It was 3:00 in the afternoon on one of the last days of July, 1941 when the men of Block 14 were digging gravel outside the Auschwitz concentration camp.  Suddenly the sirens began to shriek and German sentries shouldered their guns.  There had been an escape.  Silently the men of Block 14 prayed that the escapee had not been from their block.  That evening their worst fears were confirmed.  The missing prisoner had been from Block 14.  The entire camp was punished and received no evening meal, which usually consisted of a dried piece of bread and some cabbage soup or gruel.

Long ago a poet remarked that birds can fly and we cannot because birds have perfect faith and we do not.  Aeronautical engineers will tell you that it is impossible for birds to fly because of the way they are made; but birds, not knowing that they cannot fly, rise to heights above.

When I asked Fred Whiteman how old he was, he replied, "I'm 47 on the outside, 31 on the inside.  I've had more trouble that most senior citizens, and I still look at life through the eye of a child."  What kind of an answer is that?  Chronologically, Fred had seen 47 birthdays.  Within his chest cavity beat the heart of a man 31 years old--the result of having had a heart transplant.  Has Fred really seen more trouble than most senior citizens?

In 1947, a shepherd boy by the name of Mohammed Ab Dib, from the Ta-Amir Bedouin tribe, was allegedly searching for lost sheep when he tossed a rock into the mouth of a cave near the Dead Sea. That evening as he sat around the campfire with his older brothers, Mohammed told how he had heard an evil spirit which he thought had been disturbed by a rock he had thrown into the cave as he searched for a lost goat.

They called him, "The Gentleman Bandit."  Few robbers were ever more kind to their victims.  He would rob people, then mail the pictures of children and grandchildren back to their home addresses.  After pulling a gun and informing the victim that it was a robbery, on several occasions his heart would be touched by their stories of hardship if they lost their money, and he would put his gun in his pocket and walk away.  On one occasion a man was so frightened that he sustained a heart attack, and the kind bandit called for an ambulance.  He went so far as to sympathetically call the homes of victims, to see if they had recovered from the fright of being robbed.

Out of the mouth of babes come some of the toughest issues that ever confront theologians, to say nothing of Sunday school teachers or parents.  For example, the question that my son, then five years of age, once put to me in rush-hour traffic:  "Daddy, how did Jesus get to be God?"  What struck me about the question was that we hadn't even been talking about the subject.  Surprising as it may seem to you, that very issue was one of the first controversies in the early church.  Did Jesus become God when He was born?  Or rather was He always God and only appeared to be a man?

Anyone who has ever undertaken a building project knows that what looks great on paper never takes the same shape in the real world.  I don't know if Nehemiah had ever heard of "Murphy's law --whatever can go wrong, will go wrong."  There must have been a Persian equivalent, because a man who lived 2600 years ago experienced the full force of that reality.

Have you ever wanted to do something, yet you were faced with all kinds of obstacles?  If you answer, "Yes!" then you can relate to one of the greatest of all Old Testament characters, a man by the name of Nehemiah.

As we drove past the elementary school, we noticed the long line of cars waiting to pick up the children who were finishing their school day. "Boy," I commented--half speaking to my wife and half to myself--"things sure are different from when our kids went to school."  A generation ago, perhaps even a decade ago, few parents had much concern when kids walked home. After all, there were neighbors and it was generally safe.

David, the New Testament tells us, was a man after God's own heart (Acts 13:22), something that was said of no other person whose life story is told in the Bible. He was the one who went against the giant Goliath, the one who united Israel and defeated its enemies, yet, tragically, it was for his affair with Bathsheba, that history has most remembered David.