As a teenager who had survived years of abuse and neglect, Brian was embraced as a son by a man who taught him honor, responsibility, and his rightful place in a loving universe.

Esther was fulfilled in her career as a gerontologist and elder care advisor to many, but it was in her role as the tender, loving caregiver for her mother that she experienced her greatest joy and created lasting memories.

Easter brings again the glorious message of the risen Christ, a message of eternal life, a message of victory and triumph. The Christ is risen in power and majesty and proclaims the truth: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

Many years ago I found myself besieged with problems, challenges, and setbacks from a wide variety of sources. Some of the circumstances were outside my realm of control, and others were directly caused by misjudgment on my part. During that time I felt as if I had wandered into the “valley of the shadows,” and the smallest light of hope was nowhere to be seen. Life lost its luster; the beauty of nature became tarnished; and any sense of satisfaction and fulfillment vanished. It was a difficult period in my life.

"I came to understand that emotions are not meant to be a form of torment that makes a person feel miserable. They can be a springboard to the higher self, which is compassionate and loving."

Often people enter into relationships based on an immature or limited understanding of love.

Through a powerful and integrated seven-step program, Dr. Geffen offers patients a road map on their journey of healing that includes mind, heart, and soul.

Throughout the horrific experience of the Rwandan genocide, a young woman demonstrated that forgiveness has the power to heal.

Facing a catastrophic disease that threatened to end his life, Jeffrey realized he had a choice to not be sick any longer. He decided to live, love, and celebrate life.

When an assignment became a personal story, a news anchor made a life-saving difference for one Palestinian family.

As a paramedic, Randy's desire was to help others. In the defining moment of his life, he followed the desire of his heart and experienced the unconditional love of God.

Through experiences in life and Unity teachings, Sally came to believe everyone deserves a second chance. As a director of several corrections facilities, she put her belief into practice and saw lives transformed.

Judy's desire to help children was the catalyst for her writing a best-selling book and creating a program which offers keys to successful living for both children and adults.

Music planted seeds of faith in a young girl’s heart that grew within her over the years, bringing her through the dark days and into the pure light of spiritual understanding.

It's every parent's worst nightmare, a call
from the hospital saying, "Your son is in ICU."

By the grace of God, I don’t have many memories of being abused as a child. Between the ages of two and nine, I had been taken away from, and given back to, my birth mother several times and then placed in several different foster homes in Tennessee. At age nine, also by the grace of God, I was placed in the home of a devoted, caring foster mother whom I call Mom. Mom, a…

Observing my nine-year-old son fixated on a record going round and round on a turntable, I knew there was so much more of him waiting to break through his blank stare. There were love and intelligence that somehow could be unleashed. Discovering how to draw out these inner qualities was a journey of faith and perseverance for my husband Joel and me. Thank God, there were wonderful, dedicated people who joined us on our journey:…

At age nineteen, I received a scholarship to nursing school, believing with all my heart that being a nurse was a wonderful way for me to express my spirituality. Taking care of God’s creations, I would be serving God and letting my life be one that was dedicated to Jesus. Early on in my training, however, I faced a challenge that I thought might cause me to leave nursing school. I could not tolerate the distinct…

Spiritually awakened, Michael Beckwith turned from drug use and drug deals to following his inner voice in living and teaching a God-centered affirmative way of life.

As the new year begins, do you find yourself filled with hope that 2008 will turn out to be the year you begin to make significant progress along your spiritual path?

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is a well-loved and familiar story to many people.

I was incredibly blessed not to have to look outside my own home for my inspiration in life. Mom and Dad met at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and were the first in either of their families to attend college.

Many people are fearful of change, both the expected and unexpected they need to experience in order to live life with greater freedom and happiness.

Today we are living in a rapidly changing world. The advances being made by science and technology are leading humanity into amazing, new dimensions.

As a boy living in Austria during World War II, I never expected to survive the daily bombings or the hunger that my family, friends, and I were experiencing.

As one person, the number of life-changing events I can experience is limited. As a reporter and writer, however, I have had the benefit of experiencing the stories of many different people.

I was not quite four years old when rheumatic fever transformed me from a healthy, rambunctious child, always on the move, to a bedridden child who could hardly move without a great deal of pain.

When I was born in 1955 in a small hospital in southwest Missouri, the doctors and staff thought that a dwarf baby as tiny as I was had no chance for survival.

Born in a remote village in India, close to where the Royal Bengal tigers still roam, I had a humble beginning in life. My family and I lived at a subsistence level

I was reading all the self-help material I could get my hands on, but my life continued to spiral more and more out of control.

To anyone observing the events of my life for even a short period in 2001, it would seem I was living in chaos.

My old life ended and a time of intense transformation began when I awoke paralyzed on July 1, 2003.

Twenty-five years ago, I was working as a human resources manager in the corporate world. My brother Bobby called me at my office and asked if we could have lunch. He was in a crisis over breaking up with a girlfriend he loved and was turning to me for emotional support.

As a young man with a wife and children, I was busy pursuing my life and career—the nicer car and the bigger house. In that pursuit, I learned that satisfaction from material things was short-lived.

As an African-American visiting Nigeria, I felt as if I were returning to my roots. As a Unity minister, I would be learning firsthand about the Unity movement in Nigeria. The movement that Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded...

My parents didn’t have much in terms of money to give my sister, my brother, and me as we were growing up in Dallas, Texas, but they did instill in us the understanding of God’s unconditional love for us. They reminded us that God is the source of all we could ever need. We each may have been limited to two new pairs of shoes a year, but we were never limited in the amount…

My family taught my sister Kitsaun and me about prayer and God’s love. I believed that divine arms reached out to me as I knelt beside my bed saying prayers every night. My mother enjoys telling the story of the Good Friday I fasted, or went without eating, to honor Jesus Christ and the sacrificial love He offered humanity. I couldn’t have been more than five years old, but I remember that my stomach growled…

New Year’s Day 2004 began with a bang. I had waited in Boston for hours while our flight, destined for wind- and snow-driven Chicago, was being rerouted. In fact, I had begun to wonder if I would ever get to Kansas City to see my beloved Unity Village...

I don’t believe that the music I write for Broadway productions and movies comes from me. I believe it comes to me from the voice of God within me. Often I discover that my writing reveals truths I didn’t know I knew. As I look back, I realize I’ve been guided by my writing because writing music has been my window to God. A few years ago I was devastated after ending a long relationship.…

I believe that music lives in a realm beyond words, in the realm of the Divine. It moves past the noise of our thoughts and inhabits a deep interior place within us. For me, singing is a form of prayer, a time when I quiet my thoughts and allow the eternal voice within me to come forward unimpeded. A line of communication opens between God and me. It is my awareness of this merging of ...

I am the mother of four children, but Mattie, my fourth child, is the only one who has survived a rare form of muscular dystrophy called mitochondrial myopathy. It was only after Mattie was born that I learned I had the adult form of muscular dystrophy and that my children also had this disease. At the age of ten, while Mattie was in a coma, I was told that if he did wake up, he…

I was 19 years old and in the Navy aboard a ship in the Pacific, reading the book The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. Ivan Ilyich was a civil servant who every day went back and forth and did the job that he had been programmed to do. Although he felt that he had a greater calling, a greater mission, he never had the courage to abandon the kinds of things that he ...

I am a fifty-eight-year-old recovering alcoholic who has been sober for sixteen years. Even when I was drinking, I was able to maintain my career as a producer of television commercials and director of broadcast production at advertising agencies. I was in denial about being an alcoholic. I drank daily to kill whatever I was feeling—whether I considered the feeling good or bad. There’s a line in one of my books: “The only thing worse to an alcoholic than bad fortune is good fortune.” When we have good things happen to us, it’s just as big a trigger for drinking as when something bad happens.

My father sang and played the piano on his own radio show for 35 years, so I was raised with constant music in my life. When he started to teach me how to play the piano, I’m sure that my father never dreamed that I would someday have a career as a folk singer. By the age of thirteen, I was performing classical music in concerts. But one day I heard a folk song called…

The early morning of September 11, 2001, started off with my wife and me following our usual routine: at breakfast Margaret read the Daily Word message for the day, which always gave her a great deal of comfort and offered her inspiration for coping with whatever she would be facing in her always busy day. We then went our separate ways: Margaret to her job in lower Manhattan and I to my job in midtown…

At the time I was offered the role of Olivia on The Waltons, a family TV drama that aired in the 1970s, I had hit rock-bottom. I was drinking too much, and I felt lost. My life was a stark contrast to the idyllic scenes portrayed by Olivia and her family. The path that had led me to this point began with a childhood that was enchanting in some ways and confusing in others. I was…

Near the end of my freshman year of college, I was driving three other girls back to school. Just as we started across a bridge, the back of the car spun around. The car seemed to float on air, and then it bounced off the side of the bridge. I began praying, “God, I’ve lost control, and if You want me to get out of this alive, You are going to have to help me!…

I had been attending the same church for years, yet I had never noticed a quote by St. Francis de Sales on the side of the building until right after I had been diagnosed with breast cancer, a time when I really needed this message: “The same Everlasting Father, who takes care of you today, will take care of you tomorrow and every day. He will either shield you from suffering, or give you unfailing…

In 1952 I was a popular young woman who had lots of friends and a busy, active life. After taking a physical, I received a telephone call from my doctor, who told me that I had an incurable disease and had only six months to live. My first thought was, How in the world can I stop living in six months when I haven’t yet learned how to live? I knew that I had to…

As a child, I longed for my parents’ love. They were both alcoholics, and after my father left our family, my mother turned her rage on one of their four sons. I happened to be that one. My mother constantly blamed me for “messing up” and referred to me as “It.” Her anger increased over the next few years as she hit me and denied me food. When I was eight years old, she punished me…

I feel such a sense of pleasure when I step onto the stage to perform with Lorene Yarnell, my partner in the mime/comedy team of Shields & Yarnell. I am deeply grateful to God for helping me make the journey from a shy, self-conscious child to a confident performer. Because I could not spell or write very well, I flunked the third grade and was sent to military school. I was a nervous child—constantly being beaten…

I didn’t have the good fortune of being born into a family like that of my wife Jayne’s—through nobody’s fault. Most everyone sets out to be a good wife or husband or a good mother or father; nevertheless, some people don’t fall into these categories. Unfortunately, my father died when I was a year and a half old, so he had a negligible effect on me, but by all reports, which is all that I…

In 1994 my husband Doug and I and our son Isaiah were living in Pennsylvania where I was a deejay at a local radio station. Doug was working toward a degree at the local college, and I was due to deliver our new baby in two months. I loved our life—my job, our home, and the neighborhood where we lived. Then the radio station where I worked changed formats, and I was laid off. Doug…

There are many children today who are so concerned about being beaten up or shot that they never have an opportunity to discover their own talents and abilities. They can’t go to school and concentrate on learning because they are worried about being the victims of violence. These children—in fact, all children—need to believe in themselves and to have a support system that includes God, family, friends, and community. My childhood was not easy, but I…

My mother passed away when I was two, and for the next four years I was raised by my paternal grandmother, Rissie Harris. Grandmother was a Native American, and she taught me that the presence of God is in everyone and everything. She explained that we each have a responsibility to God in everything we do. Maintaining her Native American traditions, Grandmother also embraced fundamentalist Christian teachings. Much later in life, I was able to…

At age twelve, I was filled with anger and rage—desperately wanting to strike back with even more violence than what had been directed toward me. Although I was born and raised in South Africa, I was a child of Eastern heritage and not accepted by either side involved in the racial unrest and violence in South Africa. Too white for one side and too dark for the other, I was routinely attacked by neighborhood boys…

The incredibly secure life of my childhood exploded into unbelievable chaos during my teens. My world—my family and everything I knew—was being ripped apart at the seams. My younger brother Brian passed away, my mom and dad’s marriage began to crumble, and I became pregnant at only seventeen. My daughter Wynonna was born on the night of my high school graduation. While my classmates were starting whole new lives on their own, I was in the…

I didn’t start out to be a comic. It just happened. I had been a mother and a housewife for fifteen years and never expected to have a career of any kind except motherhood. Yet I found that when I told a joke, I not only made others laugh, but I enjoyed myself too! Laughter and humor are healing gifts. While we’re laughing, every cell in our bodies is laughing and giving off endorphins—and healing…

My mother was a tremendous storyteller. My brothers and I would gather around and listen to her in amazement. When she was on the telephone telling people about our vacation—the events and places as she experienced them—we thought, My, she must have gone on a different trip than we did! Were we there when all this happened? Mother told anecdotes with an enthusiasm that glorified her countenance and sparkled in her beautiful blue eyes. Of…

I was an atheist for most of my life. But in 1975 I underwent a spiritual transformation. I was feeling the pressure of being a doctor and, at the same time, I was going through a painful divorce. I was killing myself with alcohol, yet I was also afraid to die. One day, while making rounds at the hospital, I overheard a child—a cancer patient—ask his doctor a question that had been on my mind…

When I was about sixteen years old, something very mysterious happened to me: I had a series of dreams over the course of a week in which I was in an elaborate, kingly court. Incredibly, I felt frightened and at peace at the same time. And as the dream continued night after night, it always picked up where it had stopped the night before. In the final version, I was surrounded by beauty—beauty I could…

I certainly did not expect a blessing to come from an experience I had while on vacation with my husband one year: I was sitting in the lobby of a hotel; suddenly, a man grabbed my purse and ran out the door. I chased him to his car, only to see him drive away. But even then, I somehow knew that things would be all right. As it turned out, he went the wrong way…

As I talked on the phone with a friend, I could hear the rumble of thunder outside. The storm reminded me of my mother’s warnings about talking on the telephone with lightning in the area. Just as I was sharing this insight with my friend, I felt as if a red-hot poker had been shoved down through my body, causing me to explode from the inside out. Struck by lightning, I was declared clinically dead…

I was next, but I felt no fear—only overwhelming love as I began to picture in my mind the sweet, familiar faces of family and friends. One by one, I told them good-bye. I had been returning to my teaching job in Cairo, Egypt, from a trip to Greece when the EgyptAir plane on which I was a passenger was hijacked. The plane was now parked on the runway of an airport in Malta. In…

Looking at the tall, handsome man of twenty-five, you might find it hard to believe that he was abandoned by his parents. The story told of Ionica is that he was raised by wolves. He was found in a desolate woods and appeared to be about three years old. Unable to talk, he communicated with sounds—growls and barks—much the way a pup would. Some loose hair on his body was examined under a microscope and…

Early childhood was a time of great challenge for me. My parents were divorced, and Mom worked full-time to support us both. I felt so alone, and somehow came to believe that there was something wrong with me because I did not fit into my world. Then, when I was seven years old, Michael Landon came along and filled my world with such unconditional love, such incredible acceptance, that he was my knight in shining…

Ten years ago, I thought I was incredibly happy. The problem was that I was looking at my life through an alcohol-induced fog. Getting this and other addictions under control allowed me to wake up to a whole, new world and to some real surprises. I wanted to change my life, but giving up smoking was the first change I made. The decision to quit smoking had a domino effect on my addictions, knocking down one…

When I look back, the irony of it all continues to emerge. As a TV anchor person and a member of the Dream Factory, a nonprofit organization that fulfills the wishes of terminally or seriously ill children, I had held back my emotions as I worked with the news and children every day. Yet the thing that got me started on the road to healing was one of the very things I had held back:…

My mother and I were really concerned— the small plane my dad was a passenger on was long overdue at the airport. We were scared to the point of feeling frantic. But suddenly I remembered a sign I had seen earlier that day in front of a church: “Fear knocked at the door. When Faith answered, no one was there.” That message had caught my eye, and at the time, I said, “Oh, how charming.…

I went to South Korea in 1951 with a USO troop that was trying to bring a bit of home and entertainment to battle-weary soldiers. I came back to the United States to a different kind of battle, one in which my own life was at stake. There were thousands of men from the United States supporting South Korea in a war with North Korea. A large group of entertainers was in a show featuring Bob…

What do we do when we or someone we love comes up against a serious health challenge? We may feel overwhelmed and without resources to help us. We don’t know where to turn. What I do, and what I encourage other people to do, is pray. Many studies have been done in hospitals on the effects of praying for people who are ill. The results are exciting: Those who were prayed for healed better and faster!…

When I was younger, I was fascinated by the idea of miracles. I was always looking for one and searching for proof that they happen. I was so busy searching that I missed the real truth: every second of my life was and is a miracle! Even after I had accomplished everything in life that I thought would make me happy, I was still far from it. It is terrifying to have everything you want…

Just a few weeks after we were engaged to be married, Ken was diagnosed with cancer. During the next two years, he was in and out of the hospital. At one point in the hospital, Ken was in so much pain that I couldn’t bear to watch. I asked him if he would be okay while I went for a walk. He said yes, but asked me not to be gone too long. Having been…

Can you feel the excitement building? It’s a new year and time for new beginnings! We can’t help but allow the child of God within to come out—the child who loves for the pure joy of loving, who looks at each person, place, and opportunity with eyes of wonder. I’m in a business that is full of uncertainty. As a journalist and talk-show host, I’ve learned the importance of prayer. I’ve found it essential to nourish…