When Pastor Bob suffered an injury that affected his voice, he entered fifteen years of crisis and depression. What, he wondered, does a pastor do who can’t talk? He struggled with this question, pouring out his grief and confusion to God. He ref…

A dozen teams, each including three people standing shoulder to shoulder, prepared for the four-legged race. Bound to the person in the middle by colorful rags at their ankles and knees, each trio locked their eyes on the finish line. When the whistle …

The summer after my sophomore year of college, a classmate died unexpectedly. I’d seen him just a few days prior and he looked fine. We and our classmates were young and in what we thought was the prime of our lives, having just become sisters an…

In Texas, where I grew up, there were festive parades and picnics in Black communities every June 19. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learned the heartbreaking significance of Juneteenth (a word combining “June” and “nin…

The garage of my childhood home holds many memories. On Saturday mornings, my dad would roll our car down the driveway so we had room to work—with my favorite project being a broken go-kart we’d found. On that garage floor, we gave it new w…

The most powerful orators in history are often those leaders who have used their voices to bring about positive change. Consider Frederick Douglass, whose speeches on abolition and liberty spurred a movement that helped lead to the end of slavery in th…

A man owned more than $400 million in bitcoin, but he couldn’t access a cent of it. He lost the password for the device storing his funds, and disaster loomed: after ten password attempts, the device would self-destruct. A fortune lost forever. F…

While our family quarantined due to the global pandemic, we took on an ambitious project—an 18,000-piece puzzle! Even though we worked on it almost daily, often we felt like we weren’t making much progress. Five months after we began, we fi…

Jimmy hadn’t allowed the reality of social unrest, danger, and discomfort to keep him from traveling to one of the poorest countries in the world to encourage ministry couples. The steady stream of text messages to our team back home revealed the…

My brothers and our families spent the day moving our parents’ belongings from our childhood home. Late in the afternoon we went back for one last pickup and, knowing this would be our final time in our family home, posed for a picture on the bac…