What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “property”? Your mind may go to a piece of real estate. But you might also consider “a quality or trait belonging to an individual or thing”; for instance, the property of a certain type of wood that provides insight about it. What…
My dear friend Sally wanted to give a birthday party for one of her friends. She knew her friend had been experiencing a tough time, and Sally desired to help lift her spirits. However, Sally was unemployed and didn’t have extra money to purchase food for a nice party. So, she looked in her refrigerator…
When Carlotta was young, she thought her mother had a remarkable gift for recognizing other people. But Carlotta’s mother was normal. It was Carlotta who was remarkable. She had a rare condition called prosopagnosia. She couldn’t recognize or remember faces. Shortly after Jesus’ resurrection, two disciples walking from Jerusalem seemed as if they had such…
My tired minivan has a digital readout with initials DTE: Distance ’Til Empy. It gives me a precise mileage countdown. Most newer cars these days have this feature. It’s a handy one: knowing exactly how far I can go before I need fill up is important data to avoid being stranded! Did you know the…
As Franco Zeffirelli prepared to film his critically acclaimed version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, he made a daring decision. He chose two unknowns to play the lead characters and insisted they be close to the age of the characters as Shakespeare had penned them. Zeffirelli ultimately selected seventeen-year-old Leonard Whiting as Romeo and sixteen-year-old…
“I love you. I’ll never leave you.” Julia saved her husband’s text message so she could read it whenever she was afraid. A troubled childhood had left her with a fear of loved ones abandoning her. She’d often ask for reassurance from her husband, and she would wait anxiously for him to come home from…
Aristotle said that no one can be friends with a god. Why? Because friendship requires equality, and what god would step down from their heavenly status to become equal with lowly human beings? I wonder what Aristotle would’ve done if he’d been present at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:26-28). For there, Jesus—the Creator of all,…
Josephine Butler, a prominent minister’s wife, found herself campaigning for the rights of women accused (often unjustly) of being “ladies of the night,” those seen in society as the “least desirables.” Spurred on by her deep faith in God, she fought for years against the British Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, which subjected women…
Tim’s hotel room seemed extra dark at night. What if he got up at night and slipped and fell because he couldn’t see? But when Tim did get up, he was surprised to see a bright light shining from underneath the bed—lighting his path. A motion sensor had activated it. The light only worked, however,…
After a late summer thunderstorm ripped through our city, we had to deal with tree damage to our house plus a major cleanup of our leaf-and-branch-strewn yard. As I spent the following day dealing with the damage and the tree debris, I tried to humor myself by repeating: “We don’t have any trees!” It’s true….