During Superbowl XXXVII, FedEx ran a commercial that spoofed the movie Castaway, in which Tom Hanks played a FedEx worker whose company plane went down, stranding him on a desert island for years. Looking like the bedraggled Hanks in the movie, the FedEx employee in the commercial goes up to the door of a suburban home, package in hand.

When the lady comes to the door, he explains that he survived ...

"Hello. My name is Clark." (The people gathered in the room respond, "Hi, Clark.")

"I am a…" (Group says, "You can say it. It's okay.")

"I'm a…criticism avoider." (Applause all around.)

"It started when I was a kid…" ("Come on now. Tell it.")

...

"Then I would take the trash out when she asked me to, and she'd make a big deal over that too." ("We feel your pain, man.")

"And those good grades in school…" ...

Writer and speaker Lewis Smedes says:

Yes, somewhere people still make and keep promises. They choose not to quit when the going gets rough because they promised once to see it through. They stick to lost causes. They hold on to a love grown cold. They stay with people who have become pains in the neck. They still dare to make promises and care enough to keep the promises they make. I want to say to ...

Dr. James Dobson relates a story of an elderly woman named Stella Thornhope who was struggling with her first Christmas alone. Her husband had died just a few months prior through a slow developing cancer. Now, several days before Christmas, she was almost snowed in by a brutal weather system. She felt terribly alone—so much so she decided she was not going to decorate for Christmas.

Late that afternoon ...

In his best-selling book, The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey contrasts the humility that characterized Jesus’ royal visit to planet earth with the prestigious image associated with world rulers today:

In London, looking toward the auditorium’s royal box where the queen and her family sat, I caught glimpses of the…way rulers stride through the world: with bodyguards, and a trumpet fanfare and ...

In his book, Detours: Sometimes Rough Roads Lead to Right Places, Clark Cothern tells of a Christmas when his family encountered an unexpected house guest. A squirrel had fallen down their chimney into the wood burner stove in the basement of their Michigan home. Cothern writes:

I thought if it knew we were there to help, I could just reach in and gently lift it out. Nothing doing. As I reached in…it ...

About twenty years ago there was a house near the entrance of our subdivision that kept their Christmas lights burning long after the season was past. They burned through January. Even through the first of February those outside lights burned every night. Finally, about the middle of February I became a bit critical and said, "If I were too lazy to take my Christmas lights down, I think I'd at least ...

I once heard an actor being interviewed on late-night television. "Tell me," said David Letterman. "You're a sex symbol who plays all sorts of exciting roles with gorgeous women. How does that compare to your real life, off-screen?"

The actor reminded Letterman that he had been happily married for 20 years. Then he said, "Here's the difference in a nutshell. In the movies, life is mostly about sex ...

The mother of a nine-year-old boy named Mark received a phone call in the middle of the afternoon. It was the teacher from her son's school.

"Mrs. Smith, something unusual happened today in your son's third grade class. Your son did something that surprised me so much that I thought you should know about it immediately." The mother began to grow worried.

The teacher continued, "Nothing like this has ...

Theologian Dale Bruner writes:

David Peterson, former pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Spokane, Washington, told about a time when he was preparing his sermon. His little daughter came in and said, "Daddy, can we play?"

He answered, "I'm awfully sorry, Sweetheart, but I'm right in the middle of preparing this sermon. In about an hour I can play."

She said, "Okay, when you're finished, Daddy, ...