Fred Winters, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, was shot and killed during a Sunday service on March 8, 2009, by a troubled young man. A week after the tragic event, his wife, Cindy Winters, was interviewed by Julie Chen of CBS's Early Show. When asked about her husband's alleged killer, Terry Sedlacek, Winters spoke only a message of forgiveness—a message quite fitting ...

John Edwards ran for his party's presidential nomination for the 2004 election and again for 2008. He did not win either nomination, but he was John Kerry's vice presidential running mate for 2004. In 2008, he admitted publicly to having an extramarital affair with a campaign worker. In the book Resilience, his wife, Elizabeth, writes about how her husband's adultery affected her.

When she and John ...

Last weekend was spent doing one of those uber-stressful things: buying a car. We are a one-car family and tend to drive our cars until they die. Our trusty Sebring could no longer be trusted, so it was time to replace it. For us, a major purchase like this is almost traumatic. We are very careful and have a purchasing style that might drive others insane. …

We've been married 20 years and have ...

Have you heard about the personals website designed to facilitate extramarital affairs? Log on and you have immediate access to thousands of men and women willing to kick their vows to the curb for a no-strings-attached sexual tryst. And should you want to use the site to have an affair, the designers behind the site have worked hard so that no one will ever know about your misdeeds. For example, ...

One of the most remarkable and well-attested physical healings of someone I know personally happened to a fellow pastor named Kenneth Wallace. When I first became a pastor in 1975, he was the presbyter of the area in central Illinois that included our church, and he oversaw the interviews for my ordination. At that time he must have been in his mid to late fifties, and he struck me as a happy warrior: ...

In a 2009 article for Christianity Today magazine, author Jocelyn Green gave readers a glimpse into the lives of different military officers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—with special attention given to the responsibility the church has in ministering to those officers. She writes:

Nate Self's military record was impeccable. A West Point graduate, he led an elite Army Ranger outfit ...

My wife and I refinanced our house and cashed out what was (for us) a large sum of money. I spent several weeks dreaming of ways to spend it.

It was near Christmas, and I had been studying the birth of Jesus and what it would have meant to those who heard about it first. As I was praying and prepping for the messages I would teach in the weeks of December, God brought into my mind that to take this ...

On the afternoon of May 2, 1990, I heard holy things. I was visiting Larry Hildreth, a father and husband from our church in Pennsylvania. He was in his thirties, but he was near death from cancer. I was at his home to serve him Communion, because he was too weak to come to church.

Larry was a deeply thoughtful man, and as he spoke that day, slow and deliberately, I realized I was hearing extraordinary ...

When Dick Peterson's wife, Elizabeth, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he knew many challenges awaited his family. What he didn't know was just how many lessons he would learn along the way about love and service in the name of Christ. He writes:

The intruder invaded Elizabeth's body, and by extension, mine. Her disease became my disease and made demands on our relationship we were ill-prepared ...

In 1993, Lt. Col. Gary Morsch joined the Army Reserves as a doctor to care not only for U.S. soldiers, but also for wounded civilians and prisoners of war. In 2005, as a part of the war in Iraq, he was called up to serve as the field doctor for a battalion near the Iranian border. In an article for Today's Christian, he shares a story of something that happened on the last day of his tour of duty: ...