When a small leak in the roof took me into the attic, I found my son’s two-foot sailboat leaning on its side. The plastic hull is red. The deck blue. The sails are...
A little boy played with his father's gold watch and accidentally broke it. Saying nothing, the boy replaced the watch in his father's drawer. When the father asked how his watch broke, the boy...
Last week as I was leaving the house for the newspaper, my wife asked if I would buy her a medium cup of coffee. I drove to the Quick Check, parked my car...
Zacchaeus was a wee little man....
Two arborist brothers performed a marvelous feat in our yard today. They cut down, and into stove-length logs, two dying white pines and a diseased oak tree. Afterwards, they trimmed a second oak...
George Washington Carver, the nineteenth century horticulturlist, created hundreds of products from plants . . . 325 from peanuts alone. His work improved rural economies—saving land, varying...
Make no mistake: I am a red-blooded, two-fisted, iron-pumping, rugby-rucking, middle-aged guy with persistent delusions of athletic competence. Because I am what...
"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." —Eleanor Roosevelt ...
An Olympic ice skater brings upon two blades just the right mixture of body weight, momentum, and angle so that each blade is in sync with the laws of physics and motion. The...
God looked over everything he had made; it was so good, so very good! It was evening, it was morning— Day Six. Heaven and Earth were finished, down to the last detail. (Gen...
When we were kids, we all wanted to make a big difference in the world: cure cancer, fly to the moon, or drive that shiny red truck to put out fires in burning...
"Why do you stay up there?" my mother would ask when Mr. Leavitt ate dinner with us on Sunday after church. "Up there" meant the old farm on Pleasant Ridge where he’d been...
"Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love each other, God lives in us and his love...
I once knew a man (it could have as easily been a woman) who believed he deserved everything he wanted. He lost his job but nothing changed. In fact, he believed he deserved...
I come from a line of strong women, chief among them a great aunt who lived in a large farmhouse. As a child there, I was never bored. My aunt was always canning...
Work is tough, full of disappointments—and that is true even of work that many people envy, such as my own. I have never understood why people consider writing to be a glamorous career...
An old Native American tale recounts a conversation between a grandfather and his grandson. The grandfather confides to the boy that two wolves struggle inside him, each trying to dominate his...
In the building where I used to work, there was an elevator operator called Frank. He stood in the main entrance and ensured there was an even balance of elevators going up and...
Baseball player Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play in the major leagues. In his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, he tells a story of how it felt to break...
At the end of my first day in high school, I lingered in class until the dark-haired teacher asked me if I...
