Yesterday I met a friend I haven't seen in quite a long time. Her natural loveliness draws your attention. But she has another characteristic that I think is the true secret to her attractiveness.  She always makes the person she is talking to feel special.  Whenever I meet her, she has a ready word that is complimentary and encouraging. I go away from talking with her feeling that I am special too.

In 1949 when Billy Graham held his big tent revival in Los Angeles, some of Hollywood's most famous made decisions to accept Christ. Among those was Jim Voss, an electronics genius, who was a wiretapper for underworld gangster Mickey Cohen.

The prophet Isaiah had a most unusual vision of heaven. He saw the Lord seated on a throne, and then he heard the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" God had a message He wanted conveyed to His people on earth. Quickly Isaiah responded, "Here am I. Send me!" (Isaiah 6:8).

I attended my grandson's high school graduation where diplomas were presented to the seniors by their parents. Since this was a home school group, emotions ran high as each set of parents spoke a few words expressing their thoughts to their children.

No one knows more about gardening than God does. After all, He Himself planted the first garden on this earth, the Garden of Eden. He knows well the science of botany because He "invented" it.  God placed in our world every imaginable flower from miniscule desert blooms that require a magnifying glass to be seen, to giant corpse flowers, whose blossoms grow ten feet tall and can even raise their own temperatures.

Sometimes I think we forget the kind of God we're praying to. Do we remember that He is the one who created both the heavens and the earth?

As a child in her native Finland, Marjaana always wanted to be a missionary in Africa. At a church service, when a Kenyan nurse known as Sister Freda urged the people, "Come to Africa!" Marjaana’s heart was pounding, "I’m going! I’m going!" She was one of the first to sign up for the next trip.

The scene was the Garden of Gethsemane. A band of men from the chief priests and Pharisees had arrived to arrest Jesus. Peter, wanting to defend Jesus, drew out his sword and struck the high priest's servant, cutting off his right ear. Not only did Jesus heal the man's ear but he took time to make clear to Peter that He, the very Son of God, was soon going to lay down His life willingly.   

In the apostle Peter's second letter to the early Christians, he lists five qualities that we should try to evidence in our lives: he urges us to add to our "faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance" (2 Peter 1:5, 6 NKJV).

Nik Wallenda is a member of the world-famous seven-generation Wallenda family of high wire performers. He's famous for his walks on the high wire across the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, between skyscrapers high above Times Square, New York, and a nearly 32-minute walk across the fire-y Masaya volcano in Nicaragua. Nik's book titled Facing Fear tells of his conquest not only of these perilous walks but of his conquest of fear, especially after the collapse of an eight-person high wire pyramid in Sarasota, Florida that nearly killed all eight of them. After the accident, Nik had to conquer his fears or he would never walk the high wire again.