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A Sunday school teacher named Edward Kimball stood on the sidewalk outside a Boston shoe store, working up the nerve to go in. He nearly turned and walked away. Then he pushed the door open and went looking for a clerk named Dwight Moody.

That awkward conversation in a stockroom led D.L. Moody to Christ. He became the greatest evangelist of his century. The ripples never stopped — Moody's revivals reached J. Wilbur Chapman, Chapman taught a washed-up ballplayer named Billy Sunday to handle the gospel, Sunday's fruit reached a fiery preacher named Mordecai Ham, and in 1934 a teenage farm boy slipped into the back of one of Ham's revivals in Charlotte and gave his heart to the Lord.

His name was Billy Graham.

Edward Kimball never preached to a stadium. He just walked into a shoe store he almost skipped. A five-minute reminder that God prefers to write His biggest stories with the most unlikely cast.

Scripture echo: 1 Corinthians 1:27; Jeremiah 1:5-7
Key figure: D.L. Moody (1837-1899), American evangelist, founder of Moody Bible Institute

Read or listen on the blog: https://rodneycoe.com/dl-moody-shoe-clerk-who-shook-the-world/

Five minutes. Pull up a chair.

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They summoned him for treason. He told them he had already been summoned by a higher Judge.

Samuel Rutherford was a country pastor banished to a cold northern city, where exile turned him into one of the most beloved letter-writers in church history. This is the story of the book they burned, the pulpit they took, and the deathbed words that have comforted believers for more than three hundred years.

Scripture echoes: Romans 8:31; John 14:2; Psalm 73:25

Key figure: Samuel Rutherford (c. 1600-1661), Scottish pastor and author of the Letters and Lex Rex.

Read or listen on the blog: https://rodneycoe.com/samuel-rutherford-higher-summons/

Five minutes. Pull up a chair.

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A man stands at the railing of a ship in the middle of the Atlantic late at night. A few weeks ago he had four daughters — Annie, Margaret, Bessie, and little Tanetta who was only two. Now the captain has come to find him with the words no father should ever have to hear. "Sir, this is the place. We are passing over the spot where your daughters went down."

This is the story of Horatio Spafford — a Chicago lawyer who had already lost a son and a fortune, whose wife Anna sent the telegram from Wales that read simply "Saved alone." Crossing the ocean to reach her, he reached for a pen above the dark water and wrote not a complaint but a song. It is well with my soul.

"The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit." — Psalm 34:18

Whatever you are carrying today, whatever loss has left you standing at the railing in the dark, He is closer than your next breath. One day He will make it well.

And that, friend, is how God lifts up your day.

— Pastor Rodney Coe

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Noon on a Wednesday in 1857, in a third-floor room above an old church in lower Manhattan, a forty-eight-year-old man sat down by himself to pray. For thirty minutes, nobody came. Then footsteps on the stairs. Then five more men. Within a year, ten thousand New Yorkers were praying every day, and close to a million Americans came to faith in eighteen months.

This is the story of Jeremiah Lanphier and the Fulton Street Prayer Revival. A failed businessman, no platform, no following, just a faithful half hour in an empty room. A five-minute reminder that heaven is not waiting on the crowd — heaven is waiting on the one who will show up at twelve-twenty-nine when nothing seems to be happening.

"For who has despised the day of small things?" — Zechariah 4:10

Do not despise your small beginning today. Heaven was waiting on him. Heaven may be waiting on you.

And that, friend, is how God lifts up your day.

— Pastor Rodney Coe

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The true story of missionary Amy Carmichael and the childhood prayer God answered with 'no' (Isaiah 55:8).

A little girl in Ireland once begged God for blue eyes and woke up disappointed. She had no idea He was preparing her for a rescue that would not make sense for another forty years. This is the story of Amy Carmichael, the missionary who slipped past temple gates in the dark to save children from slavery, and the plain brown eyes God used to do it. A five-minute reminder that the prayer you think He ignored may be the one He is answering most carefully of all. "And that, friend, is how God lifts up your day."

— Pastor Rodney Coe

Full blog post + Scripture references: https://rodneycoe.com/amy-carmichael-prayer-god-answered/

Pastor Rodney's books: https://rodneycoe.com/books/

Scripture: Isaiah 55:8 • Isaiah 6:8 • 2 Corinthians 12:9

Episode 13 of the Take 5 series (True Stories of Faith)

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The true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor who left safety in America to resist Hitler in Nazi Germany (Hebrews 11:6).

In 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was safe in New York City. His American friends had arranged a teaching post at Union Theological Seminary specifically to keep him out of Hitler's reach. He lasted 26 days. Then he boarded the last passenger ship crossing the Atlantic before the war shut the ocean down and sailed back into Nazi Germany.

Two years later he was in a Gestapo prison. Two years after that, he was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp, twenty-three days before Germany surrendered. He never saw the victory he gave his life for.

But God did. And the letters he wrote from that prison cell are still preaching eighty years later.

Today's Take 5 is the true story of Bonhoeffer's costly faith, the choice he made on a Manhattan pier, and what Hebrews 11:6, Romans 8:28, and Psalm 116:15 say to every person wondering whether following Jesus is worth the price.

Heaven comes down. Lift up your day.

Pastor Rodney Coe

Pastor Rodney Coe Ministries

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The true story of William Seymour, the overlooked preacher behind the Azusa Street Revival (Acts 10:34).

In 1906, William J. Seymour arrived in Los Angeles with one good eye, a borrowed pulpit, and a message that got him locked out of the first church he preached in. He found a small group of seekers, a borrowed room, and his knees. What happened next ignited the Azusa Street Revival, one of the greatest outpourings of the Holy Spirit in modern history. And it still echoes today in over 600 million believers worldwide.

This is Episode 11 of Lift Up Your Day, a 5-minute Christian devotional podcast from Pastor Rodney Coe. Short stories with a biblical heartbeat. Stories of God breaking through in ordinary lives. Around the world, and around the corner.

Scriptures: Acts 10:34 | 1 Corinthians 1:27 | Psalm 34:18

New episodes every weekday, Monday through Friday at 6 AM Eastern.

Full blog post and source links: https://rodneycoe.com/william-seymour-azusa-street-revival/

Free 7-day devotional When Worry Won't Let Go: https://rodneycoe.com/worry-devotional

Rodney Coe Ministries

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The true story of missionary Gladys Aylward, the rejected housemaid who led nearly 100 children to safety across China (Isaiah 6:8).

In 1932, a London parlor maid named Gladys Aylward was rejected by the China Inland Mission as too plain, too ordinary, and not intelligent enough to learn Chinese. So she saved every penny she earned, bought a one-way train ticket, and traveled alone across Europe and Siberia into northern China. A decade later, when Japan invaded, she walked over one hundred orphaned children across the frozen mountains of Shanxi to safety. Every single child survived. This is her story — and the reason “I didn’t have the courage. I just had a God who said ‘Go’” is one of the most powerful sentences in missionary history.

Scriptures referenced: Isaiah 6:8 • 2 Corinthians 12:9

In this 5-minute Take 5 episode:

• The London parlor maid the mission board said couldn’t do it

• The one-way ticket through Siberia into wartime China

• The thousand-year-old practice she helped end

• 12 days. 100 children. Frozen mountains. Every child survived.

• Why ordinary obedience is the only credential heaven asks for

Lift Up Your Day is a daily five-minute devotional — short stories with a biblical heartbeat, hosted by Pastor Rodney Coe. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Read the full story → rodneycoe.com

Rodney Coe Ministries • rodneycoe.com

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The true story of Blaise Pascal's 'Night of Fire' — the encounter with God he sewed into his coat.

On the night of November 23rd, 1654, the most brilliant scientific mind in Europe had a two-hour encounter with the living God that broke him wide open.

Blaise Pascal was thirty-one years old. By twelve, he'd worked out Euclid's first thirty-two propositions on his bedroom floor. By nineteen, he'd invented the first mechanical calculator. By twenty-two, he'd proven the existence of a vacuum. He had conquered science, mathematics, and physics. He was the toast of Paris. And he was still empty.

That night, alone in his room, between roughly 10:30 PM and 12:30 AM, something happened that no equation could explain. Pascal grabbed a scrap of parchment and began to scrawl. We call it the Memorial. It begins with a single word: "Fire."

Then: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars." Then: "Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

When the candle burned low, Pascal did something strange. He sewed that parchment into the lining of his coat. He would wear it next to his heart for the rest of his life — eight more years — and never mention it to a soul. It was only discovered after his death, when a servant cleaning his coat noticed a strange lump in the fabric.

This Take 5 devotional from Pastor Rodney Coe is for anyone who's tried to fill the God-shaped hole with success, with approval, with one more title — and discovered that the deepest truth in the universe cannot be calculated. It has to be encountered.

Pascal's famous line: "There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator."

He would know. He tried genius first.

Scripture: Jeremiah 29:13 · Psalm 42:1-2 · Matthew 11:28

Keep Looking Up. — Pastor Rodney Coe

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