True, sourced stories for sermons and lessons. Search by keyword, theme, or Bible book.
195 illustrations found
Cal Ripken Just Kept Showing Up
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 games in a row, a streak so long that people called it unbreakable. On September 6, 1995, Baltimore's Cal Ripken Jr. played his 2,131st straight game.
Can We Have Two Golds?
At the Tokyo Olympics in August 2021, high jumpers Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar and Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy were dead even after two exhausting hours.
Captain Tom’s Hundred Laps
In April 2020, during Britain's first COVID lockdown, a World War II veteran named Tom Moore set out to walk 100 laps of his garden in Bedfordshire before his 100th birthday.
Chuck Feeney Gave It All Away While He Was Alive
Chuck Feeney co-founded Duty Free Shoppers in 1960 and became a billionaire. Then he did something almost nobody does.
Clemente’s Last Flight
Roberto Clemente was one of baseball's greatest stars: 3,000 hits, four batting titles, two World Series championships with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Cliff Young Shuffles to Victory
In 1983 a 61-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young lined up for the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon, about 875 kilometers, against some of the best ultramarathon runners in the world.
Corrie ten Boom Takes the Guard’s Hand
In 1947 Corrie ten Boom was speaking in a church in Munich about how God forgives and throws our sins into the deepest sea. Afterward a balding man in a gray overcoat worked his way toward her, and she recognized him.
Could You Patent the Sun?
In the early 1950s polio terrified American parents. In the last years before a vaccine, it paralyzed somewhere between 13,000 and 20,000 children every year.
Dan Jansen’s Victory Lap
At the 1988 Winter Olympics, speedskater Dan Jansen learned just five hours before his 500-meter race that his sister Jane had died of leukemia.
DART Hit Its Target Hard
In 2022 NASA did something no one had done before. It crashed a spacecraft called DART into a small asteroid named Dimorphos on purpose, to see if people could change an asteroid's path if one ever threatened Earth.
Daryl Davis Sits Down with the Klan
Daryl Davis is a Black blues musician who first met a Klansman after a gig, when a white man came up to say he'd never heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.
Derek Redmond and the Father Who Came Down from the Stands
At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British runner Derek Redmond was finally healthy and running well in the 400-meter semifinal. About 150 meters in, his right hamstring tore and he crumpled to the track.
Desmond Doss: One More Man
Desmond Doss joined the Army in World War II as a combat medic, but as a Seventh-day Adventist he had vowed he would never kill, so he refused to carry a gun.
Diego the Tortoise Went Home
On Española Island in the Galapagos, the giant tortoise population had dropped to just 15 animals. A breeding program begun in the 1960s brought together two other males and 12 females with a tortoise named Diego, who had spent decades at a zoo.
Does Anyone Here Owe Their Life to Nicholas Winton?
In 1939 a London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton worked his day job and then spent his evenings arranging permits, foster homes, and money so that eight trains could carry 669 children, most of them Jewish, out of Prague to safety in Britain before the war closed the borders.
Dr. Tom Stayed in the Nuba Mountains
Dr. Tom Catena is a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, New York. In Sudan's war-torn Nuba Mountains, where bombing has been part of life and aid has been restricted, he became the only doctor permanently based there.
Eighty Strangers Form a Human Chain
On a Saturday evening in July 2017 at Panama City Beach, Florida, two young boys got caught in a powerful rip current. Before long their mother, their grandmother, and others were caught too, until nine people were struggling to stay afloat and gulping seawater.
Eighty-Six Years I Have Served Him
Polycarp was an old man, the bishop of Smyrna, and tradition says he had been taught by the apostle John. Sometime in the second century, Roman authorities came to arrest him.
Elisabeth Elliot Moves In with Her Husband’s Killers
Elisabeth Elliot and her husband Jim were missionaries in Ecuador, and their daughter Valerie was born in 1955. In 1956, Jim and his fellow missionaries were killed by the Waorani people they had been trying to reach with the gospel.
Emily Roebling Finished the Bridge
As the Brooklyn Bridge project got underway in 1869, designer John Roebling died, and his son Washington became chief engineer. Then Washington was struck down by caisson disease, what we now call the bends.