Real Faith Stories

Former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landrys admiration for Washington Redskin Coach Joe Gibbs is unabashed. No small part of the reason is that they both are equally serious Christians.

The readers of Business Atlanta were asked several months ago to choose their citys most respected CEO. They bypassed high-profile executives such as Ted Turner and Coca-Cola Chief Executive Roberto C. Goizueta.

Gallup’s polling has explored America’s political and economic beliefs, as he puts it, “ad nauseum.” But his number-crunching also has helped lead him to something else: a deep spiritual experience.

Former president Jimmy Carter returned to Washington last week to talk about a house. Not the one he lived in for four years on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, but a house he will build this summer as part of the Habitat for Humanity Jimmy Carter Work Project.

Have you ever wondered why Jesus turned the water into wine at a wedding feast as his first miracle? He could have walked on the water, raised the dead or fed 5,000 people, all of which he did later. What does this first miracle tell us about Jesus?

Have you ever wondered why Jesus turned the water into wine at a wedding feast as his first miracle? He could have walked on the water, raised the dead or fed 5,000 people, all of which he did later.

"I was blessed with a beautiful marriage and a challenging career," Dole regularly tells prayer breakfast groups throughout the country. "Gradually, over many years, I realized what was missing. My life was threatened with spiritual starvation."

Darrell Green’s most important race began one evening in 1988. He was driving home from one of those personal appearances that professional athletes make – the kind that gets them good publicity but adds little to the lives of those they visit. Green had gone to a downtown Washington apartment complex, but as he made his way home, he started thinking about what he had just done.

Kay and Charles James camped out at a hospital in Richmond, watching and praying for their daughter, Elizabeth, who had slipped into a coma 2½ weeks earlier, suffering from a disease that doctors said is usually fatal after three weeks. But then...

On Saturday morning before the Kentucky Derby, a security guard at Churchill Downs spotted Pat Day heading for the jockey’s room decked out in a double-breasted suit. “Are you preaching today?” said the guard. “Yeah, we’re having a revival at Churchill Downs,” Day said.

She wanted to break up with me. She left early the next day to head back to college. I decided to pursue her, but her mind was set. Susie eventually married that guy. I felt like one of the walking wounded.

Every Easter, thousands of Christian pilgrims come here in search of a tomb vacated by a man named Jesus of Nazareth. But the question all pilgrims must answer is, “Which empty tomb will I visit?”

Most people don’t even think about heaven until things start to fall apart on Earth. My world fell apart during the sixties in the border town of McAllen, Texas, where the drugs flowed freely and the parties seemed to never end.

We get impatient waiting one minute for the microwave! But I have had some extra-long waits in my life that could have sent me crashing into despair were it not for God’s love.

Norman Geisler never met an atheist he didn’t like. For 40 years he has read them, talked to them and debated them. Academic atheists remain the favorite on his intellectual menu because he’s never known one who didn’t condemn the Holocaust as a moral abomination. And therein lies their fatal intellectual flaw, according to Geisler.

Harvard Law School graduate Sam Ericsson has offered his counsel in the last two years on religious liberty and justice to people from 146 countries, including six heads of state and 12 chief justices, without charging one dime in legal fees.

The Buffalo Bills’ Frank Reich, pro football’s man of the moment, says the impending Second Coming of Jesus Christ prepped him for his backup role in leading the Bills to a record come-from-32-points-behind victory over the Houston Oilers last Sunday. The Second Coming? And the NFL playoffs?

The head of the Christian Film and Television Commission this week presented movie industry leaders with 1 million signatures calling for a new family-friendly movie code.

Leigh Ann Metzger sat in her office in the Old Executive Office Building the day after the Nov. 3 election, her perky manner only slightly masking the strain of nonstop campaigning and her boss’s defeat. Now and then Metzger’s words revealed what she calls her “righteous indignation,” an apt phrase for President Bush’s liaison to the evangelical community.

In summer 1967, J. Edgar Hoover ordered FBI agents to Mississippi in an all-out search for a Ku Klux Klan member of the notorious White Knights, who had begun bombing several Jewish synagogues. Almost a year later, the hunt ended after a car chase and shootout...

The Bible pronounces a special blessing on those who take up the cause of orphans. But for one of Madison Avenue’s advertising executives, who is in the midst of a seven-month campaign on behalf of 28 orphans, “the blessing is on the way; for right now, it’s very exhausting.”

Allen Clark, a Bush appointee who directs the National Cemetery System for the Veterans Administration, recounted his miraculous recovery from a mortar shell that landed between his legs and left 25 pieces of shrapnel in them.

For an estimated 3 million devout students, the Supreme Court’s ban on classroom prayer won’t matter a bit. They’re going to gather around school flagpoles Sept. 16 before classes to pray. Some say it will be the largest student-led prayer meeting ever.

Moses and the children of Israel are not the only ones who report having witnessed miracles in the desert. Desert Storm’s most incredible story, says Marine Maj. Gen. Charles Krulak, was the “miracle well” that appeared out of nowhere to supply 100,000 gallons of water a day for U.S. soldiers.

How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel, the Bible says, and it doesn’t hurt to have great legs either, adds New York model Laura Krauss.

Although Christine Carr is a year shy of meeting the requirements for a doctorate in education from the University of Maryland, she already has gained major points in courage, charity and compassion through her work with children in Central America.

A prayer movement is under way in America and around the world, and it is sparking a religious revival, said several clerics attending a White House meeting Thursday for the National Day of Prayer.

“Racism-Ethnocentrism has made a comeback in new forms,” says a Christian sociologist who recently organized a conference entitled, “What Color is Your Idol?”

Two years ago, Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor, went undercover to experience the services available to the homeless and the attitudes that characterize Washington’s social workers. As he moved from shelter to soup kitchen, no one asked for his real name, no one asked about his family, no one asked how he became homeless.

If the soft touch of a red-lipstick kiss on the church flyer didn’t grab the attention of the congregation in Gaithersburg, Md., the title of the sermons did: “Surviving in a Sex-crazed Culture.”

Basso Jerome Hines of New York’s Metropolitan Opera was strolling around Red Square in Moscow last summer when he had an inspiration. He said he felt God telling him to bring his opera based on the life of Christ to the famed Bolshoi Theatre.

In the early 1970s, Ted Fletcher met people from all over the world in his travels as national sales manager for the Wall Street Journal. That experience so fed his desire to share his faith with people from other cultures that Fletcher, then 42, resigned from the Journal to pursue his dream of full-time missionary work.

Former President Jimmy Carter is promoting a new form of Christian theology – “the theology of the hammer.”

For Jo Starbuck, 41, a marketing coordinator for a computer software company, the class that she started attending in 1986 served as a catalyst for healing. Starbuck said she recalled reading the word “grace” in her Bible 10 years ago, and pondering, “What does this mean?”

As the speaker went to the lectern at a Washington area hotel, the audience of 70 people from 25 nations prepared to take notes. A woman from Bogota, Colombia, adjusted her headphones to hear the translation. A gathering of the United Nations delegation? An international conference? Or a meeting of ambassadors from various embassies? None of the above.