“Oh, you look so serious!” I said to my ten-week-old granddaughter Leilani. She was studying my face with a knitted brow as I talked to her. “I’d be serious too,” I continued, “looking at this world. But you know wha…

The news was horrific. A live-in foreign domestic helper had been so ill-treated by the family she worked for that she died. The employers were eventually jailed, but I felt it wasn’t enough. They should have suffered the same horrors they put th…

A team of landscape architects studied the effects of providing a fence around a preschool playground. On playgrounds without fences, children tended to gather close to the school building and their teacher and didn’t stray away. But on fenced-in…

Ginnie Hislop received a standing ovation as she was handed her master’s degree diploma in 2024. Why? It came eighty-four years after she’d completed her coursework! In 1941, she needed only to submit her thesis. But her then boyfriend, Geo…

A pack of hyenas surrounded a lone lioness. When the cackling beasts attacked, the lioness fought back. Biting, clawing, growling, and roaring in a desperate attempt to ward off her enemies, she finally fell. As the clan engulfed her, another lioness c…

Morse was the son of a Protestant minister and a struggling painter of landscapes. In the 1820s, he made a meager living as a limner—“an itinerant painter” of colonial America. But his was a life God led in another direction. Morse al…

In her blog post “Regrets of the Dying,” Bronnie Ware outlines regrets she heard as a nurse caring for the terminally ill. Among them were “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” and “I wish I had stayed in touch with my fr…

Letty, a cleaner in an office building, was known for walking fast—really fast. In doing so, she could easily avoid people. Wounded by poverty and accustomed to condescension, she passed others with one hand reflexively covering part of her face….

A Florida construction crew working on a $42 million drain project unearthed a valuable treasure. Deep in the soil they found a well-preserved fishing boat from the 1800s. The vessel contained interesting artifacts including part of a kerosene lamp, dr…

During his church’s fall retreat at a nearby camp, Pastor Jeff took a walk with my son, who led him through a wooded trail to the outdoor chapel. Suddenly they came upon the ark of the covenant! Of course, it wasn’t the real ark, but a life…