Missional-Theological Illustrations

The Hard Drive That Survived the Fall

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry, scattering debris across East Texas from an altitude of 200,000 feet. Among the...

237 words

From the Stockroom to the Super Bowl

In 1994, Kurt Warner was stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa, earning five dollars and fifty cents an hour. The...

Universaltransformation

242 words

The Symphony That Almost Never Was

In 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven stood before an orchestra in Vienna to conduct the premiere of his Ninth Symphony. He was almost completely deaf. He...

Universalpurpose

248 words

The Man in the Cave

In 1967, Johnny Cash crawled into Nickajack Cave outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, fully intending to die. Years of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction had hollowed him out....

242 words

When the Broken Composer Heard Heaven

In 1741, George Frideric Handel was a ruined man. A stroke had paralyzed his right side. Creditors circled. London audiences had abandoned him. At fifty-six,...

Universalgrace

241 words

The Girl Who Heard a Voice in the Garden

On February 7, 1837, a sixteen-year-old named Florence Nightingale sat in the garden of her family's estate in Embley Park, Hampshire, and heard what she...

Luke 1:26-38Universal

240 words

The Code That Mends Itself

In 2015, Swedish scientist Tomas Lindahl shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a discovery that had puzzled him for decades. He found that human...

Psalm 116:8-9Universalnew lifegrace

232 words

Historical

Standing at the Edge of the Grave

On December 22, 1849, twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky stood in the bitter cold of Semyonov Place in St. Petersburg, wearing a white execution shirt. He and...

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Running on Borrowed Strength

In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Derek Redmond lined up for the 400-meter semifinal. He had trained for years, endured multiple surgeries, and fought...

Universalfaith

The Courage to Receive a New Heart

On December 3, 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard stood in an operating room at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, preparing to attempt what...

Universalcourage

The Moment the Trembling Stopped

In 1987, French neurosurgeon Alim Louis Benabid made a remarkable discovery during brain surgery. While electrically stimulating a region of a patient's brain called the...

Universalfreedom

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Fifty-Three Months Without a Meal

In 2007, marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered something extraordinary on the floor of Monterey Canyon, nearly a mile beneath the...

Universalsacrifice

217 words

The Catheter and the Courage to Go First

In 1929, a young German surgeon named Werner Forssmann was convinced that a thin tube could be guided through a vein and into the living...

Universalcourage

Romans 12:21Universalgood vs. evilfriendship

The Soldier Who Wouldn't Believe the War Was Over

In March 1974, Japanese intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda finally emerged from the Philippine jungle on Lubang Island, where he had been hiding for twenty-nine years....

Mark 16:1-8Universal

242 words

Contemporary

The Professor's Long Victory

On July 29, 1954, a sixty-two-year-old Oxford professor named J.R.R. Tolkien saw his life's work finally reach the public when Allen & Unwin published *The...

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The Candlesticks He Didn't Deserve

In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean stumbles out of nineteen years in prison hardened and bitter. No inn will take him. No door opens....

The Man They Said Would Never Walk Again

In February 1949, Ben Hogan's car collided head-on with a Greyhound bus on a foggy Texas highway. In the split second before impact, he threw...

Universalhope

248 words

The God Who Rewrites What's Broken

In 2015, Aziz Sancar shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping one of the most remarkable processes in the human body: nucleotide excision repair....

250 words

Movie Analogy

Stolen Silver and Unexpected Grace

In the 2012 film *Les Misérables*, there is a scene that has made grown men weep in theaters around the world. Jean Valjean, a convict...

The Mother Who Would Not Leave

In 2007, researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered a deep-sea octopus clinging to a rocky ledge nearly a mile beneath the Pacific...

Universalsacrifice

250 words

The Man Who Fought Back by Not Fighting

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn as the first Black man to play Major League Baseball in the modern...

Universalcourage

230 words