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Dreams
(3-minute read) Where do my dreams come from? I don’t mean the ones when I’m sleeping but the dreams I have when I’m wide awake. After my sophomore year of high school, I asked my parents if I could attend art school during the summer break. There was something about art that always drew me.…
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Permission to be Wonderful
(4-minute read) When I was in high school, my parents got a call from the school wanting to see them. They insisted that my mother and father attend the meeting and that I should not attend. I took that as a bad sign. When my parents returned home, my father came to my room and…
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Priorities
(2-minute read) I was having coffee with a friend and noticed he didn’t stir it when he put cream into his coffee. He just sat there and looked at it. “Do you need a spoon,” I said, offering my unused teaspoon. “No, I like to watch the cream move in the coffee and see the…
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Captive
(6-minute read) I attended an elementary school in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, when I was eight. After school, I would take a city bus back to my neighborhood. One day on the bus, a man started talking to me about the YMCA and everything to do there. He asked me if I wanted to go with…
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The Prayer Slump
(3-minute read) There was a time when I felt that my prayers were less effective than they used to be. I wasn’t sure what had changed or how I had possibly gotten off. I decided to return to the beginning, and one day I asked the Lord, “Lord, teach me to pray.” The first instruction…
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Laugh and Believe
(3 minute read) “Don’t drop that mirror; we can’t afford seven years of bad luck,” my mother said as she laughed. As a child, I learned that there was a long list of things that some people thought brought bad luck. My mother would point them out, and then we would laugh as if it…
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Being Changed
(3-minute read) Before getting married, I spent my days at work and nights in bars. After I got married, everything was different. My boss came over to our house one night after we had been married for over six months and asked if we had any beer. I said I thought so. I went to…
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Unwanted Thoughts
(2-minute read) Sometimes, I’m surprised by selfish thoughts that go through my mind, and I’ll say to myself, “I don’t want to think that.” I used to always blame the devil, but it wasn’t until I had to deal with my own emotional crisis that I realized that most unwanted thoughts don’t come from the…
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Desire a Miracle
(2-minute read) “Lord, would you let me see a miracle that would take away my doubts?” At the time, I was 24 years old, and I had recently had a salvation experience with God. It seemed reasonable; God wanted me to believe without doubting. It took me years to understand why he didn’t do that…
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Our Place
(2-minute read) Was God the Father just and fair with Jesus? I remember shortly after becoming a Christian, being thrilled with my salvation but feeling sorry for Jesus having to go through suffering and death. Where actually asking another to suffer and die might be wrong, Jesus was not another. In the temple courts, when…
Walking the path 