Illustrations

“God delights to increase the faith of His children. We ought, instead of wanting no trials before victory, no exercise for patience, to be willing to take them from God’s hand as a means. I say—and say it deliberately—trials, obstacles, difficulties, and sometimes defeats, are the very food of faith…We should take them out of His hands as evidences of His love and care for us in developing more and more that faith which He is seeking to strengthen in us.”—George Mueller

The story is told of an atheistic barber who was talking to a pastor. The barber asked the pastor, “If there is a loving God, how can He allow poverty, war, and suffering?”

Just at that moment a disheveled man crossed the street. The pastor said, “You are a barber and claim to be a good one. How can you allow that man to go unkept and unshaven?”

“He never gave me a chance!” the barber replied.

To which the pastor said, “Exactly, men are what they are because they reject God!”

Source: Unknown

On Easter Sunday, 2013, the southbound side of I-77 near the North Carolina-Virginia border was closed for hours following a massive chain of accidents. Police later reported that seventeen different collisions involved ninety-five cars and trucks. The wrecks left three people dead and more than two dozen injured, many of them seriously. The cause of the accidents was people driving into a thick fog that descended over the Interstate that Sunday afternoon. A police spokesman said, “Visibility at the time this accident occurred was down to about one hundred feet or less.”

In May 2013, thirteen-year-old Arvind Mahankali correctly spelled the word “knaidel” (a German-Yiddish word for a dumpling) to win the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee. Mahankali had finished third each of the two previous years. In both of those years he was eliminated when he failed to correctly spell a German-derived word. In preparation for his third attempt at the prize, Mahankali diligently worked to strengthen his area of weakness. “This year I prepared German words and I studied them, so when I got German words this year, I wasn’t worried,” he said after his victory.

In 1993, four executives from a Florida rental car company were convicted and jailed for defrauding their customers. Using what con artists have long referred to as a “salami technique” (you slice off tiny pieces in hopes that no one will notice and that those little pieces will build up to a large amount of money over time), they cheated at least 47,000 customers over a four-year period. They had modified the computer billing software to overstate the size of the gas tanks on the cars.

There were 128 runners in the field for the cross country race at the 1993 NCAA Division II Track and Field Championships. As they set out on the 6.2 mile run, they were following a course that had been marked for them by the race officials. Toward the end of the course, one of the runners in the middle of the group realized something was wrong. Mike Delcavo of Western State College in Colorado saw that the main pack had missed the turn. “I was waving for them to follow me and yelling ‘This is the right way,’” he told an interviewer after the race.

When Diana Valencia was arrested in Texas on drug charges in September of 2008, there was little doubt regarding her guilt. Anyone caught with two kilos of cocaine is going to have difficulty explaining that away as an innocent mistake. However she came up with a novel attempt at getting off—she and her sister decided to bribe the judge who would be hearing her case to make sure she got off. The plan might have worked, since the judge was willing to take the money—except the FBI got involved.

In August of 2012, vacationers at the beach in Terracina, Italy were shocked when a car pulled up next to a man who had just left the water and shot him at least seven times. The man was Gaetano Marino, leader of the Camorra crime family. He was known as “Stumpy” because his hands had been blown off nearly twenty years previous when a bomb he was attempting to set for someone else went off prematurely. Police said they believed the killing was part of a struggle for control of the cocaine business between rival mob factions.

After decades of service to his country in both war and peace, George Washington completed his second term as president. In his Farewell Address to the nation he wrote: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

A Michigan judge found himself in the news recently because of the violation of a courtroom rule—and what happened next. Judge Raymond Voet has long had a policy forbidding the use of electronic devices in the courtroom. Anyone whose phone rings aloud has it confiscated and receives a fine. Over the years, attorneys, police officers, witnesses, and spectators have broken the rule and received the punishment.