Commence Prayer

This actually happened years ago. It was in 1968 on an airplane headed for New York—a routine and normally very boring flight. But this time it proved to be otherwise. As they were on their descent pattern, the pilot realized that the landing gear was not engaging. He messed around with the controls, trying again […]

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Asking Why

The sound was deafening. Although no one was near enough to hear it, ultimately it echoed around the world. None of the passengers in the DC-4 ever knew what happened—they died instantly. That was 15th February 1947, when the Avianca Airline flight bound for Quito, Ecuador, crashed into the 4,267 metre high peak of El […]

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I Walked Where He Stood

It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to guess the country of the following towns, though the names may be strange-sounding: Offenbach Wurzburg Darmstadt Bad Kissingen Mannheim Aschaffenburg Heidelberg Schweinfurt Worms Bischofsheim Ludwigshafen Coburg The land of beer steins, sauerkraut, liverwurst, and black bread; overflowing flower boxes; cuckoo clocks; wide, winding rivers; deep-green woods; gray-stone houses […]

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Back to the Basics

The late football strategist Vince Lombardi was a fanatic about fundamentals. Those who played under his leadership often spoke of his intensity, his drive, his endless enthusiasm for the guts of the game. Time and again he would come back to the basic techniques of blocking and tackling. On one occasion his team, the Green […]

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Hope for Survival

Originally, American settlers built their homes in the center of their acreage. Later on, many of them moved to the inside corners to be nearer their neighbors. Understand, I wasn’t living back then, but from what I read, that’s actually what happened. It occurred when “Go west, young man!” was the challenge of America . […]

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My Advice This Christmas

If I may borrow from Charles Dickens’s famous opening line, Christmas can be “the best of times, and the worst of times.” We have them both, don’t we? Who hasn’t cringed in early-October as stores drag out the artificial Christmas trees and put them on display? Who doesn’t dread the extra traffic and the gaggle […]

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