When Michelle Attaway moved in with her boyfriend, Jay, for a life of drugs and partying, she assumed Jay's parents would turn their back on them in disgust. So it was a bit shocking when Jay and Michelle were instead invited over for dinner. She writes about the events that followed:

I was incredulous because I knew that Jay's parents were "normal" people, the type that crossed to the other side ...

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 ...

Julio Diaz, a 31-year-old Bronx social worker, just wanted to do what he did every night on the way home from work: grab a quick bite to eat at his favorite diner. Only one thing stood in his way from doing just that—a mugger. When Diaz stepped off the train and onto the subway platform, a teenager ran up to him, pulled out a knife, and demanded Diaz hand over his wallet. Realizing it wasn't ...

Your New Year's resolution for 2008 probably wasn't as extreme as Mark Boyle's. Boyle decided he and two other friends would spend the year walking the 9,000 miles between Britain and India without a dime in their pocket. Their goal was to rely only on the kindness of strangers as they traveled. Whenever they entered a town, they would offer a few minor services and accept food and lodging as payment. ...

Every day, for close to seven years, Walter "Buck" Swords cursed and stomped his feet in his favorite restaurant, Luby's Cafeteria, demanding that he get his food exactly as he wanted it. Every day, for close to seven years, his preferred waitress, Melina Salazar, offered a patient smile and did whatever she could to help her most stubborn customer. After years of thankless service, Salazar was rewarded. ...

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 ...

In a 2009 article in Time magazine, writer Coco Masters shared a startling statistic: one in five Japanese men and women have seriously considered taking their lives, and each year over the past decade, more than 30,000 people have killed themselves in that country. But Masters surrounded those troubling statistics with the story of Yukio Shige. It's because of Shige that at least 188 Japanese men ...

From 1993–2009, ER was a popular television series on NBC about the lives of emergency room doctors and nurses. In this scene from the medical drama's third season, Dr. Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) is upset because one of his patients, a woman with Down's syndrome who is in desperate need of a heart transplant, has been turned down by hospital administrators to receive a new heart through the ...

Not long after we moved [into our first house in California], my wife, Janie, and I picked up on the tension between a couple of neighbors. One was a very outspoken churchgoer, while the other was an unbeliever. I knew I was in the hot seat when the unchurched man struck up a conversation with me as we were both working in our yards.

"Say, Steve, aren't you a pastor?" It seems implicit in the public's ...

On the wall of what my grandmother called the "sitting room" of her antebellum home in South Carolina, was a constellation of family portraits—old pictures of my uncles and aunts, my cousins, grandparents and great-grandparents, a genealogy in photographs. In the very middle of the cluster, in the place of honor, was the portrait of someone I did not recognize. It was a sepia-toned, Civil War-era ...