My first visit to a health club was in the 1970s. Health clubs were new. My friend Frank told me he had a membership and that I could come with him as his guest for a workout.

When I met Frank at the club, we went into a room filled with weight machines. I'd never seen these things before in my life. Frank called it "the circuit." The idea was to spend a few minutes on each machine, exercising all ...

Years ago, Bill Hybels shared how he had seen a newscast about a big Vietnam veterans parade in Chicago. Part of the commemoration was a mobile version of the Vietnam Wall. Like the original, it bore the names of all the soldiers who had died in Vietnam. Hybels said one newscaster asked a vet why he had come all the way to Chicago to visit this memorial and to participate in the parade. The soldier ...

Texts: Assorted texts from the Passion accounts of the Gospels and Isaiah 52:13–53:12

Principle: The weight of the sins we have committed and the sins committed against us have been placed on Christ.

Objects: Multiple bricks, multiple notecards, a copy of Frank Warren's Post Secret, a wheelbarrow, and a tall wooden or metal cross

Experience: A number of bricks are piled on one side of the stage. ...

What one sees depends on where one sets up one's shop. Mine is at the entrance of the empty tomb.

—W. Paul Jones, Roman Catholic priest

Many years ago, my wife and I were having a marital "moral discourse," and I was becoming increasingly agitated. In my fury, I yelled at her and aimed my fist at a section of the dining room wall. Unfortunately, the Holy Spirit failed to guide my hand between the studs, as he usually had done, and instead I hit a stud right on. I broke a knuckle.

A deathly silence settled in the room. While I came ...

Someone dear to me once gave me a little cross adorned with roses. It bears the inscription, "Hope raises no dust." I looked at that phrase and tried my best to penetrate its mystery. I didn't want to look stupid, so I didn't say anything. After pondering it for a little while, I just had to get to the bottom of what it meant. It had been written on a cross, so it had to mean something! When I typed ...

The gospel message says: "You don't live in a mechanistic world ruled by necessity; you don't live in a random world ruled by chance; you live in a world ruled by the God of Exodus and Easter. He will do things in you that neither you nor your friends would have supposed possible."

Most kingdoms do anything they can to protect their king. This is the unspoken premise of the game of chess, for example. When the king falls, the kingdom is lost. Therefore, the king must be protected at all costs. Another notable example comes from the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill desperately wanted to join the expeditionary forces ...

In January, 2008, a story made the rounds about a 15-year-old girl in Australia named Demi-Lee Brennan. Brennan became the world's first known transplant patient to change blood types from O negative to O positive, taking on the immune system of her organ donor. At first the doctors assumed someone had made a mistake, because it's always been assumed that a change like that can't happen. Now they ...

In the Christian life, nothing, nothing at all, can be purchased at the do-it-yourself shop.

—Author Harry Blamires