Heading home to California … a friend and I passed through the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. On the way to the connecting gate, we heard loud patriotic music playing and saw a group, mostly women, wearing colorful hats, cheering, and waving American flags. The troops were coming home, and here was their welcoming committee.

Two women encouraged us to grab flags and join in. We were early for our ...

Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is the third installment in "The Mummy" franchise of movies. Each of the stories follows Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his wife, Evelyn (Maria Bello), as they hunt for buried artifacts and confront monsters of all kinds. In this scene, Rick and Evelyn have just discovered that their son, Alex (Luke Ford), has dropped out of college in order to follow in his parents' ...

I discovered the importance of healthy counsel in a half-Ironman triathlon. After the 1.2 mile swim and the 56 mile bike ride, I didn't have much energy left for the 13.1 mile run. Neither did the fellow jogging next to me. I asked him how he was doing and soon regretted posing the question.

"This stinks. This race is the dumbest decision I've ever made." He had more complaints than a taxpayer at the ...

Most who champion on-line chat rooms and message boards argue that such technology encourages community. The question, however, is just how healthy on-line community really is. Emboldened by anonymity, people often say things to others that they would never say face-to-face. Armed with a certain sense that "this isn't really the real world," people have little concern for the consequences of their ...

While working his way through seminary, pastor and author Ed Rowell took a job driving a school bus for kindergartners. Ed shares a story about a valuable lesson he learned from that experience—a lesson about the power of presence and a willingness to say the things God whispers into our hearts. The story begins with Ed meeting a memorable little boy named Ryan:

Several of the kids came from ...

In March of 2008, I did something stupid. I fell on ice and ruptured the ligament that connects the kneecap to the thigh. The moment I hit the ground I knew my right leg was inoperative. My first thought was, I guess I won't be running tomorrow.

Dragging my useless leg, I crawled to the back door of our home and finally got the attention of my wife, Gail. With her assistance I managed to get inside ...

Anthony Burger died at age 44. Many feel that he was the finest gospel pianist that ever lived. He spent ten years playing for the Gaither Vocal Band, and in 2006 accompanied the Gaithers on a Christian cruise in the Caribbean. Fifteen hundred people were on the cruise. They vacationed during the day, and they'd come to a gospel concert in the ship's theater at night. The fourth night out, Anthony ...

Webster's Dictionary defines empathy as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience" of someone else. With that definition in mind, psychologist Douglas LaBier, director and founder of the Center for Adult Development in Washington, DC, feels many of us are being "catastrophically unempathetic." We suffer from ...

Dill Rummel, a woman from the church where I pastor, once told me the story of how a colleague of hers was hospitalized for ten weeks. Her name was Colleen, and she had broken her back in two places. Despite the doctors' efforts, her back wasn't healing. Dill was very busy, but she knew God wanted her to visit Colleen. In fact she felt God wanted her to lay hands on Colleen and pray for healing—something ...

Around 7 p.m. on the evening of Friday, May 31, 1985, an F3-magnitude tornado swept through Beaver County, Pennsylvania, just north of Pittsburgh. We were at church for a meeting, and when we got word of the storm, we had no idea how bad it had been. When our meeting came to an end, we headed to the home of some friends just as we had planned on doing.

My friend is a surgeon, and when we arrived at ...