True, sourced stories for sermons and lessons. Search by keyword, theme, or Bible book.
66 illustrations found
Rocky Bleier Decided He Would Walk
Rocky Bleier finished his rookie season with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1968, then was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. After only three months his platoon was ambushed in a rice paddy.
Seventy Years in an Iron Lung
Paul Alexander caught polio in 1952 when he was just six years old, and within days the disease left him unable to breathe on his own. He spent the next 70-plus years in an iron lung, a seven-foot metal cylinder that pushed air into his lungs.
Takacs Came to Learn
In 1938 Karoly Takacs was a sergeant in the Hungarian Army and a member of his country's world champion pistol team. During an army exercise a grenade exploded in his right hand, his shooting hand, and shattered it.
Terry Fox and the Marathon of Hope
In March 1977, when Terry Fox was only 18, doctors amputated his right leg above the knee because of bone cancer. Within weeks he was walking on an artificial leg, and the night before his surgery a coach had brought him a story about an amputee who ran the New York Marathon.
The Arctic Tern Goes the Distance
The Arctic tern is a small seabird with a big reputation. Audubon calls it a long-distance champion.
The Butterflies That Know the Way
Every fall, monarch butterflies in eastern North America head south, some of them flying up to 3,000 miles to the mountain oyamel forests of central Mexico.
The Candy Bomber Wiggles His Wings
In July 1948, during the Berlin Airlift, American pilot Gail Halvorsen met about 30 hungry kids at the barbed wire fence at Tempelhof airfield.
The Christmas Truce of 1914
Picture the first winter of World War I. British and German soldiers are freezing in muddy trenches, sometimes close enough to shout across to each other.
The Fish That Came Back from Extinction
For a long time scientists believed the coelacanth had died out with the dinosaurs, about 70 million years ago. They knew it only from fossils.
The Gophers of Mount St. Helens
When Mount St. Helens blew in 1980, it flattened about 135 square miles of forest and buried the ground under ash thick enough to bury a car.
The Lahaina Banyan Tree Puts Out New Leaves
In August 2023 a wind-driven wildfire tore through the historic town of Lahaina on Maui, and the famous banyan tree on Front Street, planted in 1873 to mark 50 years since the first Protestant mission there, was left scorched and standing in the ashes.
The Marathon That Took 54 Years
Japan sent only two athletes to the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, and one of them was marathon runner Shiso (often spelled Shizo) Kanakuri. The trip took ten days by train, and race day was brutally hot.
The Milkmaids and the End of Smallpox
Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases in human history. It's believed to have been around for at least 3,000 years and it killed millions.
The One-Armed Outfielder
When Pete Gray was six, he was hitching a ride on the running board of a produce truck. The driver stopped suddenly, Gray fell, and his right arm got caught in the wheel spokes.
The River That Ran Free Again
In the early 1900s two dams went up on the Elwha River in Washington's Olympic Peninsula. They made electricity, but they also blocked salmon from the upper river for about a century.
The Seeds Came Back Out of the Ice
In Norway sits the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a safe place to store backup copies of the world's crop seeds. A research center called ICARDA kept a seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, with about 150,000 cereal, food, and feed samples from more than 100 countries.
The Seventh Grader Who Stopped the Bus
One afternoon in April 2023 in Warren, Michigan, a school bus driver called the transportation base to say she felt dizzy and needed to pull over.
The Soldier Who Didn’t Know the War Was Over
Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese army officer sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines near the end of World War II with orders never to surrender.
The Stick Insects on One Bush
Lord Howe Island, off Australia's east coast, was once crawling with big, wingless stick insects about six inches long. Then in 1918 a shipwreck brought rats to the island, and the insects disappeared.
The Survivor Tree
A month after the September 11 attacks, workers at Ground Zero found a badly damaged Callery pear tree in the rubble. Its roots were snapped and its branches were burned and broken.