struggled to present the best possible article I could for the high-ranking editor. Feeling pressure to meet her standards, I kept rewriting my thoughts and ideas. But what was my proble…

Twice this summer I suffered the scourge of poison ivy. Both times it happened, I was working on clearing away unwanted plant growth from our yard. And both times, I saw the nasty, three-leafed enemy lurking nearby. I figured I could get close to it wi…

Something so cordial can happen in first introductions when two persons discover that they have a friend in common. In what may be its most memorable form, a big-hearted host welcomes a guest with something like, “So nice to meet you. Any friend …

Three-year-old Buddy and his mom went to church each week to help unload groceries from the food ministry truck. When Buddy overheard his mom telling his grandmother that the delivery truck broke down, he said, “Oh, no. How will they do food mini…