Jesus warned against piling up money on earth, because money comes and goes. A sad reminder of the vulnerability of money came with the June 2009 news story of an elderly woman in Israel who had hidden her life savings of one million dollars in her bed mattress. Every night she slept on one million in American dollars and Israeli shekels. She must have felt very secure with her fortune literally inches ...

At 3:30 p.m. on June 6, 2007, a 21-year-old man with muscular dystrophy named Ben Carpenter drove his electric-powered wheelchair down the sidewalk in Paw Paw, Michigan. As he approached the street crossing at the corner of Red Arrow Highway at Hazen Street, a semi truck came to a halt at the stoplight. Ben began to cross the street from the north to the south in his wheelchair just a few feet in ...

In an interview with Carolyn Arends, singer and songwriter Sara Groves explains why she begins her 2007 album Tell Me What You Know, which primarily addresses social issues, with "Song for My Sons":

I wondered how my kids would finish the statement, "My mother always said … " What would they say? Besides, "You get what you get," "Don't throw a fit," and "That doesn't fit in your nose"? I would ...

Sarah, a woman who attends our church, had never prayed aloud in her life. She grew up moderately connected to the church, but when a relational crisis hit with her fiancé, she realized she needed more. She began attending church for comfort. Little did she expect that Jesus would also make her uncomfortable.

Sarah was on call for her job as an ultrasound technician for a local emergency room. ...

The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.

—Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and American writer (1926—)

Fire swept through Southern California from the north of Los Angeles to the Mexican border during October, 2007. Five hundred thousand acres were burned up, a half-million people displaced from their communities, and 2,000 homes destroyed in the blazes.

But in Rancho Bernardo, in a Presbyterian church in which 60 families lost their homes, worshipers met to give thanks. One reporter noted, "They gave ...

Writer Virginia Stem Owens describes a Thanksgiving dinner she shared with her parents in a nursing home:

… The tables have been rearranged, end-to-end pilgrim-style, for the Thanksgiving feast, and my father and I take our places on both sides of my mother. Across from us sit Norman, the owner of the Christian music boom box, and James, a black man in a Mister Rogers cardigan who moves with ...

The nuclear submarine Thresher had heavy steel bulkheads and heavy steel armor, so it could dive deep and withstand the pressure of the ocean. Unfortunately, on a test run in 1963, the Thresher's nuclear engine quit, and it could not get back to the surface. It sank deeper and deeper into the ocean. The pressure became immense. The heavy steel bulkheads buckled; the Thresher was crushed with 129 people ...

In early 2006, San Francisco paralegal Mike Patterson started MyDeathSpace.com, an Internet site that details the deaths of MySpace members and offers links to the archived pages of their accounts. There's even a digital map that tracks the locations of all the deceased who are registered. Patterson's site lists nearly 3,000 deaths and receives over 100,000 hits a day.

Over time, MyDeathSpace.com has ...

When despair tries to take me under…I choose life.

When I wonder what God could possibly be thinking…I choose trust.

When I desperately want relief from unrelenting reality…I choose perseverance.

When I feel oppressed by my disappointment and sorrow…I choose gratitude.

When I want to keep my feelings to myself…I choose vulnerability.

When nothing goes according to ...