The One Year Book of Amazing Stories: 365 Days of Seeing God’s Hand in Unlikely Places

By Robert Petterson

ECPA 2020 Christian Book Award Finalist!

You wouldn’t believe it, but . . .

• James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, grew up mute.
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
• Albert Einstein was bullied mercilessly in school.
• Beethoven’s mom almost aborted him.

Life takes the strangest sharp turns—and sometimes, U-turns. Robert Petterson—popular speaker, storyteller, and author—has been a student for his entire life of what God is teaching us through those real-life U-turns. In this book, he compiles 365 amazing stories that teach lessons you won’t easily forget. Each entry is written in the rest-of-the-story style popularized by Paul Harvey. With The One Year Book of Amazing Stories, you’ll marvel at how God has used the lives of these ordinary people to change the course of human history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
• Release date: Oct 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496424037

Book preview

The One Year Book of Amazing StoriesThe One Year Book of Amazing Stories by Robert Petterson

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The One Year Book of Amazing Stories: 365 Days of Seeing God’s Hand in Unlikely Places

Copyright © 2018 by Robert A. Petterson. All rights reserved.

Ninety of the devotions in this book were previously published in 2017 as The Book of Amazing Stories under ISBN 978-1-4964-2814-1.

Cover illustration by Eva M. Winters, copyright © Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration of dingbat copyright © by LSE Designs, PH/The Noun Project. All rights reserved.

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Designed by Eva M. Winters

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version,® NIV.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version,® copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked WEB are taken from the World English Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible,® copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version.

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These 365 amazing stories are dedicated to three generations of amazing females . . .

JOYCE, my wife,

a remarkable woman whose unfailing love and steadfast support have given beauty, substance, and wonder to our story together.

RACHAEL, our attorney daughter,

a woman of force and unfailing compassion, champion of the powerless, whose tireless work transforms the stories of the sojourners among us from despair to hope.

MAE and MIRA, our granddaughters,

whose infectious joy, determination, and insatiable curiosity will continue our amazing story for generations to come.

Contents

Introduction

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Sources

Topical Index

Names Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Introduction

J. K. Rowling says, There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place. Great stories take us to the hidden places of our unexplored imagination. They have the capacity to touch something deep within us—something that goes beyond mere facts and cold logic to empower us with transforming insights. Stories remind us that we are not alone and inspire us to believe that the impossible is actually possible. That’s why God fills the Bible with epic tales of adventure, intrigue, and love—and why, when Jesus wanted to move people, he told stories.

The amazing stories tucked inside these pages are about real people like you and me. These folks have lived in every age and come from every walk of life. Yet the footprints they leave behind can embed themselves deeply in our own lives, often in ways that astound. In these stories, you will discover that there are no little people, small places, or unimportant encounters.

Some of these stories will ignite your imagination. Others will catch you by surprise as you discover amazing things about people you thought you knew. In each one, you will see God’s truths illustrated in the most unexpected ways.

In the year ahead, you will unwrap a new story each day to recharge your spiritual batteries. Each will conclude with a thought-provoking life principle as well as an accompanying Bible verse to carry you through the day. In the back of this book, you will find sources allowing you to discover even more about each story. If you are a storyteller yourself, you may want to investigate the topical indexes, which will make it easy for you to access stories for your sermons, classes, public speeches, or after-dinner conversations.

It’s my hope that these stories will inform, inspire, and transform you as much as they have me. Most of all, I hope they will inspire you to tell your own story. I believe this about you: the best lines and chapters of your amazing life story are still waiting to be written.

Dr. Robert Petterson

JANUARY

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31

January 1

A Devastating Rescue

Snow covered Bavaria like a fresh dusting of powdered sugar. On the banks of the icy Inn River, children were playing a game of cowboys and Indians. The frosty air was filled with Sioux war cries and shouts of Bang, bang! You’re dead. Among the cowboys and Indians was a four-year-old boy. He was sickly and frail, small for his age, and wearing thick glasses. Yet he ran with determination, trying desperately to keep up with the galloping herd of children—until he tripped and fell over the embankment. His eyeglasses flew through the air as he broke through the thin sheet of ice. Unable to swim, the frantic boy was swept downriver toward certain death.

Johann Kuehberger was only five years old. But when he heard his playmate scream for help, he jumped into the icy waters and pulled him to safety. Little Johann was proclaimed a hero by the local newspaper in the town of Passau. No one was surprised when this courageous child grew up to be a priest. Johann Kuehberger would spend the rest of his life trying to save those in distress. But saving that childhood playmate from drowning would haunt him to his dying day. A fellow priest, Max Tremmel, revealed that Father Johann spent many sleepless nights obsessing over that rescue in the winter of 1894.

Little Johann might have grown up to serve God, but the child he saved went on to become one of history’s most diabolical monsters. If only five-year-old Johann could have seen the future in that split second before he jumped into the river, he might have stopped dead in his tracks. Surely countless millions would have been spared terror and death—if only little Adolf Hitler had drowned that day.

Hitler often reminisced about his childhood games of cowboys and Indians on the banks of the Inn River. But he never mentioned the near drowning. He wasn’t about to spoil the Nazi myth of a superman Führer by admitting that he had been saved by a future priest of a religion he despised. Yet reporters have uncovered the story of his rescue from old files in Passau. A recent program on Bavarian radio got folks thinking: What if Hitler had drowned?

Every act has consequences. We can never know what the future will do with our decisions and actions. Sadly, Father Johann wasted far too many nights second-guessing himself. Ultimately, we cannot control the outcomes of our acts. But we can worry too much. Maybe you’re filled with regrets or bitterness for the painful consequences of yesterday’s choices. Or perhaps you hesitate to make decisions today for fear of how they will play out tomorrow. You might find some freedom from the paralysis of analysis if you remember this:

Do the best you can do, and leave the results to God.

Commit your actions to the L

ORD

, and your plans will succeed.

PROVERBS 16:3

January 2

The Most Courageous Man in America

In 1986 Italian runner Gianni Poli won the New York City Marathon in two hours and eleven minutes. In 2003, Mark Yatich of Kenya triumphed at the Los Angeles Marathon in a time of two hours and ten minutes.

But the greatest marathons of all time may have been run by the guy who finished dead last in both races, in the slowest times ever recorded. In 1986 he completed the New York City race in about ninety-eight hours. It took him a little more than 173 hours to cross the finish line at Los Angeles in 2003.

Before you write Bob Wieland off, you need to know that he completed both marathons using only his arms and torso. Bob has no legs. In 1969, while trying to rescue a fallen buddy in Vietnam, he stepped on a mortar round designed to destroy tanks. He sent this short note to his parents:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m in the hospital. Everything is going to be okay. The people here are taking good care of me.

Love,

Bob

P.S. I think I lost my legs.

Bob could have shriveled up in a wheelchair. Instead, he walked across America on his hands. That exploit took three years, eight months, and six days. He’s the only double-amputee ever to complete the Iron Man Triathlon in Kona, Hawaii, without a wheelchair. He swam 2.4 miles, then biked 112 miles, and finished up with a 26.2-mile marathon using only his arms. He twice made a 6,200-mile round-trip bike ride across America and has amassed four world records in weight lifting, including a 570-pound bench press!

It’s no wonder Bob Wieland is called Mr. Inspiration. The NFL Players Association awarded him the title The Most Courageous Man in America. People magazine dubbed him one of the six most amazing Americans. After he took more than a week to complete the Los Angeles Marathon while walking on his hands at age fifty-seven, Bob told the Associated Press, This was supernatural. It was done by the grace of God. He then summed up life without legs: I do it one step at a time.

Bob Wieland reminds us that the race of life isn’t won by the fastest. It’s always good to remember that by perseverance and patience the snail made it to Noah’s ark before the Flood. Most victories in life are won by plodders. And only the persistent learn to run on their arms after their legs are gone. Maybe the wear and tear of life has put you on the ragged edge of giving up before the race is over. The story of Bob Wieland reminds us that when our legs are gone and our arms are worn to nubs, we can still make it. Bob would agree with something Robert W. Service once wrote:

It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.

I have observed something else under the sun. The fastest runner doesn’t always win the race, and the strongest warrior doesn’t always win the battle.

ECCLESIASTES 9:11

January 3

The Irresistible Power of Courage

Winter blew frigid cold across the plains of Armenia. Yet while locals shivered before their fires, legionnaires marched into the maelstrom of icy winds. Theirs was the famous Legio XII Fulminata—the Thundering Legion. These elite storm troopers had carried black shields, each emblazoned with a lightning bolt, across the world to form a wall between Rome and invading Persians.

But a more insidious danger faced decaying Rome: the rise of Christianity. So a frightened emperor decreed that his legions sacrifice to the pagan gods. When his orders were delivered to the Thundering Legion, forty legionnaires refused. Their superiors angrily responded, You alone of all Caesar’s troops defy him. Think of the disgrace you bring upon your legion. They replied, To disgrace the name of our Lord Jesus Christ is more terrible still.

The forty were dragged to flogging posts and beaten with whips. When they didn’t break, they were flayed with hooks. When they still refused to deny Christ, their commanding general ordered them stripped naked and taken onto an ice-covered lake.

On a bitter winter’s day in AD 320, they joyfully stripped off their clothes and ran out onto the ice. Their commander ordered tubs of heated water placed on the banks of the lake to entice them to give up. But the freezing Christians prayed, Lord, there are forty of us engaged in this battle; grant that forty may be crowned and not one will be missing from this sacred number.

It seemed that forty would stay true, until one broke from their ranks and stumbled to shore. Yet when he was eased into the warm bath, the shock caused his body to go into death convulsions. There were only thirty-nine when a sentry, impressed by their bravery, stripped off his uniform and ran naked onto the ice. Again there were forty.

The next morning, the general ordered that their frozen bodies be burned and the ashes scattered on a nearby river. His legionnaires were shocked to find one still alive. His mother, who was among the camp followers, was summoned to convince this solitary survivor to recant. To everyone’s surprise, she begged her son to stay true to the end—and he was burned alive with the corpses.

The forty martyrs of Sebaste tell an enduring story of the irresistible power of courage. A pagan legionnaire turned to Christ after one of those Christians came off the ice, then stripped naked to join them. A survivor was willing to be burned to death to keep that number intact. Four years later, Constantine I executed the caesar who had ordered those sacrifices. Sickened by pagan barbarity, and impressed by the faith of martyrs like those at Sebaste, Constantine made Christianity the favored religion of Rome.

Some 2,960 legionnaires followed orders that winter day. But forty did the right thing. Today, you may be tempted to cave in to pressure and violate your conscience. Don’t you dare! The forty martyrs of Sebaste teach us that a single act of bravery can even change the course of history.

Courage inspires and ignites a spark of bravery in those watching.

Fear not; you will no longer live in shame. Don’t be afraid; there is no more disgrace for you.

ISAIAH 54:4

January 4

Who Killed Superman?

On June 16, 1959, police found George Keefer Brewer dead from a single gunshot wound to the head. Cursory evidence pointed to suicide. But the shell casings were in the wrong place, his body was covered with bruises, and witnesses waited for almost an hour to call the police. Many of these witnesses were unsavory characters, each with enough motive to kill him—especially those with Mob connections.

One thing is sure: George was unlucky in both life and death. His hulking good looks got him a part in Gone with the Wind, but after that it seemed that he could only get roles in forgettable B films. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he was drafted. That seventeen-month stint in the army all but killed his career. So he took a starring role in a horrible little film, Superman and the Mole Men. He was almost laughed out of Hollywood. But the much-panned movie did get him a starring role in a new television series, Adventures of Superman. Just about every kid in 1950s America knew the opening line from the announcer: Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. George was now a superstar—to children. But he was still a B-list actor when it came to the big screen. Maybe that’s why his life descended into a downward spiral of booze, bad luck, and unsavory friends. The world was shocked when the man with the stage name George Reeves was found shot to death. To this day, people ask, Who shot the bullet that felled Superman?

There is another mystery: Did George Reeve’s mysterious death unleash a Superman curse? After Christopher Reeve played the superhero in four films, he was thrown from a horse and paralyzed for life. His costar Marlon Brando’s career took a nosedive after Superman; his family disintegrated, and he ballooned into morbid obesity. Margot Kidder, who played Superman’s girlfriend, was partially paralyzed in a car accident. Richard Pryor’s life fell apart after he costarred in Superman III, and he ended up in a wheelchair. The child who played Superman as a baby ended his life by sniffing air freshener from a can. But none were more cursed by Superman than the original creators of the comic book superhero, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. After being cheated out of the rights to their creation, they spent their lives fighting losing battles in court. They died without receiving any of the billions that their character generated.

Maybe kryptonite exists after all, fatal to anyone who touches this Superman first conceived by the German atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, and later embraced by Adolf Hitler as the superior man who needs no God. But no one is faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. We need a much bigger power, from beyond outer space, to see us through life. You might want to remember these words when you think you are Superman or Superwoman:

Be careful who you trust. The devil was once a super angel.

Those who know your name trust in you, for you, O L

ORD

, do not abandon those who search for you.

PSALM 9:10

January 5

Tamerlane’s Curse

Perhaps you think ancient curses unleashed on the modern world are only found in Hollywood movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. If you think they can’t happen in real life, you might want to consider the amazing story of Tamerlane’s curse. This fourteenth-century Mongol ruled a vast empire that covered most of modern-day Central Asia, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. He was one of the worst butchers in history, often slaughtering whole people groups. When he was almost seventy years old, this genocidal maniac launched his final campaign, setting out with a massive army to conquer China. No enemy had ever prevailed against him, but a freak winter storm put an end to his unbroken string of victories. Trapped in impassable snowdrifts, Tamerlane died shivering in his blankets as winds and wolves howled around him.

The emperor’s body was taken back to Samarkand, where it was embalmed and enclosed in an ornate tomb. These foreboding words were inscribed on the door to the crypt: When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble. That’s why locals were frightened six hundred years later, when Joseph Stalin sent a team of archaeologists to bring Tamerlane’s corpse back to Moscow. Muslim imams begged them not to unleash a curse by entering the tomb. But these were men of science, not superstition. Yet after breaking into the burial chamber, even they shivered at this inscription: Whoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I. Maybe they should have run from that crypt, but they had their orders from the Communist boss of bosses.

Two days after the remains were shipped to Moscow, some 3.6 million German soldiers invaded Russia. Comrade Stalin, who had laughed at Tamerlane’s curse, watched helplessly as the Nazi juggernaut rolled across the Soviet Union. Before the horror ended, twenty-six million Russians died. Surely the curse had come true: the world trembled as it watched Adolf Hitler, a butcher far more terrible than Tamerlane, unleash his invasion on those who opened the fourteenth-century tomb. It’s no wonder Stalin sent Tamerlane’s corpse back to its violated crypt, where it was reburied in an Islamic ceremony.

Even more amazing: within a month of the tomb being resealed, the tide of war turned at the Battle of Stalingrad. The surrender of the German army on the eastern front began the unraveling of the Third Reich. If he could, the six-hundred-year-old Mongol mummy would have been howling in wicked delight from his burial chamber.

What do you think? Coincidence or curse? At least this much is sure: no one has since dared to disturb Tamerlane’s resealed tomb. You can be even more sure of this: God has warned us that curses will be unleashed on those who disobey commands inscribed in his Word. The evidence that they are being unleashed on our world today is too compelling to deny. So, just as we should seek God’s blessings, we ought to fear his curses. Fearing God is out of fashion today, but there are some blessings for those who do so:

He who fears God fears nothing else; he who sees God sees nothing else.

It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

HEBREWS 10:31

January 6

The Biggest Nation of All

Though his warrior father had carved out a kingdom for the crown prince, it was not big enough. This prince had a voracious appetite that could never be satisfied. That craving for more would send him to the ends of the earth in a never-ending quest that still astounds the world some 2,500 years later.

The crown prince was only twenty years old when his father was assassinated. After rounding up and ruthlessly executing all of his rivals, the boy conqueror began his long march across planet Earth. His army of some thirty thousand warriors blitzkrieged from the Balkans to India in less than thirteen years. They covered some ten thousand miles on sandaled feet, making the mechanized conquests of our high-tech military operations look almost slow by comparison.

The statistics of that amazing odyssey seem almost impossible. This ancient juggernaut conquered countless cities and nations that made up what are now Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Greece, Jordan, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Arabia, Egypt, the Balkans, and part of India. Its empire stretched from the Aegean to the Himalayas, across three continents. The conqueror’s rule spanned more than two million square miles of earth by the time he was thirty-two years of age.

When he reached the Indus River, his bone-weary army refused to take on the war elephants of India. After the better part of two decades, the troops wanted to go home. The ancient historian Plutarch writes that thirty-two-year-old Alexander the Great sat on the banks of the Indus and wept like a baby because there were no more worlds to conquer. Most historians figure that he would have marched his men all the way to China—if they would have followed him.

With an unsatisfied hunger that still gnawed at his restless soul, Alexander marched back to Babylon, where he drank himself into a stupor. In June of the year 323 BC, he died at age thirty-two. The cause of his death is still mysterious. Most likely it was typhoid fever, but some suspect that his generals, who carved up his empire after his death, might have poisoned him.

He was carried in an ornate casket back to Alexandria in Egypt, one of the more than seventy cities that he named after himself. That airtight burial box became the final resting place of a man for whom the world was never big enough. His tutor, Aristotle, often lamented that young Alexander could conquer the world, but he was never able to conquer his own passions or imaginations.

Perhaps the biggest nation of all is our imagination. Certainly, Pascal was right when he said that there is within us all a God-shaped vacuum as infinite as God himself. We can possess the whole universe and all that it contains and still not fill that vast emptiness within. If you have a soul hunger, you might want to remember this:

When too much is never enough, give yourself to the infinite one, who is more than enough.

You are a people holy to the L

ORD

your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the L

ORD

has chosen you to be his treasured possession.

DEUTERONOMY 14:2,

NIV

January 7

The Forgotten Explorer

When his parents died, Matt dropped out of school and became a dishwasher. He was only twelve when a Baltimore ship captain took him on as a cabin boy. That skipper was the closest thing Matt ever had to a father. The captain showed the orphan how to read, write, and navigate a ship. Matt learned skills that would take him where no man had ever ventured.

When the ship’s captain died, Matt was again on his own. He returned to Washington, DC, where he met the second man who would change his life. Captain Robert E. Peary was sailing south to survey the feasibility of a canal across Nicaragua. When he met Matt, he was surprised that an eighteen-year-old knew so much about navigation. So he hired the teen as his personal valet. During their two years in Central America, Peary’s vision to explore the Arctic Circle ignited a passion in Matt. Their shared dream would yoke them together for twenty years of history-making exploration.

In 1895 they traveled to Greenland on a trip that turned to disaster. They barely survived the winter by eating their sled dogs. When they found refuge with an Inuit tribe, Matt became the first American to master their difficult language. He also learned how to build dogsleds, kayaks, and igloos, taking tips from the locals in surviving the harsh Arctic. Peary knew that his valet was the key to making it to the North Pole.

After several failed attempts, in 1908 they began their final shot at reaching the northernmost point on the planet. The two mushed north with forty-nine Inuits, more than two hundred dogs, seventy tons of whale blubber, and countless sleds full of supplies—slogging a trail through ice fields, across yawning crevices, and over towering glaciers. They did so in the face of howling winds, endless night, and temperatures that plunged to sixty-five degrees below zero. It was one of the most harrowing trips in history. As they finally came within sight of their goal, Captain Peary was exhausted, so Matt continued on, becoming the first man in history to stand at the North Pole. He then went back to get Peary. The captain was livid that his valet had planted the first flag, and forever after refused to speak to him. Matt later said that the North Pole was the place where his heart was broken.

The party arrived home to a hero’s welcome. In 1909, their feat was like landing a man on the moon. Proud Americans feted Captain Peary with parades and receptions, applauding him as the first man to stand at the North Pole. Nobody took notice of Matt. Yet today the world knows it was really Matthew Henson who was the first to reach the North Pole. Maybe if he hadn’t been African American or if he hadn’t been Peary’s valet, he’d have been recognized sooner. But some thirty-five years after the journey, Matt was finally awarded the Medal of Honor.

Perhaps you feel like Matthew Henson. You work hard, but others get the applause you deserve. Please don’t let that make you discouraged or bitter. Remember this:

God sees everything, forgets nothing, and rewards what others miss.

Look, I am coming soon, bringing my reward with me to repay all people according to their deeds.

REVELATION 22:12

January 8

Saved by His Unborn Son

Aron is addicted to living on the jagged edge. He has made more than forty solo winter climbs of Colorado’s tallest mountains, equipped with nothing more than water, candy bars, and an ice ax. He never brings a cell phone, GPS, rope, or basic survival equipment. This daredevil was once buried up to his neck in an avalanche, nearly drowned in a river, and tussled with a bear. Yet what happened when he was solo climbing in Utah was beyond anything Aron could ever imagine.

As he was climbing up a crevice, Aron shook loose an eight-hundred-pound boulder, which crushed his arm against the canyon wall. He was now trapped by a hunk of rock bigger than the bed of a pickup truck. The pain was excruciating. He screamed, cursed, and prayed, but no one in heaven or on earth seemed to be listening. By day three, the last drop of water was gone. When day five dawned, he was facing hypothermia. He knew that he would die if he didn’t extricate himself. So he came to an agonizing decision that still astounds us: he cracked the bones of his right arm against the rock, then used a multipurpose tool with a dull blade to saw off his lifeless limb below the elbow.

He managed to fashion a tourniquet to stem the blood flow, used his left arm to rappel seventy-five feet down to the canyon floor, and then walked seven miles before hikers saw him stumbling toward them, half-delirious and bleeding profusely. He was airlifted to the hospital in critical condition. Aron Ralston’s amazing survival story astounded and inspired the world. But few people know the rest of the story.

During the last night of his 127-hour ordeal, it was freezing cold, and Aron was ready to give up, when a specter of a child showed up. The little boy was about three years old with blond hair. Aron says that the child threw his arms around his neck and held him tight. Six years later, in the final days of his wife’s pregnancy, he told Time magazine he believed the child who visited him that night was his unborn baby, and he had waited seven years to see the boy again. Three years after Jessica gave birth to a baby boy in 2010, he claimed that his three-year-old blond toddler was the child who gave him hope nine years earlier.

A skeptic would say that Aron was hallucinating. A cynic might even accuse him of making up the story for personal gain. An orthodox Christian could dismiss any thought of the pre-conception appearance of a child as New Age hocus-pocus. Surely, there are mysteries beyond our understanding. Perhaps the best answer is the simplest: God hears our prayers, and he heard Aron’s, too. Even when we cause our own messes, his grace and mercy is bigger than our stupidity and sins. What Aron saw that night is not nearly as important as the fact that God saw him through. And he will do whatever it takes to see you through too.

God adds extra to your ordinary and super to your natural.

Jesus looked at them intently and said, Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But not with God. Everything is possible with God.

MARK 10:27

January 9

History’s Strangest Siege

Who knows what will change the course of history? King Richard the Lionhearted, the greatest knight in all of Christendom, had returned from a crusade in the Holy Land to wage war against the French House of Capet. Richard knew that his enemy, King Philip, was no pushover. So the Lionhearted quickly shored up a string of fortresses. His pièce de résistance was a marvel of medieval times: an impregnable fortress that he built on a steep limestone hill high above the River Seine north of Paris. When it was finished, even the Lionhearted was awed by this twelfth century engineering feat. He exclaimed, Behold, how fair is this year-old daughter of mine. He called it Château Gaillard, or Strong Castle.

He was especially proud of the public latrines. Usually, the few toilets in a castle were reserved for the nobility. But King Richard was an enlightened world traveler who had learned that human waste causes disease. Besieged castles were more often doomed by the epidemics that raged inside than from the attacking armies outside. So he made sure that concealed chutes carried waste from the latrines to a distant place outside the castle walls.

Richard the Lionhearted was killed in battle before he saw the fate of his engineering masterpiece. But King Philip did come with his armies. The French bombarded the walls with everything they had and feverishly dug their tunnels to breach the fortifications. After six months, Château Gaillard stood unscathed. But the late King Richard’s enlightened concern for the health of his defenders proved their undoing. At winter’s end, a French soldier noticed steam coming from the base of an outer wall. The chutes to the public latrines were discovered. Frenchmen climbed up through human waste and into the toilets. Within hours, the most impregnable fortress in Europe fell.

Having seized Château Gaillard, King Philip was free to take Normandy from the English. For the first time in two hundred years the French controlled their whole country. The English loss of Normandy almost bankrupted Richard’s brother, the new king of England. King John heaped ruinous taxes on England to recover his losses. Finally the barons revolted against the late Richard’s brother, forcing the signing of the Magna Carta. That first taste of liberty would inexorably lead to a representative democracy over four hundred years later when the English Bill of Rights was signed. That leap forward in liberty led to America’s Declaration of Independence a century afterward. But the chain of events that brought about the liberties we enjoy might never have happened had Frenchmen not climbed up through those public toilets that Richard built in 1198.

None of us know what will come of decisions we make. Our smallest acts are part of the countless threads woven together with innumerable others to form God’s tapestry of history. Maybe that’s why we should heed something that philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote:

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Do not despise these small beginnings, for the L

ORD

rejoices to see the work begin.

ZECHARIAH 4:10

January 10

The Ultimate Cold Case

Two children disappear in the dark of night, never to be seen again. These are not ordinary kids. One is Edward V, King of England. The other is his brother, Richard, the Duke of York. In the five hundred years since their disappearance in the summer of 1483, no bodies have been produced or examined. Accusations have been made, culprits identified, and motives suggested. But still, there is no conclusive proof as to who ordered the murder of the two princes or even if they were killed. It is the ultimate cold case.

The finger has long pointed to Richard III, the boys’ uncle and regent to the throne. He had the most to gain from their deaths. He had long claimed that his nephews were illegitimate heirs. Around the time of the boys’ disappearance he ascended to the throne of England. Sir Thomas More implicated him in his writings, and Shakespeare portrays him as a deformed monster in his play Richard III—the unspeakably cruel villain who sends killers to the Tower of London to smother the princes with their pillows. The bard paints a hauntingly tragic scene of two boys sobbing in fear, clutching on to each other as their killers approach their bed. Tradition holds that one of the king’s noblemen confessed to carrying out the murder. But he confessed under torture ordered by the new king of England, Henry Tudor (Henry VII). He said that the boys were buried under a stairway in the Tower of London. Sure enough, the bones of two boys are said to have been found in that spot. Or was that a story cooked up by Henry’s associates to discredit Richard and strengthen his claim to the throne?

Henry VII had a lot to gain from those boys’ deaths, as they had a more legitimate claim to his throne. Did his men kidnap and kill them before or after Henry’s army defeated Richard’s in battle? In 1933 the bones again appeared. Doctors said that they seemed to be from a ten-year-old and a thirteen-year-old. But there was no DNA testing then. Recently, the remains of Richard III were discovered under a parking lot in England. The exhumed body bore no resemblance to the man described by Shakespeare. Nor does his psychological profile fit that of a man who would order the death of children. Scholars desperately want to test the bones of those boys, but both Queen Elizabeth and the Church of England refuse to allow this.

Forensic scientists are so much closer to solving this five-hundred-year-old case, but the more they learn, the more confusing and convoluted it gets. Maybe this amazing story of one of the world’s oldest cold cases reminds us that not all mysteries are meant to be solved by us. Who killed those boys? God knows. He has already dealt with the matter. And he will deal equitably with every unsolved mystery in your life. So relax, and let him be God.

We need to do what we can do, and let God do what we cannot.

Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

ISAIAH 55:9

January 11

Antonina’s Ark

Antonina adored the wild outdoors. Mostly she loved nurturing the cuddly offspring of wild animals. She was grateful that her husband, Jan, was the keeper of the Warsaw Zoo. Every morning Antonina awakened to the sounds of one of the largest menageries of exotic animals in Europe. She turned the grounds of their villa into a Garden of Eden where she and her young son bottle-fed a variety of orphan cubs during birthing season. On any given day, visitors could see wild antelopes and zebras grazing on the Zabinskis’ property. If asked to explain her love affair with wild animals, she would quickly say that, as a Christian, she was responsible to care for God’s creation.

But the serpent stole into her Eden when the German blitzkrieg rolled across Poland and the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw into rubble. The zoo was almost obliterated, along with many of the world’s most exotic animals. Antonina was devastated when Nazi SS arrived to round up what was left. Most of the surviving animals were shipped to Germany. The SS turned the ruined grounds into their private game preserve, hunting down the few creatures that were left behind. After their killing spree ended, the renowned Warsaw Zoo was eerily empty.

When the Nazis unexpectedly made Jan the superintendent of parks, God opened doors that would turn a massacre into a miracle. Not far from their deserted zoo, one of the monstrous evils of the twentieth century was taking place in the Jewish ghetto. No lions or tigers could be more beastly than the SS predators who were systematically starving thousands even as trains were arriving to transport the rest to death camps.

So the Zabinskis hatched a plan to turn the rubble of dashed dreams into building blocks for something far better. Antonina later said that the destruction of their zoo was not the dream of death . . . but merely ‘winter sleep.’ Jan turned the empty zoo into a pig farm. The Nazis were amused. They could never imagine that the zookeeper was cleverly using his position as the director of Warsaw parks to smuggle pork into a starving ghetto to feed Orthodox Jews. Nor did they know that the empty cages in the zoo had been turned into a labyrinth of hiding places for more than three hundred Jews smuggled out of the ghetto.

You can read the amazing story of this heroic couple in Diane Ackerman’s book The Zookeeper’s Wife. If you find yourself at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, you can see their tree planted along the Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations, which honors Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Nazi Holocaust.

The story of the Zabinskis reminds us that God sometimes allows us to lose good things so that our hands are free to grab hold of better things. When Antonina’s Garden of Eden was destroyed, she could have wallowed in the wreckage of her dreams. Instead, she and her husband replaced exotic animals with pigs to feed starving Jews and used the rubble of their zoo to build a Noah’s ark to save endangered people. If your dream has died, this truth might help:

The rubble of broken dreams provides the building blocks of future hope.

The L

ORD

is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.

PSALM 34:18

January 12

The Evolutionary Man

After their house was torched by white supremacists, his daddy’s body was found on the railroad tracks. After his widowed mother had a mental breakdown, the eight children were parceled out to foster homes. When a family of do-gooders took him in, Malcolm Little was thrilled to be in a white home. But they saw him as more of a pet black puppy than a member of their family. They gave him a new name: Malcolm the Mascot. When he told a white teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer, the teacher sneered. A lawyer?! That’s not a realistic goal for a n—!

Malcolm drifted to the East Coast, where he adopted street slang, became a hustler, peddled dope, and ran numbers, earning him a new name: Detroit Red. After he was arrested for armed robbery, Detroit Red was sentenced to ten years in prison. Fellow convicts called him Satan because of the way he cursed God, the Bible, and all things religious as a white man’s tool to destroy blacks. That’s when his sisters begged him to turn to the Nation of Islam. Malcolm was irresistibly drawn to its prophet, Elijah Muhammad, and his claim that whites were devils, and blacks needed to have their own nation. He came out of prison in 1952 as Malcolm X. His zeal caught the eye of Elijah Muhammad, and soon he was in the prophet’s inner circle. By 1957 this Islamic sect was in the spotlight after a television exposé called The Hate That Hate Produced aired. When the charismatic Malcolm X became its most-sought-after spokesman, a jealous Elijah Muhammad ordered his assassination.

Malcolm X broke from the Nation of Islam. When he set out on a holy pilgrimage to Mecca, he told the world that he was now Malik El-Shabazz. Everything changed on that hajj. For the first time Malcolm saw Muslims of every nationality and color. He realized that black racism was as evil as white racism. He came home a changed man, preaching a message of reconciliation, not separation. He was rapidly becoming an agent for positive change when his house was firebombed on February 14, 1965. A week later, Nation of Islam assassins murdered him. El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz was only thirty-nine.

From Malcolm Little to Malcolm the Mascot to Detroit Red to Satan to Malcolm X to Malik El-Shabazz, his is an amazing story of personal evolution. We should weep for the white racism that turned him into a man called Satan. We ought to find his reverse racism abhorrent. But surely, we can find hope in his trajectory. Today he is celebrated as a martyr for his final fight for the dignity of African Americans and racial reconciliation. We can only guess what he might have become, if he only had a few more years to complete a transformation that was headed in the right direction. May all of us be continually transformed for the better, and may God give us the time to complete the transformation.

You are always one decision away from a totally different life.

Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.

ROMANS 12:2

January 13

The Singer Who Stopped World War III

Most of us have forgotten the civil war that plunged the Balkans into a genocidal nightmare during the 1990s. By 1999 the war was winding down. The Serbian militias had finally left Bosnia and Croatia. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were poised at the borders, waiting to return home. A column of thirty thousand NATO soldiers was advancing toward the strategic Pristina airfield.

That’s when the precarious peace in the region was threatened. The Russians got there first, determined to fill the vacuum left by their fleeing Serbian allies. They pointed their artillery at the approaching NATO column and warned them to come no closer. It looked like a standoff until a single word came by radio from US general Wesley Clark: Destroy! James Blunt was a captain in the British Life Guards and the lead officer at the head of the column. Again the order came from General Clark to attack the occupying force of two hundred Russians. Directly behind Captain Blunt was the elite Parachute Regiment, itching for a fight.

Blunt knew that obeying the general’s command could lead to an international incident, maybe even World War III. Disobeying it would lead to court-martial. His cool judgment bought enough time for the commander of the British forces, General Sir Mike Jackson, to intervene with the words I’m not going to have my soldiers start World War III. He gave orders to Captain Blunt to surround the airfield. Two days later, the Russians sent a message: We have no food or water. Can we share the airfield with you? After two weeks of negotiations, the Russians were enfolded into the peacekeeping force while staying outside the NATO command structure.

James Blunt always preferred crooning to commanding. He resigned his position to become a rock singer in England. His album had a hit song, You’re Beautiful. Another song, No Bravery, became an anthem for the peace movement. He wrote that song outside the Pristina airfield during the 1999 standoff. He once said, War is an absolutely ghastly thing. I wouldn’t bother describing the things we saw. He also remains firm that if General Jackson hadn’t intervened, he would have disobeyed General Clark’s orders. The British general almost resigned in protest over Clark’s insistence on destroying the Russians. Eventually Wesley Clark was relieved of his NATO command for integrity and character issues.

The amazing story of rock singer James Blunt is another proof that history is God’s story. He will write the last chapter and put the exclamation mark on the last line. General Wesley Clark could have started World War III. At least there might have been a war with Russia. It could have escalated to a nuclear holocaust. But God controls his story. He will even have an English rock-and-roll singer at the head of a NATO column to make sure that things are kept under his sovereign control. In an unstable world, that ought to make you sleep a bit sounder tonight.

Worry less and limit stress. God’s got everything under control.

The L

ORD

is my light and my salvation—so why should I be afraid? The L

ORD

is my fortress, protecting me from danger, so why should I tremble?

PSALM 27:1

January 14

The Real Lone Ranger

Aficionados of cowboy films remember that thrilling score from the William Tell overture and a horseman on a distant hill yelling, Hi-Yo Silver, awaaay! After a pause, someone on screen would ask, Who was that masked man? Every kid in America knew the answer: He’s the Lone Ranger!

But no one knew that the real Lone Ranger was Bass Reeves. During the Civil War, this aide to a Confederate officer finally had a gutful and rode west. After his escape, he had good reason to lose himself in the Oklahoma Territory. He learned enough Creek and Seminole language and customs to become a territorial scout, and he built a homestead with his bare hands. But things were about to change. The Indian Territory was a haunt of desperadoes, renegade Indians, horse thieves, rapists, and murderers. That’s when Hanging Judge Isaac C. Parker was made the federal judge of the Indian Territory with dictatorial powers to clean up this cesspool. From his bench in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the hanging judge appointed James Fagan US marshal, authorizing him to hire two hundred deputy marshals. One of Fagan’s first hires was Bass Reeves.

Reeves was thirty-eight years old when he began his legendary career. He was tall and imposing—a John Wayne figure of a man on a big white horse. He patrolled seventy-five thousand square miles of lawlessness, often traveling with a chuck wagon and cook. He also carried a large supply of chains and shackles, sometimes bringing in as many as twelve outlaws at a time to Fort Smith for a quick trial and hanging. When Bass Reeves went looking for the notorious Belle Starr, she turned herself in rather than face the most feared lawman in the Old West. He arrested more than three thousand felons in his illustrious career—more than any other lawman in US history. He killed fourteen desperadoes in the line of duty and was often the target of assassination attempts. Yet in spite of his many shoot-outs, he never took a bullet. When he died at age seventy-one, newspapers declared him to be the greatest lawman in the history of the Old West. Maybe that’s why Bass Reeves became the inspiration for the Lone Ranger and the prototype of every Hollywood marshal from Matt Dillon to Rooster Cogburn.

So now you know the amazing story of the real Lone Ranger. But there is one more surprise: Bass Reeves was an African American, raised as a slave on an Arkansas plantation. He got to the Indian Territory by fleeing from his slave master, a Confederate officer. Yet hardly any of the newspapers that celebrated his exploits ever mentioned that he was a black man. But today we’ve taken the mask off the Lone Ranger and revealed that he was black Bass Reeves.

Maybe this is just a preview of a day when God will rip the masks off everyone, revealing and rewarding people who are the real deal, and exposing and punishing fakes, posers, and pretenders. Maybe we should take our masks off today and deal honestly with who we are while there’s still time to get things right.

The problem with masks is that pretense finally lapses into character.

If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves.

GALATIANS 6:3,

NIV

January 15

The Devil’s Daughter

Little Svetlana was only six when her mother died. It would be years before she discovered that thirty-one-year-old Nadya had not died of peritonitis but had shot herself. By the time she learned that her mother had committed suicide, Svetlana, like her mom, would do almost anything to escape her monstrous father. She later lamented that she was the devil’s daughter.

It didn’t start out that way. She remembered sitting on his lap, tickled by his thick moustache as he nuzzled her neck, being showered with kisses, and smelling his pipe-tobacco breath as he whispered how much he loved his little hostess. But everything changed when she began to notice how many people in her papa’s inner circle disappeared, never to be seen again. When she was seventeen, she fell in love with a Russian filmmaker. When her father disapproved, the arguments began. He had the final say when he shipped her lover off to the dreaded gulag. When Svetlana confronted her father, he beat her. Then she thought about all her aunts and uncles who had vanished for not keeping their mouths shut and began to experience the same terror everyone else felt in his presence. She never felt it more than when she sat near his deathbed. At the end, he sat up in bed, coughing, spitting up blood, and looking around with demonic fury while hissing like a serpent.

Only later did Svetlana Alliluyeva learn the full extent of her father’s reign of terror that murdered twenty million people. In 1967 she fled to the West, leaving her two children behind. She left a note that said, It is impossible to be always a slave. She thought she could find happiness, but she discovered that people were more interested in her infamous father than her. Disillusioned, Svetlana returned to Russia in 1984—only to discover that the children she had abandoned wanted nothing to do with her. So the devil’s daughter fled back to the West, living a nomadic life between England and America. She plowed through failed marriages and disastrous romances. Olga, a third child born in America, was the only child who accepted Svetlana. She said her mother could only be satisfied by a man. Maybe she was still driven by a little girl’s desire to be loved by her daddy. But that’s impossible when your papa is a devil named Joseph Stalin. So she went looking for love in all the wrong places and died a lonely old woman in 2011.

The tragic story of Svetlana Stalin reminds every father that he needs to love his children. If a dad doesn’t fill that father vacuum in a child’s soul, no one else can ever fill it later on—unless, of course, it is our heavenly Father who ultimately satisfies every father longing. Tonight in America millions of children will go to bed in homes where there is no father. Even more are living with dysfunctional fathers. Don’t let your children be counted among them.

Children don’t look for love in all the wrong places when they start out life finding it in the right place.

The L

ORD

is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him.

PSALM 103:13

January 16

The Shaggy Hero

Teens too often get a bad rap from the older generation. But every once in a while, a teenager rises up to make us all proud. James Persyn III has an impressive name, but he’s a pretty ordinary fourteen-year-old from Shepherd, Michigan. He isn’t very tall, and with his shaggy haircut, he could use a trip to the barber. He plays too many video games and watches too much television. But he astounded everyone on a January night in 2013. The teen was babysitting his brother and sister when he heard pounding on the front door. A college student outside was frantically screaming, Let me in! Let me in! It took courage for James to open that door.

The wild-eyed woman ran into the kitchen, shouting hysterically that a rapist had tried to kidnap her and had chased her to this house with murderous intent. She screamed that the children needed to hide quickly. James remembered his father’s instructions that, in the case of danger, his kids should get into the bathroom that had no windows. James herded the woman and his two siblings into the empty tub and told them to keep quiet. He shut the door and ran into his bedroom to retrieve a hunting knife. He called Mr. Persyn on his cell phone and said, Dad, you need to get home quick. There’s a man outside, and he wants to kill us all.

James’s dad sped off for his house. Meanwhile, the woman’s enraged attacker poured gasoline all over the house and then set it on fire before he took off. James Persyn Jr. cut his lights as he neared his driveway. His heart sank as he saw the bottom part of his house on fire. He didn’t know if the attacker was inside or if his family was safe. He smashed a window in an attempt to dive through. His kids were shaken, but the college girl had managed to calm down a bit. A police manhunt quickly found her attacker, Eric Ramsey. During the shoot-out, Ramsey was killed.

Later it was discovered that Ramsey was one bad dude. He had kidnapped the woman at gunpoint, tied her up, and taken her to his house, where he raped her. He was on his way to a deserted place where he planned to kill her when she jumped out of the moving car and ran up to the Persyn front door.

The teenager’s calm handling of the situation and heroic stand against a crazed killer made national headlines. He was touted as a hero by the media. But his dad said, I’m proud of my son. But he’s not a hero. He just did the right thing. That may seem like a strange thing to say in an era of self-congratulation. But maybe Mr. Persyn is right. Hero is one of the most overused words in America today. By using the word indiscriminately, we have devalued and trivialized its once-sacred status. It’s refreshing to hear someone say that doing the right thing is not necessarily heroic, it’s just right.

Doing the right thing is always the right thing.

Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of orphans. Fight for the rights of widows.

ISAIAH 1:17

January 17

A Dog’s Tale

Stroll through Greyfriars on a rare sunny day, and it seems like an idyllic cemetery. But at night it becomes the rendezvous of ghost hunters. They claim it is the most-haunted graveyard in the world: a spooky place where body snatchers robbed graves; a makeshift prison where Presbyterian Covenanters were murdered; the place where the poltergeist of George MacKenzie, orchestrator of the unspeakable horrors endured by those Covenanters, is released each night to wander his killing fields. No wonder J. K. Rowling wrote her Harry Potter stories about wizards and witches in a coffee shop across from Greyfriars.

Yet at the entrance to the phantasmagoria of Greyfriars is the statue of a wee Skye terrier. Thousands of tourists come to this spot each year, proving that a dog’s tale is better than any ghost story. This diminutive terrier was a familiar sight in the 1850s as he trotted beside his master on his nightly rounds. The policeman and his puppy were inseparable pals. But the man they dubbed Auld Jock was dying of tuberculosis. Scots openly wept when he was carried to Greyfriars on a February day in 1858. But most of their tears were for the forlorn little terrier leading the procession. After Auld Jock’s burial, the dog he called Bobby refused to leave. Grave diggers shooed him away, but he clung to the freshly dug grave.

Stormy weather, freezing nights, and the ghost of George MacKenzie could not dislodge the grieving pet. The keeper of the churchyard, Auld Jock’s family, and well-meaning locals couldn’t entice him away. Month after month and year after year, he growled menacingly at anyone who came too close to his master’s grave marker. Crowds came to Greyfriars just to see Bobby. The wee Skye terrier only left Auld Jock’s gravesite at one o’clock each afternoon at the firing of the cannon in Edinburgh’s old fortress. He would cross the cobblestone street to a pub where he was fed table scraps and then return to his faithful watch. The terrier lived well beyond his breed’s normal life span, finally dying on Auld Jock’s grave. He is buried next to his master, with these words on his granite marker: