There was a woman in the Bible named Naomi. With her husband, she had two sons, and was blessed to see them both marry. But a famine in the land brought great loss, as Naomi’s husband and both of her sons died young. Out of pure loyalty to her mother-in-law, Ruth vowed to stay with…
Satirist Tom Lehrer commented, “It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” Born in the Holy Roman Empire in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived just 35 years. But in those 35 years, he composed more than 600 works and is still considered perhaps the most…
When your child wants to tell you a secret, she may climb into your lap, cup her hands around your ear, and then whisper in such a way that you are the only person on earth who hears what she has to say. God is waiting for you to crawl into his lap. You may…
Batman has been listed as the 82nd greatest show in television history (by Zoller Seitz). From January 12, 1966 to March 14, 1968, my brother and I watched all 120 riveting episodes. Every Wednesday night, an episode would play, always ending with the caped crusaders in perilous danger. So we had to tune into the…
The Apostle Paul worked with the giants of the faith – men like Peter, Barnabas, Silas, and Timothy. And then there was another fellow, a young man who checked out when trouble checked in. John Mark abandoned Paul early in his first missionary journey. Fast forward several years. Paul is now an aging missionary, and…
It brought Abraham Lincoln through the Civil War. It carried Winston Churchill through the darkest days of WWII. It energized Steve Jobs, inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., and drove Muhammad Ali. Passion. G.W.F. Hegel said, “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” But this isn’t a column on charging the next hill,…
On this date in 1975, Barry Manilow reached #1 on the Billboard adult contemporary charts with his greatest hit ever, I Write the Songs. There was just one problem. Manilow didn’t write the song. The 32-year-old singer-songwriter was proud of his songwriting skills, but he had not written anything that was really that successful. Producer…
Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz made history when his team performed the first heart transplant in America, at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, on December 6, 1967. Neary 41 years later, on November 14, 2008, Dr. Kantrowitz died – of heart failure. Putting the irony of his cause of death aside, Dr. Kantrowitz taught us an important…
There is a famous line from the movie Network. “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Let’s talk about that – anger. The Bible warns us, “Let not the sun go down on your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26). There are actually two distinct kinds of anger identified in the Greek New…
The most successful musician in American history said, “I don’t know anything about music, In my line, you don’t have to.” Elvis had a good point. It is not knowledge that matters as much as what we do with that knowledge. My favorite author said is like this: “We don’t fall because we don’t know…