True, sourced stories for sermons and lessons. Search by keyword, theme, or Bible book.
66 illustrations found
A 2,000-Year-Old Seed Sprouted
In the 1960s, archaeologists digging at Masada, Herod's fortress by the Dead Sea, found ancient date seeds buried under rubble. Radiocarbon dating put them at about 2,000 years old.
A Circle of Prayer 700 Meters Down
In 2010, a rockfall trapped 33 miners about 700 meters underground at the San Jose mine in northern Chile. They were stuck in a space about the size of a small apartment, with almost no food and heat that never dropped below about 90 degrees.
Anthony Robles Wrestled on One Leg
Anthony Robles was born without a right leg. He tried a prosthetic, but at age three he pulled it off and chose crutches instead.
Bald Eagles Came Back
The bald eagle is the national symbol of the United States, but by 1963 only 417 nesting pairs were known in the lower 48 states. Habitat loss, illegal shooting, and the pesticide DDT had nearly wiped them out.
Banting Read One Article
In the early 1920s, doctors knew diabetes was linked to a missing substance from the pancreas, but every attempt to extract it had failed. Frederick Banting, a young Canadian doctor, read a medical article by Moses Baron about what happens when the pancreatic duct is tied off.
Bessie Coleman Learned French to Fly
Bessie Coleman grew up in Texas and later worked as a manicurist in Chicago. When her brother came home from World War I talking about women flying airplanes in France, she decided the sky would be her arena.
Bethany Hamilton Couldn’t Wait to Surf
In 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was lying on her surfboard off Hawaii with her left arm dangling in the water. A shark came up and attacked, pulling her back and forth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Endurance Found After 107 Years
In 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was squeezed and crushed by Antarctic sea ice and sank, leaving his men stranded on the ice. Shackleton led an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats, even sailing a lifeboat across brutal seas to go get help.
Enough at the Opera to Have Carried It
William Wilberforce had spent nine years fighting to end the British slave trade. On March 15, 1796, his bill finally looked like it might pass.
Fanny Crosby’s First Face
When Fanny Crosby was only six weeks old, a man posing as a doctor treated an illness by putting hot mustard poultices on her eyes, and the treatment left her blind for life.
Fifteen Whooping Cranes
Whooping cranes are the tallest birds in North America, and there were once more than 10,000 of them. Shooting and the loss of prairie habitat to farming nearly wiped them out.
Firefighters Save the Dinosaur Trees
The Wollemi pine is so rare that it was thought to be extinct, known only from fossils, until 1994, when a park officer named David Noble rappelled into a narrow canyon in Australia and found trees he didn't recognize.
Fixing Voyager from 15 Billion Miles Away
In November 2023, NASA's Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in existence, started sending home gibberish. Engineers figured out that one memory chip in an onboard computer had failed, taking some of the spacecraft's code with it.
Fleming Noticed the Mold
In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was working in his London lab when he noticed something odd. A mold had accidentally grown on one of his culture plates of staphylococcus bacteria, and around the mold there was a clear circle where the bacteria had died.
Forty Days Lost in the Amazon
On May 1, 2023, a small plane went down in the Colombian Amazon. The mother and two pilots died, but four children, ages 13, 9, 4, and 1, survived the crash and wandered into the jungle looking for help.