My youth group was hundreds of miles from home on a mission trip in New Orleans. We were piled in the van on the way back to the motel when someone yelled out, "I get the pay phone first!"

"Why?" another kid asked. "Who do you need to call?"

"It's Father's Day, dork!" came the reply.

Father's Day. I hadn't thought about that in years. As everyone scrambled for coins and planned out a calling schedule, ...

In a very difficult season when finances were tight, I was driving a dilapidated car that had been donated to the church. It had lots of problems, including a ceiling lining that drooped down and grazed my head every time the broken shock absorbers launched me from the seat toward the roof. The car began to speak to me. It said, "Failure." Why couldn't I get my life together? I was getting older every ...

While working as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, Lee Strobel was assigned to report on the struggles of an impoverished, inner-city family during the weeks leading up to Christmas. A devout atheist at the time, Strobel was mildly surprised by the family's attitude in spite of their circumstances:

The Delgados—60-year-old Perfecta and her granddaughters, Lydia and Jenny—had been burned ...

A recently discovered draft of Napoleon Bonaparte's will was sold at auction in Paris for $149,505(U.S.).

One month before his death, a bedridden Napoleon, in exile on the island of St. Helena, dictated his will. In the draft, Napoleon expressed that he forgave his enemies, the English. But those lines were scratched out and did not appear in the final version. The scratched out lines included the ...

A Thousand Acres is the story of the long-term damaging effects of childhood sexual abuse upon two women, Ginny and Rose. When their aging father retires and leaves the family farm to his three daughters, a series of events leads to family conflicts and the release of pent-up resentment from the two abused daughters toward their father.

The scene begins with Ginny (Jessica Lange) in the hospital at ...

William Frey, retired Episcopal bishop from Colorado, told the following story in a message on the power of God at work in us:

When I was a younger man, I volunteered to read to a degree student named John who was blind. One day I asked him, "How did you lose your sight?"

"A chemical explosion," John said, "at the age of thirteen."

"How did that make you feel?" I asked.

"Life was over. I felt helpless. ...

On June 17, 1966, two black men strode into the Lafayette Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, and shot three people to death. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a celebrated black boxer, and an acquaintance were falsely charged and wrongly convicted of the murders in a highly publicized and racially charged trial. The fiercely outspoken boxer maintained his claims of innocence and became his own jailhouse lawyer. ...

Stand and Deliver is a movie based on the true story of Jaime Escalante. In 1982, Escalante (played by Edward James Olmos) leaves a high-paying job as a computer engineer to become a teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Through creative teaching techniques, discipline, compassion, and humor, Escalante awakens the potential of delinquency-prone Latinos in an inner-city school.

Eighteen ...

The film The Joy Luck Club, based on Amy Tan's novel, is about the strained relationships between four Chinese-born mothers and their adult American-born daughters. As the daughters mature, the mother's expectations of how a woman should live conflict with the values and goals of their American daughters.

In one scene, June and her mother clean up after a dinner party. The mother notices that June ...

The movie In Love and War is based on the WWI experiences of author Ernest Hemingway. The 18-year-old Hemingway (Chris O'Donnell) is a Red Cross volunteer in Italy just before the end of the war. While stationed there, he meets, falls in love with, and proposes to Red Cross nurse Agnus von Kurowsky (Sandra Bullock). But Agnus, unbeknownst to Hemmingway, accepts a marriage proposal from an Italian ...