FTT—my wife first introduced me to those initials. Nancy was a nurse when I first met her. There were many parts of nursing for which she did not care. But she loved diagnosis. To this day there cannot be too many episodes of Grey's Anatomy or ER for her. (Oprah either, but that's another story.) She is constantly telling me her private diagnoses of people—even total strangers—based ...

2007 was a bumper year for the Southeast Correctional Center "restorative justice garden" in Charleston, Missouri. Inmates yielded extraordinary crops of a variety of produce on the facility's six-acre vegetable garden, and all of it will be donated to public nonprofit organizations.

Inmates are eager to participate in the program, as the 200-person waiting list suggests. In the words of one inmate, ...

Rumored notes from hospital charts (probably written by some sleepy intern or frazzled nurse):

• The patient refused autopsy.

• Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.

• Note: Patient recovering from forehead cut. Patient became very angry when given an enema by mistake.

• Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.

• On the second day, ...

Hope is always made more real when we see tangible action today that points with credibility to the possibility of a better tomorrow.

In the darkest days of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, Jeremiah was asked by God to go out and buy a piece of real estate—complete with witnesses, a deed, and money exchanged (Jer. 32:6–15). This was a tangible act and one that seemed to make no sense. But ...

You can have it all. You can work harder, play harder, and multitask your way to squeezing 31 hours of activity into a 24-hour day. That's the finding of a study conducted by the American Management Association.

The study concluded that people can add almost 50 percent more activity to a typical day of 16 waking hours. Similarly, according to U.S. Labor Department figures, the average yearly increase ...

Steve Sample, president of the University of Southern California, writes:

In the spring of 1970, when I was 29, I learned I had won a fellowship from the American Council on Education, which would allow me to serve an administrative internship with Purdue University President Fred Hovde for the 1970–71 academic year. I was elated by the opportunity. Despite having only recently been awarded tenure ...

Death Valley may no longer deserve its name. Normally the hottest and driest place in North America, this desert area in California has experienced the wettest year in a century. As a result, colorful wild flowers are in bloom. “Vast fields of desert gold poppy, Eschscholzia glyptosperma, desert star, Monoptilon bellioides, evening primrose and phacelia have sprouted in the usually barren moonscape, ...

George Whitefield, the great 18th century evangelist, spoke these words at a funeral service:

Do you think any farmer would have a crop of corn next year unless he plowed now? You may as well expect a crop of corn on unplowed ground as a crop of grace until the soul is convinced of its being undone without a Savior. That is the reason we have so many mushroom converts, so many persons that are always ...

Pastor and author Rick Warren says:

As I wrote in The Purpose Driven Life, each of us comes into the world with a specific purpose that God has in mind for us. Our job is to find out what that purpose is. Toward the end of my time in seminary in the late 1970s, I went through a period of questioning. I knew I wanted to spend my life serving God, but I didn't know how. As part of that questioning, I ...

In Iran, Mehdi Dibaj, an Assemblies of God minister, spent nearly 10 years in prison for his faith. A convert from Islam in 1955, Dibaj is given every opportunity by the authorities to regain his freedom. First, he is asked to sign a paper admitting he was wrong and that he wants to return to Islam. When this fails, he is beaten, tortured, and put through mock executions. His wife succumbs to pressure, ...