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32 illustrations — Vivid stories and real-world analogies for sermon use
In 2019, a cattle rancher named Dale Pennington outside of Broken Bow, Oklahoma, noticed that three of his weaker heifers had gone missing after a...
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Ezekiel.
In February 2019, a polar vortex dropped temperatures across the Texas Panhandle to twenty below zero. Cattle rancher Jake Herrmann of Amarillo woke at 3...
In February 2019, a polar vortex drove temperatures across the Midwest to forty below zero. Most ranchers in western Nebraska hunkered down and waited it...
In 2010, a border collie named Keno worked with Montana Search and Rescue, covering terrain no human team could manage alone. When a twelve-year-old boy...
In March 2019, when the Missouri River surged over its banks near Craig, Missouri, rancher Dave Hogeland lost track of forty-three head of cattle. Neighbors...
In 1514, a Spanish priest named Bartolomé de las Casas stood in his church on the island of Hispaniola and read the words of Ecclesiasticus:...
In December 1938, twenty-nine-year-old London stockbroker Nicholas Winton canceled his ski holiday and traveled to Prague. Jewish families were desperate, their children in grave danger...
In 1966, Mao Zedong's Red Guards swept through China with a singular mission: destroy every trace of Christianity. They shuttered churches, burned Bibles by the...
At a middle school outside Memphis, the cafeteria had an unspoken hierarchy. The athletes and popular kids pushed to the front, loaded their trays with...
In the autumn of 1904, a twenty-six-year-old Welsh coal miner named Evan Roberts stood before seventeen people in a small chapel in Loughor, Wales. His...
In 1858, the River Thames was so polluted that Parliament hung lime-soaked curtains over their windows just to endure the stench. They called it "The...
On the morning of May 5, 1945, Private First Class Desmond Doss stood atop the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa — a sheer four-hundred-foot cliff the...
In 2001, permaculture designer Geoff Lawton stood on a barren, salt-crusted plot in the Jordan Valley, just miles from the Dead Sea. The soil was...
In 1977, Wangari Maathai knelt in the red soil of her backyard in Nairobi, Kenya, and planted seven trees. It was a modest act —...
In the autumn of 1904, a twenty-six-year-old Welsh coal miner named Evan Roberts stood before seventeen people in a small chapel in Loughor, Wales. He...
When Florence Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital in Scutari in November 1854, she found soldiers lying in their own filth on bare floors,...
In 2014, volunteers with the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative gathered on a stretch of abandoned lots in Detroit's North End. The properties were littered with...
In 1722, a handful of persecuted Moravian refugees stumbled onto the estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in Saxony. They were exhausted, homeless, and few...
In 1793, a Northamptonshire cobbler named William Carey stepped off a ship in Calcutta with little more than a printing press and a stubborn conviction...
In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Whole neighborhoods stood hollow — 78,000 abandoned buildings, streetlights dark for miles, emergency response...
In 1935, the Tennessee Valley was dying. Decades of poor farming had stripped the soil bare. Rivers ran brown with erosion. Families abandoned homesteads where...
In August 1727, a small community of religious refugees gathered in the German village of Herrnhut on Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf's estate. They were fractured,...
In Utah's west desert, miles from anything green, there is a place called Fish Springs. The land surrounding it is cracked alkali — white, barren,...
In August 1916, Ernest Shackleton stood at the bow of a Chilean tugboat, scanning the frozen shore of Elephant Island through binoculars. Four months earlier,...