Page 177 – Guideposts Articles

A Sweet Answer to Her Prayer

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Angela Logan

I was up to my elbows in cake batter when I heard a sharp rapping at the front door of the house. “Coming!” I shouted from the kitchen.

I hoped it was my fiancé, Melvin, with supplies for more cakes.

Not Melvin. A stranger, a woman with a rigid expression.

“Are you Ms. Angela Logan?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m from the health department. You need to cease baking and selling cakes from your home. Immediately.”

“Stop making my cakes? There must be some mistake…”

“It’s a health-code violation. You cannot sell baked goods from your home. They must be made in a state-approved commercial kitchen.” She handed me a notice and left.

I shut the door and sank to the floor. “Lord, no!” I cried.

Those cakes were my last hope to save my house. If I sold a hundred apple cakes, that would give me enough to make the first of three payments to qualify for a mortgage-loan modification.

Melvin and my teenage sons, Marcus, William and Nick, had helped me spread the word. A reporter from the local paper had even interviewed me, though I had yet to see the story in print. I’d gotten quite a few orders already. How could I fulfill them if I couldn’t bake? And that payment was due in five days!

I buried my face in my apron. What was I thinking? I wasn’t a business owner. I wasn’t even a professional baker.

I was an actress. I’d dreamed of making it big in the movies. It never happened. I’d done commercials, one-woman shows, had bit parts on TV. I made enough to get by, but with three college-bound boys, I needed a regular paycheck.

So I enrolled in a nursing program at the community college and found side work as a hairstylist.

Then the storm hit. The recession of 2009, and an actual storm that left our roof, windows and top floor in shambles. I hired a contractor to fix the damage, but he took our money and ran. Not long after that, my talent agency went under and I didn’t get paid for acting jobs I’d already done.

I fell behind on mortgage payments. Foreclosure notices rolled in. A credit counselor worked with me to apply for the loan-modification program. The catch was, I had to make three trial payments to qualify. How in the world would I do that?

The idea came in a flash of inspiration: cake! What if I baked and sold cakes? Cake makes people happy. I learned that from my grandma Melissa.

The highlight of my childhood Sundays after church was going to Grandma’s and having home-baked treats, like her famous glazed lemon cake. While my brothers and sister devoured their pieces, I studied mine. Did she use real lemon juice? How did she get it to smell so yummy?

Grandma, seeing my interest, taught me her secrets, like using only the best and freshest ingredients.

I developed my own specialty raising my boys as a single mom. Apple cake–using the freshest Gala and Delicious apples, Saigon cinnamon, organic sugar, cream-cheese frosting. It was the boys’ favorite (they’d even hide pieces in their rooms!) and a big hit at school bake sales and church functions.

Then I reconnected with an old friend, Melvin George. We fell in love, and he fell in love with my apple cake too.

When I floated the idea of baking my way out of foreclosure, he was all for it.

“You bake and I’ll deliver,” he said. Normally the boys rolled their eyes at any idea of mine (teenagers!) but this time they were totally into it.

That’s how Mortgage Apple Cakes came to be, just 10 days before I had to make my first loan-modification payment. If I sold a hundred cakes at 40 dollars each, that would cover the payment and then some. But would people pay that much? And who would I ask?

“You’ve got to tell everyone you know that you’re in trouble and need their help,” Melvin said.

That was going to be hard. I was used to making it on my own. All these years as a struggling actress, the only one I’d ever asked for help was the Lord.

I swallowed my pride and wrote an e-mail. “Buy a Cake, Save a Home” was the subject line. I explained my situation and ended with, “Would you be willing to help me?” I sent it to everyone on my contacts list.

I even admitted my problem to my nursing-school classmates. I stood up in class one day and said, “I’m selling cakes to save my home. Would any of you like to buy one?” Hands shot up.

We got 42 orders in four days. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe I could pull this off after all! Even with only one mixer and four cake pans.

But now the health department had shut me down. How could I have been so foolish as to think cake could save my house? I dried my eyes on my apron and broke the news to Melvin and the boys. “It’s over,” I said. “There’s nothing else I can do.”

“There is one thing we can do,” Melvin reminded me gently. “We can pray.”

And we did. Lord, I know those apple cakes weren’t my last hope, I prayed. There’s always hope when I turn to you. I called the reporter who’d interviewed me and all but begged him to get the paper to print the story. “I’m running out of time,” I told him.

“Actually, your story will run tomorrow,” he said. “It’ll be in the obituaries section.”

I groaned. He might as well have told me the story was dead. Who would see it in the obits?

Turns out: just about everyone! The manager of a nearby Hilton hotel called and offered me the use of their kitchen. I was whisked away in a limo to appear on a national news program. Orders poured in from all over the country, so many we could hardly keep up.

The boys set up a website and Melvin helped with shipping. Those apple cakes saved our house after all.

Now, five years later, Mortgage Apple Cakes is a full-fledged business. I’m proud to say a portion of the profits goes to helping folks in financial trouble.

Oh, and remember how I dreamed about making it in the movies? Producers at the UP network heard my story and found it so inspiring, they made a movie out of it!

Download your FREE ebook, A Prayer for Every Need, by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.

A Student of Hope

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Kate Snow

My BlackBerry buzzed on my desk and I gave it a quick glance. Very quick.

My BlackBerry buzzes all the time and I’ve gotten pretty good at sorting the important stuff (my husband’s updates from home about our two kids) from the headlines I’m bombarded with as a TV news correspondent. This headline, though, caught my attention: World’s Oldest Pupil Dies at Age 89.

Whistle Stop Cafe In Article Ad May 2023

“Oh, no!” I cried. Though the man referred to in the headline had lived thousands of miles away in Africa, and I’d only met him once in my life, I felt a profound sense of loss. Kimani Nganga Maruge was indeed the world’s oldest student, a Kikuyu tribesman from a Kenyan shantytown who, at age 84, decided to get the elementary school education he’d been denied as a child—so he could learn to read the one book he had yearned to understand all his life, the Bible.

I’d done a story on Kimani three years earlier. I’d never forgotten him. In all my years as a reporter, among all the world-changing events I’ve covered and the famous people I’ve interviewed, Kimani Maruge stood out. He was one of the most inspiring men I’ve ever met.

I was lucky to meet him at all. In 2006 a production crew and I traveled to Africa to film an in-depth segment about the Masai Mara, a massive game reserve on the Serengeti Plain in southern Kenya. Only because we were already in Africa on assignment were we able to detour to the Kenyan city of Eldoret, where Kimani lived. Though he was a fascinating subject who’d already attracted lots of international media coverage, network news budgets aren’t what they used to be and I probably couldn’t have justified flying all the way to Africa just to meet him.

When I say that Kimani lived in a shantytown, I mean it. His house was a small one-room mud hut with a door fashioned from wood boards. Inside was a bed, a stool doubling as a nightstand, some clothes and not much else. Kids ran laughing through streets of red dirt. Animals grazed in nearby fields.

Kimani was seated outside his door cooking a sweet potato in a battered tin pot over a pile of smoldering corn cobs. It was Sunday afternoon. One of Kimani’s children, a son named James, was reading to him from the Bible. Kimani smiled. His teeth were crooked, but his face, creased by wrinkles, was radiant. He projected a kind of impatient joy, the happiness of a determined, practical person who has, quite unexpectedly, stumbled upon something wonderful.

That something wonderful was a recently passed law granting all Kenyans free access to primary education. Previously, Kenyans had to pay fees to attend public school—unfortunately all too common in Africa. According to UNESCO, the United Nations education organization, fewer than half of primary-school-age children in many African nations attend class.

Access is even lower in rural areas and urban slums. Schools lack teachers, teachers are untrained and classrooms often do not have a single textbook. Families either can’t afford to send their kids to school or find it’s financially necessary to put the children to work.

That was what had happened to Kimani. He was the oldest of seven children, he told us, and he’d grown up helping his father in the fields so his younger siblings could attend school. He remained a farm laborer, leaving the fields only to join Kenya’s struggle for independence from British rule. He showed us his left foot, missing a toe. “I lost it in the war,” he said.

Throughout his hard life Kimani had remained a steadfast Christian. (More than half of all Kenyans are Christians, a legacy of British missionaries.) Still, he longed to know the Bible better. Because he couldn’t read, he had to rely on sermons and his children for knowledge of Scripture.

All of that changed in 2003, when Kenya abolished fees for primary school. Though schools remained underfunded, enrollment rates grew nearly 60 percent in following years. Kimani saw children, including three of his grandchildren, streaming to Kapkenduiywa Primary School in his shantytown. He saw them learning to read. He was in his eighties, but he thought, Why not me?

“All my life I have wanted to read the Bible,” he told us. Now was his chance.

One day he walked to Kapkenduiywa and asked to attend. Jane Obinchu, the headmistress, took one look at him and shooed him away. “We thought he was lost,” she said. “It was the last thing on our minds that he wanted to come to school.” Over the next few months Obinchu turned Kimani away four more times. He always came back.

Finally, in late 2004, Obinchu realized this elderly man was serious. He arrived at school wearing the proper uniform—shorts (which he’d made by cutting the legs off one of his few pairs of trousers), a collared shirt and a matching coat. He told Obinchu he was ready to learn. “All right,” she said. “You may come to school.”

Kapkenduiywa is a far cry from a well-appointed American school. The buildings are more like brick-walled shelters. Students play in a red-dirt courtyard. The school is overcrowded, like many in Kenya. Average class size is 100 students. Despite such challenges, Kimani thrived. The other students made fun of him at first, but he persevered and eventually was named head of his class. He passed exams in English, math, reading and Swahili.

Word got out and Kenyan journalists began writing stories. The British Broadcasting Corporation aired a profile of Kimani, and suddenly reporters from around the world descended on Eldoret.

By the time we met Kimani, he was in third grade, perhaps the most famous elementary school student in all of Africa. His English was by no means perfect, but he knew enough to tell us the basics about himself. What I remember most was his shining spirit. Here was a man who’d endured incredible hardship and yet the joy never left his face. He was thrilled to have something most Americans take for granted—a free education. He wasn’t reading the Bible cover to cover (he was only in third grade, after all), but he was full of thanks to be progressing toward his goal.

“There are those who don’t like to work,” he said. “But look at me! I do the hard work.”

Just two years after I met Kimani, rioting broke out in Kenya following a disputed election. Kimani’s shantytown was devastated and he was forced to relocate to a refugee camp. He stayed in school, walking with a cane two and a half miles each way to attend class. Only when he became ill with cancer the following year did he drop out. News reports of his death said that words from Scripture were among the last sounds Kimani heard.

I turned from my BlackBerry to my computer to blog about Kimani for ABC News. “Kimani Nganga Maruge was one of the most charming, most determined men I’ve ever met,” I wrote. That only began to capture his impact on me. Meeting Kimani changed my perspective on life.

These days, whenever I find myself complaining about the stresses of work or parenting, I think of Kimani and suddenly I feel tremendously grateful for what I have and pretty sheepish about my grousing. I think of him sitting in his hut, poring determinedly and delightedly over his Bible, always seeking to know more. He was the world’s oldest student. And one of my most inspiring teachers.

A Spiritual Habit to Enrich Your Daily Life

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Edward Grinnan

How can a new habit help you see your life through a spiritual lens? I can share a positive habit that increases the health of my soul.

Years ago, I was convinced to contribute devotions to Guideposts’ popular annual devotional book, Daily Guideposts (now called Walking in Grace). Fact was, I’d never written one. My editor said, “Just tell a little story, an observation from your daily life, which gave you a spiritual insight or just made you feel good or lifted you up when you felt down. Make a habit of it.”

Light for Life NASB Study Bible in Article

Small, Inspiring Moments

So, I did and based my devotions of these little observations and stories. Something truly remarkable happened. I found myself not just finding these small, inspiring moments but increasingly I viewed the events of my daily life from an enriching spiritual perspective. God was in the details!

I’ve since written hundreds of devotions for Guideposts. Yet the real benefit has come from the habit of writing down one of these moments, these insights, every day. Most don’t turn into devotions but that doesn’t matter. It’s the habit of writing just a few lines about a special moment in my day that is the spiritual payoff. The effect is cumulative…no, magical. The more I record these moments the more of them I recognize as I go through life. They water the garden of the soul.

“Thanks for Saying Hello”

I set aside time near the end of my day to practice this. Only a few minutes and a couple of lines. The message is for me. Today, for instance, while I was walking Gracie on a busy Manhattan street, she suddenly tugged me over to a stoop where a woman sat forlornly looking like she hadn’t a friend in the world. I hadn’t even noticed this person amid the sidewalk throng, but Gracie had. She snuggled up to the woman, all 70 golden pounds of her, curling like a puppy, and the woman beamed. “Thanks for saying hello, baby.” I had seen an angel in action! And maybe next time it would be me who stops and says hello.

I promise you, if you develop this simple spiritual habit of writing down that one moment in your day when you saw God in the details you will feel enriched and that enrichment will only grow.

READ MORE ABOUT SPIRITUAL HABITS:

A Spiritual Approach to Making Exercise a Habit

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Rick Hamlin

Five days a week I go out for a run. A short, slow run. It’s a habit with me. And the only way I can stick with it is to keep it a habit. To glorify God. In other words, it’s a spiritual approach to making exercise a habit.

The Apostle Paul observed, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God…?” (I Corinthians 6:19)

We’re meant to treat the body with respect, to do all we can within our power to keep it healthy and serviceable.

A Wild Heart History

As I’ve written before, I have a wild heart history. Have had heart surgery twice in my life, most recently over a year ago. After each “procedure” (that seems to be the word medical professionals use), I signed up for cardiac rehab.

In cardiac rehab, you work with a nurse, a physical therapist—with a cardiologist on hand if needed—and get exercise three days a week, building back your strength and more specifically, your confidence.

This last time around I figured, “Okay, I’m not going to go running anymore.” On the contrary, the nurse and therapist urged me on. Running is good for my body. And I daresay, for my soul.

Encouragement to Keep Going

Their encouragement was a reminder: keep it up, Rick. If you saw me, slowly jogging up and down hills, you’d know I’m not out to win any races. In fact, recently, as I came up that last hill running with a friend, a neighbor exclaimed, “You look like the very LAST two finishers of the marathon.”

Thanks a lot. I decided to take it as a compliment.

“You must really love to run,” people will say to me. Love is too strong a word. But I love to finish a run. That feels good.

The only way I can do it is to make it a habit. It’s inscribed in my head (and heart). Sometimes I do it first thing in the morning. As the weather gets cold, I prefer going later in the day, when I won’t freeze. I could do it in a gym, but I don’t really like jogging on a treadmill. I prefer the great outdoors. A chance to get closer to the Creator.

Learning While Running

Sometimes I listen to a Bible podcast. My favorite is called “The Bible for Normal People,” full of interesting guests and scholars. I can learn while I run. I can grow.

Good habits are, in turn, habit-forming. I find it easiest if I simply make it a rule. The Bible offers commandments for us to follow. And the more you follow them, the easier it is to observe them. They become habits. So try a spiritual approach to making exercise a habit.

Like that everyday jog.

Sometimes I imagine Jesus there, as I’m huffing and puffing up a hill. “Okay, Jesus, I’m doing this for You.” To love the Lord with all your heart, body, mind and soul. “I’ll keep doing this, Jesus, until you tell me to stop.” Or a doctor says as much.

I like walking, too. That’s awfully good for you. Maybe that’ll be next.

A Single Seahorse Changed this Diver’s Life

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Roger Hanson

Dive a few feet underwater and you’re in another world. It’s quiet down there. You can hear yourself think. If you’re me, you stop thinking so much. You slow down. Look around. See the world maybe a little more the way God intended. I’m a restless guy. Married four times. Moved all over the country. Grew up on a farm and later worked as a teacher and coached football, wrestling and track.

Scuba diving is what I keep coming back to. I learned to dive 30 years ago. I’ve been a diver almost half my life. No matter where I live, I find water and dive. I’ve chainsawed holes in the Wisconsin ice and plunged in.

I always say I’m a C-minus on land but a Mensa genius underwater. I don’t mean I get smarter; I mean I become a better person down there. I’m kinder. More patient. More tolerant and observant. My rough edges smooth out, and I become the calm, generous guy I try—and mostly fail—to be on land.

I never knew why that was until a few years ago. That’s when I made a tiny discovery during one of my routine dives. I was in shallow water off Long Beach, an industrial port city south of Los Angeles. I looked down and saw a bright orange seahorse, 4½ inches long, hovering near the ocean floor.

Credit: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times
via Getty Images

That seahorse didn’t belong there. The waters near Long Beach are too busy and too cold. Seahorses are shy and prefer warmer water. San Diego marks the northern limit of Pacific seahorse habitat, some 110 miles away.

I swam closer, fascinated and enchanted by what I was watching. I didn’t know it then, but that little seahorse had just changed my life. Wind the clock back to 1950, when I was born in Oelwein, Iowa. A town about as far from the ocean as you can get. Still, my sister and I grew up surrounded by nature and the cycle of life. We played in cornfields, watched calves being born and learned gardening from Mom.

Dad loved farming, but he couldn’t make the financial part work. We ended up moving to Council Bluffs, where Dad drove a truck and I attended high school. I knew my way around a farm but struggled in school. Kids made fun of me, and I burned to make something of myself.

I squeaked through college, but I had no idea what to do after graduating. I wound up teaching. I enjoyed the work and the students. And the job was portable. I’ve taught school in Wisconsin, Florida and California.

For years, I found it hard to settle down. I was always chasing that elusive something that would make me feel good about myself. I moved around. Cycled through relationships. Tried out different roles at school: teaching, coaching.

Just before I turned 40, I took a vacation to Mexico. I was at one of those beach resorts where you dive with tropical fish. On a whim, I put on a wet suit and regulator and slipped into the water.

My world transformed. For the first time in my life, the restless engine churning inside me slowed down. The water was quiet. Colorful fish darted around like jewels. The sound of my breathing and the swish of fins were all I heard. It was like a place apart. I didn’t want to leave.

My top priority when I returned home to Wisconsin was getting back in. I learned to scuba dive and went diving every chance I got. Eventually I moved to California to be closer to the ocean.

I began to notice how different I felt and acted underwater. I’d pretty much stopped going to church, but I sensed something holy down there. Or someone. In that presence I was able to relax, look around, not take everything so personally.

Back on land, I was just as ornery and impatient as ever. I didn’t like it but didn’t seem able to change it.

One day, 11 years after I learned to dive, I was off the coast of Laguna Beach in Southern California. It’s rocky there, and I was watching fish dart in and out of crevices. Suddenly I noticed a huge shape looming beside me.

It was a gray whale, about 40 feet long, just a few feet away. I should have been terrified. That whale could have killed me with a flick of its tail.

Instead, I looked in the whale’s eye. The whale seemed to stare back at me and into my soul. There was no condemnation in that gaze. The whale moved on, and I swam in a daze toward the surface.

After that, I began diving every day. I even lived by the beach in my white minivan for a while. I was working at a school in Long Beach, so I mostly dived there. It’s not a beautiful spot, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be underwater.

To help some octopi I found living in the bay, I created a small habitat out of discarded toys lying on the ocean floor. I called the habitat Littleville. Maybe I wished I lived in Littleville.

One day, checking on Littleville, I noticed something small and orange hovering in the sea grass a few hundred feet away. A seahorse.

I knew that seahorses didn’t belong there. I also knew an unusual pulse of warm water had traveled north to California that summer. Maybe the seahorse had drifted on the current and was trying to eke out a living in Long Beach.

I hovered, not wanting to scare the seahorse away but desperate for a closer look. It was so small. So helpless. The water wasn’t very deep. Beachgoers could paddle out here and churn everything up.

Finally I had to surface. I returned the next day and almost every day thereafter to check on the seahorse. A few months later, it was joined by a companion! Seahorses often form close attachments to one another.

Winter was approaching, and I feared the sea grass wouldn’t give the seahorses enough protection. I gathered sticks, pine branches and other bits of plant life on land and used them to build a sheltered area for the seahorses on the bay floor. They moved right in.

Soon I discovered more seahorses in the area and built habitats for them too. I gave the seahorses names like Deep Blue, Daphne and Bathsheba. I visited them every day. Something about them drew me.

I kept detailed notes about the seahorses and water conditions in my dive log. I got so excited, I shared the observations with marine biologists in the area. Normally they wouldn’t listen to some random diver. But the presence of this particular species—the Pacific seahorse—so far north caught their attention. They came to see for themselves, and before I knew it I was appearing on local TV news.

The attention went to my head. At last, the respect I had been craving! I took tons of pictures, posted online, hammed it up for the cameras. One day I dove down to visit my seahorses and…they weren’t there! I searched everywhere. At last I saw them deep in the recesses of their habitat. It was obvious they were hiding. My attention had become too intrusive. I had scared them away.

From that day, I backed off and let the seahorses call the shots. I stopped taking pictures and posting online and, instead, just hovered nearby, observing. Slowly I came to know each seahorse’s daily rhythms and personality.

The more I watched, the more I realized those seahorses were the exact opposite of me. They were quiet. Calm. Patient. Most of all, they were content. They didn’t rove around, seeking the next best place or food source. They moved into the bay, found mates and settled down. They faithfully played their role in God’s ocean drama.

What was my role? For so many years, I had devoted every spare minute to being underwater. Why? What did I find down here?

The answer was obvious. What I found underwater was God. It was God who spoke to me in the silence I heard in the ocean. God who gazed at me in the eye of the gray whale.

And now God was showing me yet another side of himself in the lives of these fragile but faithful seahorses.

I struggled on land because I found it hard to admit that I wasn’t so different from the seahorses after all. I too was loved by God because God made me and redeemed me. If I truly accepted that, I could stop my lifelong search for validation. God’s love was enough for the seahorses. Maybe it could be enough for me.

For almost five years, I have shepherded the seahorses. I observe, take detailed notes and help scientists understand this fragile species.

I keep the exact location of their habitat secret. Once, I even had to move parts of it after a bunch of high school football players got dangerously close, blowing off steam at the beach.

Maybe one day the seahorses will leave. I’m okay with that. For me, the seahorses have already done their work. In their quiet, unassuming way, they took hold of my life and turned it in the right direction. I’ll keep diving, and I’m sure God will give me another job.

I still work on my manners above water. But the restlessness? The insecurity? Gone.

The ocean knows the real me. God knows. He loves me because he made me, and he shows me where to go. I’ll follow him anywhere. I strap on my tanks, start my regulator and plunge in.

For more inspiring stories, subscribe to Guideposts magazine.

A Single Mom’s Second Chance at Love

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Charlotte Mobbs

Late again! The booster club meeting for my son’s high school football team was almost over. I slid into a seat at the back of the crowded room, hoping no one would notice. Working full time as a single mother made it tough to get to my kids’ school activities on time. Life was easier to navigate with a partner, but when I started dating after my divorce, each date was worse than the last. The womanizer, the guy who was financially irresponsible, the controlling one, the immature one… It took a while but I finally got the message: I’d be single forever.

At least the kids and I are a happy family, I thought as the booster meeting wrapped up around me. I knew it should be enough, and most of the time it was. But sometimes in the back of my mind I caught myself wishing for a companion. Someone to talk to at night after the kids went to bed. Someone to hold hands with at the football games. Someone to love and someone to love me. But it seemed like all those bad dates had proved that God had closed that door for good.

“One last item,” the man running the meeting announced. “Don’t miss the game on Friday! See you all there.”

I gathered my things. On my way out I bumped into my friend Darryl, who was talking to someone I didn’t know.

“Hey, Darryl,” the guy said. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

“I’m surprised you two haven’t met. Kenny, this is Charlotte,” Darryl said. “Kenny’s son will play on the team this year.”

“Nice to meet you, Charlotte. I’ll probably see you at the next game,” Kenny said.

As I drove home, I remembered everything I’d already heard about Kenny through Mack, another mutual friend. Kenny was a widower who had lovingly cared for his wife during her long illness.

Next time I saw Darryl he asked if I would work the cash box at the tailgate fund-raiser before the game. The money went toward college scholarships for the players. “Sure,” I said. “Happy to.”

I drove straight there after work on Friday. It had been a long week, but I was excited to mix with the other parents before the game. There was always a crowd of them. But when I arrived in the stadium parking lot, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I was the only woman in sight! Only me and a bunch of men to work the team fundraiser. Darryl waved to me from behind the grill with his tongs. “Hey, Charlotte!” he called. Kenny stood next to him.

Then it hit me. Darryl had set me up! He knew exactly what he was doing when he asked for my help!

I exchanged cold but polite hellos on the way to the cash box. If Darryl thought he was going to play matchmaker he would be disappointed. Dating and I were through.

As the fans passed by paying for their burgers, Kenny offered me a soda. “So what position does your son play?” he asked.

“Safety,” I replied.

“You really get close to these kids as a single parent, don’t you think? My son is my best friend,” Kenny said, smiling. He had a nice smile. Not that I entertained for a moment that he might be a “match” for me.

“Hey, Kenny! Charlotte!” someone called across the parking lot. It was Mack. “I heard you two finally met,” he said. It looked like Darryl wasn’t the only one playing matchmaker. Was the whole town in on this?

“How about I save you two some seats while you finish cleaning up here?” Mack offered. “I’m heading into the stadium now.”

When the tailgate party ended and I counted the last dollar, I rushed into the stadium, not wanting to miss the kickoff. I climbed the bleacher steps and scanned the crowd for Mack. As I settled into my seat, Kenny took the one next to me. Exactly, I figured, what Mack had planned. Lord, help me.Those two just don’t give up.

Kenny and I talked so much I have to say I hardly remember a moment of the game! Two days later he called and asked me out. I said yes before I even had time to remember my reason for saying no. We went to all the games together and spent the football season falling in love.

By the first game the following season, Kenny and I were married. His son and my son and daughter became a happy family. I’m glad Darryl and Mack didn’t pay attention to me when I felt so sure I was destined to be alone. You see, God hadn’t closed the door on love for me. I had. Thankfully, caring friends knew that if I opened that door one more time, I was bound to find an angel.

Download your free ebook, Angel Sightings: 7 Inspirational Stories About Heavenly Angels and Everyday Angels on Earth.

A Sidelined Surgeon Finds New Purpose as a Swimming Coach

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Brett Leveridge

Hi Guideposts; I’m Sherry Colgin. I’m a retired hand surgeon from Birmingham, Alabama.

I retired at a very young age; I was 51 at the time. I’ve trained in plastics, reconstructive hand and microsurgery; it took me nine years of training. I was born and raised in Alabama; I’ve enjoyed living here. I was forced to retire in 2006, at the age of 51, as I mentioned, from cardiac disease. I had my first heart attack at 47, my first bypass at 49 and my second bypass at 51.

I was devastated when I was told I needed to retire because this is all I knew. I was a triathlete and had been fairly competitive but I couldn’t do that either. So I sat around wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life and a friend of mine called me from a place called Lakeshore Foundation; it’s located in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s an Olympic and Paralympic training site and what she needed was a swimming coach.

I told her, I said, “Jill, I’m not a swim coach; I can teach how to swim across a lake, but not in a pool.” She said, “I’m in a bind and you don’t have anything to do and you can learn.” So she had me take four Paralympic athletes, who had just returned from competing in the Athens Games, and she wanted me to take them to Minneapolis, Minnesota, for a swim meet in December.

And when I walked into that natatorium, I couldn’t believe it. I saw disabilities I never dreamed could swim: quadraplegics swimming, amputees swimming, kids that were blind swimming. It was an amazing experience for me.

We worked very hard and I had one of my swimmers qualify to go to the Beijing Paralympic Games, and I actually picked up a cyclist—we took her as well. Probably one of the best things I’ve had happen in my life is when I saw both of them having a medal placed around their necks. It was quite amazing.

I again had a little bit of down period because I didn’t know what I was going to do, until I was contacted by the Navy Wounded Warrior program. They asked me to be their swim coach for two years, and it was an amazing ride. I met young people who had just come back from war, who were injured in unspeakable manners—people who’d lost legs, people who’d lost multiple limbs, head injuries, blind.

So we worked very hard—some of them we had to teach to swim from scratch—and then we would take them to the Warrior Games to compete against their brothers in arms: the Army, the Marines, the Air Force and Special Ops. They would do great, and I learned so much from them. They lifted me more than anything that had ever happened, other than the trip to Beijing. I really learned a lot from my athletes about how to get over tremendous adversity and horrible injuries.

I’ve not been involved in coaching as intimately as in the past. I coach a little bit now; I work with athletes and non-athletes, disabilitied and abilitied, but my love is to work with people who don’t know how to swim and I’m continuing to do that and it’s very rewarding.

I now have to overcome my disabilities and learn how to compete on my own. So it’s been an amazing ride to learn from my athletes how to overcome adversity, how to use what you have and don’t have and be successful. My athletes, I think of them all the time and how I can overcome what I’ve been given, my path, and it has been an amazing ride and I wouldn’t change it. It’s changed me.

So when I retired and thought I had nothing left to do, I realized that after I was involved with my athletes at Paralympics and Lakeshore and then my involvement with the Navy that God put me exactly where I needed to be, that I was in the career that I was really destined to belong in, and I’ve been more happy than I could ever imagine. God has moved in incredible ways in my life, directing me where I needed to go. I now have my new career. I thought I’d lost the love of my life, my surgical career—and I had, and I’d lost an identity—but what I found was a much more important identity and that was coaching and helping others, but learning from them. It was an incredible experience, and I hope I can keep at it.

A Schoolboy’s Prayer

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Van Varner

The rubber band around the envelope was desiccated; the inscription on the tired yellow paper was in Mom’s clear, steady hand: “Letters of Importance from Joe W. Varner.” Joe was my father. Along with everything else in this safe-deposit box, the envelope came to me when my mother died in 1957, yet in the last half century I had never opened it. I assumed that the letters concerned official matters relating to my parents’ divorce, something to which even now at the age of 81, I am not entirely reconciled. All these years later, the pain feels fresh every time I think about it.

I was five at the time. We lived in Louisville, Kentucky. I cried and cried when I was told that Dad would no longer be living with us. We were a family: Mom and Dad, my two brothers and I—Ham the oldest, JoJo the youngest and me in the middle. To my way of thinking, the family was indivisible. Everything I was taught in Sunday school reinforced that conviction. And I refused to believe that Mom and Dad were not a loving pair. Hadn’t God brought them together? Didn’t that mean their love was perfect? It must!

Even today, on a wall in my apartment, I keep a photograph of their wedding. What a splendid affair it was. The wedding party is dining, coiffed and dressed in 1919 fashion, and the huge round table, strewn with flowers, glows with lighted candles. Guests converge on the newly married couple: “Aunt” Lucy and Granduncle Ferd and “Aunt” Lillian. Mom responds to one group laughingly as Dad banters with another. All are rejoicing, for smiles abound and congratulatory hands are raised. Even Mom’s little white dog, Fluff, joins in the chorus.

The wedding was held on the cusp of the twenties, a decade of buoyant living, of drinking, of loosening morals and marital bonds. Dad was nothing if not carefree. “Your father has always been a boy,” Mom said once. “He has never grown up.”

That was true. He was a jokester, ever ready to go to a ball game or to set forth with his beloved shooting irons in search of quail. He was youthfully slender all his life (when he died at the age of 53, his suits, without any alteration, fit me, age 26) and both men and women loved him, especially the women. Women were the cause of the trouble, I later surmised, and alcoholism. The divorce hit Dad so hard that he never took another drink. Women were another matter.

Life after the divorce wasn’t as bad as I had dreaded. Dad came out to the house every day at four-thirty. My pal, John Sherrill, recalls how Dad tickled him when he accompanied me home from play. He endured the tickling because of the Snickers bars that Dad brought us. On Sundays, after church, Dad joined us for a chicken dinner (and possibly quail), and later he would drop Ham and me off at the Uptown for movies. (JoJo was too young then to tag along.) I figured it was only a matter of time until Dad and Mom would get together again, permanently. But I took no chances; I prayed to God every night before bed that it would be so. Did I say pray? Beg would be more like it.

And Mom, what about her? She was fun and alive to the changes that women were waking to, yet rigid when it came to matters such as manners—or sex. I was aware that she had suitors, but she had a life of her own, apart from children, ex-husband, friends. She wrote stories and reviewed books for the local paper until she happened onto a new medium: radio. Mom’s pleasing personality and sparkling voice—I can hear it clearly at this very minute—helped her develop a number of programs for herself. “Patience Morgan, Advice for the Lovelorn” was one that I recall. And her little “Kate in Toyland” was an instant hit. So much so that Macy’s called from New York and asked her to come up and talk with them.

Around that time—I was nine—Mom took me downtown with her to Stewart’s department store. “Good morning, Mrs. Varner” or “Hello, Mrs. Varner” was the way Mom was greeted. Louisville was that kind of town then, small enough for most people to know each other. While Mom was poking around in a drawer filled with blouses, a young woman came in—I can picture her to this day, blonde and attractive. Then I noticed two saleswomen tittering in a corner and looking at Mom. Suddenly Mom turned around and was face to face with the woman. They talked. I couldn’t hear what they said, but from a distance I could tell that Mom was more upset than I had ever known her to be. She whisked me out without telling me who the woman was. Today, I think I know.

Everything changed. That summer we kids were taken to Camp Chimney Rock in North Carolina, and Mom went to New York to talk with Macy’s. Dad wrote us each a postcard every day, but no word arrived from Mom until just before camp ended. Only later did we find out that Mom had been in a hospital with a deadly streptococcal infection—there was no miraculous penicillin then—and had nearly lost her life.

“Your mother is here,” said my counselor. Mad with excitement I burst into the waiting area, and there Mom was—on crutches. I was momentarily taken aback, but we were soon all over one another with long-awaited hugs.

“I’ve been very sick,” she told the three of us, “but I’m getting well now.” After a while she said, “I have to thank a most wonderful man who came down to New York from Albany and saved my life.” On cue, a man, whom I recognized from his trips to see Mom in Louisville, came in. “This,” she said in a way that I took to be imploring us to like him, “this is my husband.”

Things changed, did I say? Just completely, that’s all. Soon we were in a new home in a new city with a man who was not our father but who made the effort to be fatherly. He never succeeded, nor did the marriage, but that is the story of the rest of Mom’s tormented life. And what happened to my dream of Mom and Dad reunited? Shattered. And what happened to my belief in what God could do? Confusion. Disappointment. Sadness. Such sadness. Love wasn’t perfect after all.

Dad died in 1949 and Mom in 1957. So long ago. Yet in some ways it was as if no time had passed, that my feelings had been left in some kind of emotional abeyance. They welled up in me again as I looked at the envelope in the safe-deposit box I inherited from Mom. I had seen it before dozens of times but, somehow, I hadn’t wanted to open it. You figure that by the time you reach my point in life things are what they are. “Letters of Importance from Joe W. Varner.” The question tugged at me—What could it contain of any importance so long after so many lives had been marred? Why risk being hurt all over again? Yet even with these doubts, I slipped the rubber band off the frail envelope.

A Western Union telegram fell out. It was addressed to “MRS MARY MILAM VARNER” and dated “1933 AUG 23 PM 12 14.” I was strangely optimistic. She had not yet remarried. “IF NOT YET TOO LATE FOR YOU TO RECONSIDER. . . . “

But it was too late.

The letters that followed astonished me. Dad had written about shipping our dog Cricket to Albany or how he had subscribed to a baseball magazine for “Hamie,” but what took my breath away was that they always began “Dearest Mary Milam.” There was more than one apology throughout—”You have been hurt”—and repeatedly a protestation—”You have and do come first always in my heart.” The letters I held in my hands were, beyond the bounds of all decorum, love letters. And Mom had kept them.

Why hadn’t she ever told me about how Dad felt? Why hadn’t Dad? No mistake, my father had come through. Boyish he might have been, but he was manly in his devotion. Did she decide to marry again because she was still hurting over that woman at Stewart’s, her prim Victorian side exposed? Was it a tragic case of failure of communications, Western Union when the telephone failed? Or was it that, worn out by her illness, with responsibility for three sons and under the stress of pitching her radio program, Mom had simply seized a lifeline in the shape of the man who was at her side and ready to help? She never said.

I remember I was in graduate school, in Berkeley, when I got a telegram. I immediately telephoned Mom. “Dad had a heart attack,” I said. “He’s dead.”

There was no reaction, and I wondered for a moment if we had been disconnected. Finally, a different voice than the sparkling one I knew cried out, “Oh, the poor thing!” and then there was silence at the other end until I heard the faint sound of suppressed weeping. I quietly replaced the receiver on its hook. Mom had shown her deepest feelings. They were the same as Dad’s.

I sat in the stuffy cubicle of the bank for a long time—elated by my discoveries, yes, yet disturbed too, because my parents’ love seemed unfulfilled. Dad never married again, and Mom was trapped in a doomed marriage. I thought back to the things I’ve written about here: the happy times when Dad would come out to the house, Mom and Dad’s wedding and the photograph I treasured. I imagined the scene that lay behind that picture, and I heard the familiar words of the marriage ceremony with its rigorous conditions. Did the young couple live up to them? No. But one injunction they most certainly upheld: They loved each other, supremely. That day they were united by God. Mom and Dad are together now, forever. Their love was not perfect, as I had so fervently believed when I was a boy. No, not ever that. But oh, how human, and in its own imperfect human way, how lasting!

I put the letters back, thinking of another kind of love available to us all. Imagine it, after almost 76 years, God has answered a schoolboy’s prayers.

A Sanctuary of Healing, Born of Tragedy

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Jennifer Hubbard

Sunday morning, two days after the shooting, two days that felt like two eternities, I sat with my husband, Matt, on our living room couch in Newtown, Connecticut, staring at the blank document on my laptop, wondering where to start, how to start. How to find the words to write my little girl’s obituary.

Family and friends milled about. A coffee cake sat on the kitchen counter untouched, as if the thought of eating in the face of such tragedy was a kind of sacrilege.

It felt as if we were caught in a bank of fog trying to find our way to some sort of comprehension of what had happened in our peaceful New England village 75 miles north of New York City.

People need to know how much love went out of this world when she died, I finally thought. Just tell them. I willed my fingers to type.

“Catherine Violet Hubbard, age 6, born June 8, 2006, passed away Friday, December 14, 2012, during the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She is survived by her older brother, Frederick….”

So unnatural for a parent to be writing about the loss of her child. It should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? Catherine should have been a mom herself telling the world what a good mom and grandma I had been, that I had lived long and well and died peacefully after a happy life.

And yet our sweet, loving, beautiful daughter was gone. What more was there to say? Her life was over almost before it had begun, but the void she left felt unfillable.

She could be shy around adults, like lots of little girls. With animals or other kids it was another story, especially with animals. She came alive with love, our own miniature flame-haired Dr. Doolittle. It was as if she couldn’t contain her need to care about every living thing.

How many hours did Catherine spend in the backyard with her friends patiently training our old yellow Lab mix to jump over a stick? Hugging her. Picking her up, though she weighed twice as much Catherine. She had a thing for critters—her pet bunny, her fish, the crickets in our yard on lazy summer nights, even the worms.

Butterflies were a big deal. She’d gasp with delight when one landed on her hand, which they always seemed to do. Maybe it was because she’d whisper to them, “Tell all your friends I’m kind.” Yes, kind. Catherine knew what she was and how precious kindness is in this world.

Not long ago she made her own business cards with Catherine’s Animal Shelter across the top. Care Taker, she wrote under her name. She handed them out to friends and to her first grade teacher at Sandy Hook. Matt and I smiled at her sense of purpose.

She was never without some kind of animal, usually one of her unbelievably huge collection of stuffed toys. She piled them around her on the bed at night. In the morning she always picked one to put in her backpack for school. As if she had to have something with her to care for, even a stuffed animal.

First grade, going to class all day, had been an adjustment. For her and for me. More me, probably. When she was in preschool and kindergarten I cherished having our afternoons together.

I rushed to get my chores and errands done so when she got home I could give her all my attention, make time for art projects, baking cookies and reading with her. Those hours were precious to me, and so much more precious now that God had called her home.

I didn’t know why Catherine died. The greatest comfort—the only comfort—was knowing she was in the safest place of all, in heaven, with no hate and no bullets, only love and life eternal.

I reread what I had written so far. How could all the beautiful things our daughter was even be expressed in words? I typed: “Her family prays that she, all the students of Sandy Hook Elementary, and all those affected by this brutal event find peace in their hearts.”

Peace, a word I had chanted silently to myself since Friday morning.

Matt looked over my shoulder at what I’d written. “Looks good,” he said.

“We need some kind of memorial,” I said. “People are going to want to send donations.”

Matt thought for a moment. “What about the animal shelter?” he said. What was it called? A friend did a quick search on her phone. “It’s called the Animal Center,” she said. “Here’s the address.”

I typed it into the form. “In lieu of flowers…” It wasn’t much, but for now it was all my heart could manage.

I e-mailed the obituary to the funeral home. We’d spent that Saturday meeting with our priest and the funeral director, planning the wake for Wednesday, the mass for Thursday morning. So many decisions. It was impossible to believe that it could all be actually happening.

I felt both raw and numb, like someone walking barefoot across burning-hot coals and not quite feeling the pain. Not yet, at least.

The casket. The cemetery plot. The music. The question of whether to open the mass and the wake to the public. We’d said yes. Scheduling a time for the services. Our church alone, St. Rose, was holding eight funerals. One choice was easy: we’d decided to bury Catherine with her stuffed animals. All of them.

That was the one thing I knew for certain she would have wanted. So you’ll have something to care for in heaven, my love.

Now with the arrangements done the hours were agonizing. Empty. Our house felt like a prison cell. We couldn’t leave without being escorted by a state trooper. One was assigned to every family.

We’d been told the village was swarming with media, that there were dozens of reporters camped out behind police barricades at the end of our block. I understood that the country and the world mourned with us, but still…

I reran the events of that terrible morning over and over in my mind, how I’d walked her and Frederick to the bus stop, as I always did. The bus coming. Catherine kissing my hand, as she always did, holding it tight against her heart. “Push it in all the way to my toes,” she said.

I’d walked back home and poured a cup of coffee. I hadn’t taken a shower. Matt was in Switzerland on business. I was looking forward to an easy morning. Then the phone rang. A friend whose daughter was in the same class as Catherine. “Come to the school,” she said. “There’s been a shooting.”

I grabbed my purse and dashed to the car. The school was five minutes away. I called my sister Ann and my parents in Pennsylvania. “We’re praying for you,” they said.

The road to Sandy Hook Elementary was blocked by dozens of police cars, fire trucks and ambulances. I parked and raced to the firehouse, maybe 100 yards from the school, past cops and emergency workers who looked dazed and in shock.

Parents, hundreds of people, were coming from all directions. Everyone was asking the same question: “Did you find your kids?”

I ran into the firehouse. I saw Frederick with his third-grade class and his teacher. Thank God… Then he yelled to me, “I can’t find Catherine!” I went to him and held him tightly against me. “Don’t worry,” I said. “She’s okay.” But even as I said the words I could feel my chest tighten.

I searched everywhere for her, in the firehouse bays, outside, everywhere I could go. But not inside the school. It was sealed off and there was no sign of Catherine. Or her teacher. Her class. Other parents were collecting their children and leaving.

A woman gathered Frederick and the other kids that remained and led them behind a partition where there was a TV and snacks.

Someone ushered me to a conference room crowded with parents whose children were also unaccounted for. Matt called from Switzerland. He’d seen the news on his phone. He knew more than I did. I told him I didn’t know where Catherine was, that maybe she was still inside the school.

“I’m coming home,” he said. He was crying. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Soon was a relative term because time seemed frozen inside that room. I waited for the inevitable, only dimly aware of the muffled cries, husbands and wives holding each other, people pacing all around. At some point a priest sat beside me and took my hand. “She’s gone,” was all I could say.

No one had to tell me. I felt a strange sense of peace. My daughter was safe with God. I clung to that one solitary thought like a lifeline. My mind, my whole being was in shock.

Finally we were officially told what I’d known for hours. I went to find Frederick. “Catherine’s in heaven,” I told him. “I know,” he said. I knelt and wrapped my arms around him, my heart pounding. I didn’t want to ever let him go. My family had arrived by then and we left to go home.

When we opened the doors to the firehouse we were facing a sea of television cameras and lights, reporters yelling out at me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, couldn’t process the words.

A psychologist came by that night to counsel us, to talk with Frederick particularly. “How do we do things as a family again?” I asked. “Even just a meal?”

“At first all you can do is pretend,” she said. “Pretend as if you can go on without her. It won’t be easy. You must give yourself time.”

I thought of the saying “Act as if you have faith and faith will be given to you.” I had faith. But I didn’t have Catherine. How could I act as if I did?

Matt got home at 2:00 A.M. on Saturday morning, escorted from the airport by state troopers. We held each other for what seemed like forever. “I’m so sorry,” he said over and over.

More than 400 people came for Catherine’s wake. They stood in line for hours. The air was thick with grieving. With pity. With unchecked emotion. I’d never seen so many people so sad. I’d written a few thoughts I wanted to share at her funeral. This time I didn’t have to think about it. The words came easily.

“I know that God has a specific purpose for us,” I said. “And while I may not understand how I will muster the strength to fulfill his purpose, he will provide what I need to move forward.”

We attended two more funerals and four wakes. Then Matt’s and my families left. “You need time alone,” my sister said, “to start healing.” She was right, of course. But starting was hard. What to say? How to act? How to resist just falling to pieces?

“We’re going to get through this,” we told each other. I believed that with all my heart. The task seemed overwhelming, though, the healing so impossible. How do you survive a child’s death? I spent hours talking to God. Lord, I know Catherine is with you, but I need to feel her with me too. Please.

One afternoon Matt said, “I’m going to drive out to that animal shelter. We should tell them about Catherine’s memorial.” He took Frederick. I’d just sat down on the couch with a magazine when the phone rang. It was Matt.

“I’m here at the address we put in Catherine’s obituary. But it’s not the shelter. It’s just somebody’s house.”

“Oh no!” I said. What had we done? I got online, found the phone number for the Animal Center and called them. A woman answered. She sounded kind.

“We’re animal rescue volunteers,” she explained. “We don’t have a building or anything like that. We’ve been wanting to call you, but felt we should, you know, wait a bit. I think it would be best if we met in person.”

A few days later two pleasant, unassuming women came to the house. Their expressions puzzled me. They looked almost embarrassed.

“Can I ask how much in donations you’ve received?” I said.

“It’s about $175,000,” one of the women said. “The donations are coming from all over the country. All over the world, actually. And they keep coming.”

I looked at Matt. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! “That’s a lot of money,” I said. “What are your plans?”

“Well,” the woman said, “we’ve always dreamed of starting a wildlife sanctuary. A place where both animals and people could find healing. It would be calm and serene. Peaceful. There would be walking paths and places to sit. And there would be opportunities for people to work with the animals.”

Care taker. Catherine’s business card burst into my mind. It was almost as if she were there with us again, a butterfly resting on the back of her hand as she held it aloft: Tell all your friends I’m kind.

“Catherine will love that,” I said, and hugged them both.

Today, six months after the brutal murder of 26 children and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary, the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary is becoming a reality.

We want it to be a place of peace, peace born of terrible, incomprehensible violence. Peace, like the peace of Christ, that is the only answer to evil. Because no amount of hate, no gun or bullets, can kill love. Especially the love of a child like our daughter, Catherine Hubbard.

Watch a video about the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary.

Download your FREE ebook, A Prayer for Every Need, by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.

A Rocket Scientist at 22, Tiera Guinn Fletcher Is Grateful

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Brett Leveridge

Hi Guideposts! My name is Tierra Fletcher, previously known as Tierra Guinn. I’m 22 years old, I graduated form MIT, studying aerospace engineering, and now I’m working for Boeing on NASA’s space launch system as a rocket structural analysis engineer. Right now I’m at the United States Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, at a photo shoot for Guideposts magazine.

I grew up around a very supportive and fanstastic family. As young as six years old, I just loved to innovate and calculate, so I would use Legos, construction blocks, construction paper, pencils, colored pencils, crayons, whatever I could put my hands on in order to turn my dreams into a reality. At the age of 11, I decided to be an aerospace engineer.

My parents played a key role in cultivating my love of mathematics and science. My mom, an accountant, would just get me to calculate anything and everything, and my dad, a construction worker, would teach me about measurements. My favorite teacher from Lindley Middle School, Alan Newsome—he wasn’t just a normal science teacher. He taught me how to innovate and bring my dreams into an actual project, something that could truly change the world. He taught me about forensics, environmental aspects, even how to have a more healthy lifestyle. He was a great mentor.

After taking a moment to truly believe in myself, I decided to apply to MIT and I got accepted and attended MIT and I majored in aerospace engineering.

For the girls out there who are looking to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), do it! Don’t be afraid! Don’t let the fact that you are the minority in your field get in the way of pursuing your dreams. Focus. Stay on it, and you’ll get there.

Faith not only supported me throughout my life, but it made me who I am today. It has put me where I am today. I continuously depend on my faith in order to get me through whatever it is I’m going through, whether it’s taking humans to Mars or even getting up out of bed. Without my faith, I have no idea where I would be, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be a rocket scientist.

A key support in my life is my wonderful husband, Myron Fletcher. He’s a rocket propulsion test engineer and he’s an amazing man of God, and I truly appreciate having him in my life.

Follow me and my husband, watch our faith walk and even learn more about relationships and your walk with God at Rocket with the Fletchers Facebook page.

NASA’s space launch system is the most powerful rocket ever created in history and it will be our journey to Mars. Being a part of a world-changing program like that is truly an honor because I am a part of history.

A Riddle for You… It’s All About Passion

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by carolzette

A riddle for you: What has the aroma of an expensive perfume, the beauty of a flower, the properties of a medicine, a mouth-watering taste, and is fun to use in decorating?

Give up? OK. Here’s a hint. It’s an herb. But which one?

Recently, I was chatting with Joyce (Kilborn) Laitinen, president of the Willamette Valley Herb Society, and editor of their chock-full-of-tips newsletter Willamette Herb. We were at a gathering of schoolmates who had attended Silverton Union High School in Oregon’s scenic and fertile Willamette Valley. What I love about reunions is “re-meeting” old friends and learning about their passions. Herbs are Joyce’s passion.

I asked Joyce what her favorite herb was. Her answer was quick and decisive. “Lavender. Every part is useful. It’s aromatic, decorative, beautiful, medicinal, and delicious…as in lavender ice cream, cookies, tea, and even…lavender chicken!”

Lavender chicken? That was a stretch for me, but I admit her list was making me hungry. “Do you chop your herbs…or slice them…squeeze or squish them…or what?” I asked.

“I have a coffee grinder I use only for spices,” she said to my surprise. But then, I think, Why not? When I was 10, I ground up my mother’s roses in her meat grinder, hoping I could make rose perfume…only to discover the juice I got from the mangled petals smelled like ground hamburger!

Joyce explained how her passion came to her. “When I was a child, my grandmother had a huge cottage garden with herbs and flowers. When I was ill, she dosed me with herbs.”

Joyce caused me to ask myself: What herbs are in my life? I admit to having a Brown Thumb. But years ago, I stuck a sprig of peppermint in some dirt by the driveway and since then, I’ve been pinching leaves for my tea. On my deck, I have lemony thyme and basil still in their plastic pots, and I enjoy zipping out and grabbing a few leaves to toss in whatever I am preparing salads, soups, or meats. So, why not try lavender?

Herbs aren’t Joyce’s only passion. She baked 300 pies for the booth her church, Camby United Methodist, hosted at the Oregon State Fair this year.

My passion? Eating pies…that’s a worthy passion! Hmmm. How about a lavender pie?

—Carol

Feel free to email me your environmental tips and questions!

Members of Willamette Herb Society receive the newsletter, Willamette Herb, featuring Joyce’s “Herb of the Month” and seasonal tips. They also get to hear speakers and attend outings—dues are only $15. You can learn more from Mina.Oregon@yahoo.com.

Are You Treating Your Time Like It’s Sacred?

Posted on March 11, 2026March 12, 2026 by Michelle Cox

Have you ever thought about the value of your time?

Somehow—and I’m not sure how it happened—the years zoomed by, and I went straight from being a young bride to becoming a grandmother. It felt like those pages on the calendar whipped by like an expert shuffling a deck of cards at warp speed.

That’s led me to realize something important: Time is one of our most precious commodities.

It’s like each of us has a bank account of days, hours, minutes and seconds to spend instead of dollars and coins. On the day we were born, God deposited the moments of our lives into that account—and we get to choose how we spend them.

Those moments can’t be replaced. They can’t be done over. And there’s no guarantee about how many days and hours were deposited into our time accounts.

Each moment is a precious gift from God. And that’s the question for us: Are we spending those priceless days and hours wisely? The letters of “TIME” provide a great reminder of ways that we can use that gift to accomplish God’s plan for us:

T = Talents
Are we using the talents He gave us or are they going to waste? I love what Erma Bombeck said, “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, ‘I used everything You gave me.’” Like Erma, I want to use the time God gave me to accomplish the tasks He has for me to do.

I = Impact
Are we using God’s gift of time to impact the lives of others? All of us can volunteer at church or our child’s school, do yard work for an elderly neighbor, encourage a single parent or help a disadvantaged child learn to read. And if we don’t do it, who will?

M = My Loved Ones
Are we spending all of our time at work or other pursuits, or are we investing our lives and love into our family and friends? Those are irreplaceable moments. I’ve heard of many deathbed situations where people wish they’d spent more time with their families, but I’ve never heard of anyone wishing they’d taken more time at work. Do our loved ones know how much we value them? Sometimes “love” truly is spelled t-i-m-e.

E = Eternity
Are we using our time for what will matter for eternity? Many folks spend their lives accumulating “things,” but we can’t take them with us when heaven beckons. Those things that we do for God–sharing our faith, teaching our children about Him, being extensions of God’s hands to others through kindness and love–that’s what will live on in others.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12)

Manage your time better with the 2016 Daily Guideposts Planner! Buy one here.