Much of my life has been spent trying to talk to God.
As a boy I used to sit on my bed and pray with my father. We said the Lord’s prayer from Mathew every night, side by side on my bed. And after that, my father tucked me in and turned off the light and I fell to praying my own prayers. I had a rhythm to it, a mental list that I went through every night. I prayed for family and friends first, before myself, so that God didn’t …

One pale morning so early that it was still blue outside, that moment when the blackness of night has faded before the moon, and the sun is only a promise yet some time off, I woke up and rested on one elbow. A girl slept quietly beside me, her face half buried in a pillow so that only her red lips, curved cheek, and strands of black hair crossing them both, were exposed. Other sleepers breathed heavily or snored nearby, propped in chairs or sprawled in sleeping bags. All of …

The world has always had a frontier, an edge beyond which nothing was known.
Most famous of these frontiers was the dark and endless waters beyond the Azores during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Most people believed that the world was flat and that the water went on forever, until the sailing ship would suddenly fall off the face of the earth. A series of explorers that included Christopher Columbus, Magellan, and Vespucci conquered that fear (1) and found the frontier: the new world. And then that world became known and …

As a little boy, the days leading up to Christmas took forever.
It didn’t help that everyone started preparing so early. Just after Thanksgiving, neighbors started putting up blue and red and green lights along their roofs, wrapping the trees in their lawns with yellow and white. On TV I saw ads for Christmas shopping and as I rode the bus to school in the morning the radio played Christmas songs, even though Christmas was still four weeks away. In school, my kindergarten teacher had us make paper stockings with cotton …

Some men are born hermits. They don’t mind spending the rest of their lives in a solitary existence.
I am not that kind of man.
Yet, in Japan I was by default. Not in the sense that I was out in a shack in the middle of forest all by my lonesome, but in my style of existence. My little house, squatted at the edge of the railroad with waving seas of green rice stalks on three sides. On the other side I had a neat little rows of brown, clay shingled …

By Lindsey Williams
In real life there is often a thin line between tragedy and mystery. Such are the circumstances surrounding the fate of Flight 19 recalled by the recent recovery of a World War II Navy torpedo bomber from the sea bottom near Key West.
Treasure salvor Mel Fisher and his crew found the corroded plane 16 years ago while searching for the Spanish galleon Atocha. Having, brought up several million dollars worth of gold and jewels from the ancient ship, Fisher lifted the more modern wreckage to view once more.
By …

My first day of teaching broke early and hot, but I was already up. It is a habit with me, to wake before my alarm, the morning of momentous events. I sleep restlessly, waking several times during the night with the fear that I have missed my alarm, missed the event I have prepared for so much. I have never actually missed a single such event, but this perfect track record doesn’t help ease the fear that this next time will be the first. That morning I woke five minutes …

For much of my life I have always stood out, but not necessarily for the best of reasons.
In my little league picture I stood out. Our team name was Golden Fish. It’s not a bad name, but it’s not exactly the Pirates or the Rangers. Those are cool names. The Pirates wear black and gray uniforms, the rangers wear blue and white. Those are cool colors especially when you are eight, but they weren’t our colors. We wore white baseball pants and yellow shirts with a big black goldfish …

Japan is a story that almost never happened for me. My senior year of college was going by quickly. I had the credits I needed to graduate, and my attention was more focused on acquiring the one thing many young people go to Christian colleges to find: the perfect someone that one later says they knew it the first time they saw them. I had quite a few friends in this situation. I wanted to join their ranks, and quickly, for if college ended and I still didn’t have a …

A first impression is like a first kiss. It lingers long after the relationship has changed.
I stepped off the plane in Ube, Japan, wearing a suit even though it was ninety plus with terrible humidity. The air was thick with water and the squat mountains in the distance appeared as though through a cloudy window. Yet, I had been told that first impressions were paramount in Japan. I buttoned up my shirt and pulled on my suit jacket and pasted a big smile on my face. I wanted to …