Your bees are swarming rdquo My wife stuck her head inside the door and gave me news no beekeeper wants to hear I ran outside to see thousands of bees flying up from the hive to the top of a tall pine never to return I was a little behind in reading the clues that the hive was about to swarm more than a week of storms had hampered my inspections The morning the storms ended the bees left The colony was new and healthy and the bees were actually dividing the colony to start a new one ldquo Don [... more]

The halted hands of a pocket watch in a library rsquo s archives at the University of North Carolina tell a harrowing tale They mark the exact moment and seconds the watch rsquo s owner Elisha Mitchell slipped and fell to his death at a waterfall in the Appalachian Mountains on the morning of June Mitchell a professor at the university was gathering data to defend his correct claim that the peak he was on mdash which now bears his name Mount Mitchell mdash was the highest one east of the Mississippi His grave is located at the mountain rsquo [... more]

Our family was planning to get a puppy so my eleven-year-old daughter researched for months She knew what the dog should eat and how to introduce it to our new home mdash among myriad other details nbsp nbsp nbsp Turns out puppies do best she told me if they rsquo re introduced to one room at a time So we carefully prepared a spare bedroom I rsquo m sure there will still be surprises as we raise our new puppy but my daughter rsquo s delight-infused preparation couldn rsquo t have been more thorough The way my daughter channeled her [... more]

In the mid- s two people participated in research on the effects of darkness on the human psyche They entered separate caves while researchers tracked their eating and sleeping habits One remained in total darkness for days the other days Each guessed how long they could remain in darkness and were off by months One took what he thought was a short nap only to discover he rsquo d slept for hours Darkness is disorienting The people of God found themselves in the darkness of impending exile They waited unsure of what would take place The prophet Isaiah used darkness [... more]

A man walked into a convenience store in Wollongong Australia put a bill on the counter and asked for change When the clerk opened the cash drawer the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register which the clerk promptly provided The man took the cash from the clerk and fled leaving the bill on the counter The total amount of cash he got from the drawer Fifteen dollars We all act foolishly at times mdash even if unlike this would-be thief we rsquo re trying to do the right thing The key is how [... more]

Radamenes was just a kitten when his owner dropped him off at an animal shelter thinking he was too ill to recover The kitten was nursed back to health and adopted by the vet He then became a fulltime resident at the shelter and now spends his days ldquo comforting rdquo cats and dogs mdash just out of surgery or recovering from an illness mdash through his warm presence and gentle purr That story is a small picture of what our loving God does for us mdash and what we can do for others in return He cares for us [... more]