Several years ago I ran a marathon. I trained hard to be as prepared as possible, but there's a part of a marathon that's always hard to prepare for. A marathon is just a little over 26 miles, but experts tell you not to run over 20 miles in your training. That means the last six miles of a marathon are "no man's land." You don't know what you're getting yourself into. You may hit a wall. You may ...

Like most couples preparing for a wedding, Dave Best and his fiancée were probably worried about whether or not everyone would show up on time for the ceremony on July 6, 2008. They didn't need to worry about their friend Dave Barclay, though. He was so excited about the wedding that he showed up a year early!

When Dave Best wrote Barclay, telling him about the July 6 wedding in Wales, Barclay ...

When a hurricane hit South Florida, Norena's home was one of many that was severely damaged. The elderly woman received an insurance settlement, and the repair work began. However, when the money ran out, so did the contractor, leaving an unfinished home with no electricity. Norena has been living without power ever since.

The astounding part of this story is that the hurricane was not Katrina, but ...

In Spanish, it's called el camino de la muerte, which translated into English means "road of death." In 1995, the Inter-American Development Bank called it the "world's most dangerous road."

Found in Bolivia, this dirt and rock route stretches 38 to 43 miles, depending on the source, and descends from La Paz (at 12,000 feet) down to the beautiful rain forest town of Coroico at the edge of the basin ...

Getting a novel published is an extremely difficult affair, especially if you are an unknown author. One freelance writer named Chuck Ross decided to test this maxim in an unusual way. Ross took a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, titled Steps, which had won the National Book Award six years before. Ross retyped the first 21 pages of Steps and sent them out to four publishers, using the name Erik Demos as ...

When Dave Boon first saw the avalanche that swept his car over a guardrail on Interstate 40 in Denver, Colorado, it was only "a puff of powder, 10 yards ahead" of his two-door Honda Accord. After that brief warning, a snowy burst of wind knocked the car out of control. "Not even a second later," Boon said, "a freight train hit us"—what he later learned to be a roaring boxcar blast of tons of ...

There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well-nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on.

—Frederick W. Faber (1814-1863)

On January 14, 2005, Shane Maixner died in an avalanche. The 27-year-old and four of his friends drove to the Canyons ski resort outside Park City, Utah, rode the ski lift, hiked up to the backcountry gate outside the Dutch Draw area, went through the gate posted with warning signs, and started snowboarding.

On the second trip down the same slopes, someone in the party shouted, “Avalanche!” but Shane ...

On March 19, 2005, when a resident at an extended care facility in British Columbia, Canada, died, the medical personnel did what they usually did. They placed a call to Fraser Health Authority, who then sent a driver to pick up the deceased woman. The driver dutifully transported an elderly woman to the hospital morgue.

Unfortunately, the driver failed to check the wristband for identification and ...

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How did the thieves cover up such an obvious crime? They started another gasoline engine and left it running right beside the generator. The robbers took off with their prize, while the owner was lulled into a false sense of security created by the sound of his own riding lawnmower.