While serving in Iraq, Courtney Birdsey experienced the protective hand of God, forever changing her. She says:

On one of [our] missions, my unit made a return trip to Samarra, north of Baghdad, to gather data. As we were leaving the town, the Humvee I was riding in approached a tank from behind. A soldier riding on the tank gave us an urgent "turn around" signal. We didn't hesitate to follow orders. ...

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. He would take care of soldiers in the medical tent, provide supervision and training to eight combat medics, and visit ...

In his book The Cell's Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator's Artistry, Fanzale Rana gives the following account of the approach used to authenticate a piece of artwork by Picasso, often referred to as The Unknown Masterpiece:

In the early 1970s, a junk dealer came across five ink drawings while clearing out a deceased woman's apartment in London. He hung onto them for several years, [and then] ...

Editor's note: Though you might not be persuaded by the information below, it still has great illustrative potential. D'Souza's article might provide an intriguing way into a sermon that deals with why God allows bad things to happen. It might be something you want to contend with or elevate as a possibility. It might be a way to raise several other questions about why bad things happen. Or, taking ...

The gospel message says: "You don't live in a mechanistic world ruled by necessity; you don't live in a random world ruled by chance; you live in a world ruled by the God of Exodus and Easter. He will do things in you that neither you nor your friends would have supposed possible."

Have you heard about Pocket God? It's one of the top-selling video game applications for Apple's iPhone. Here's the game description found on iTunes:

What kind of god would you be? Benevolent or vengeful? Play Pocket God and discover the answer within yourself. On a remote island, you are the all-powerful god that rules over the primitive islanders. You can bring new life, and then take it away just ...

In the first half of 2009, news reports poured in of pirate vessels attacking vital shipping lanes along the coast of Somalia in southern Africa. Entire shiploads of cargo were held for ransom by pirates, delayed severely, or even lost at sea.

Amid that chaos, Mark Wilson was learning the ropes for his new job as logistics coordinator for the U.S. headquarters of Africa Inland Mission (AIM)—a ...

The omnipotent God, primal power of the world, being himself supremely good, could not permit anything evil in his works, were he not so all-powerful and good as to be able to bring good even out of evil.

We can actually learn a lot about some of Satan's strategies in spiritual warfare by studying the military strategies of some of the warriors of old. In his book Head Game, author Tim Downs writes:

Psy-ops stands for Psychological Operations, a form of warfare as old as the art of war itself. An early example of this can be found in the battle strategies of Alexander the Great. On one occasion when ...

I remember an animated discussion with my high school freshman English teacher over the word awful. I insisted on using awe-full to describe something so exalted as to arouse reverence. She preferred that I stick with the word's common spelling and its usage to designate something dreadful.

We should have looked in the dictionary. My old Webster's lists as its first definition "inspiring awe; highly ...