Knocking at the window woke me up in the middle of the night. Shaking off the remnants of my slumber I looked at the clock. It was 3 a.m. "Who on earth could it be?" I thought. I came up to the window and saw a guy in his mid-twenties begging to let him in. There was peace in my heart, so I did not hesitate to open the door to my unexpected visitor. As he entered the house, he told me that his name was Arthur and he lived at his friend’s in an apartment block nearby (the local ghetto, in fact). He was obviously frightened, and his face was pale with fear. As our conversation unfolded, I found out that he had been drinking with his friends, and they started arguing and then fighting. Arthur got very scared of what was happening and ran away.

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Galina, an older sister from the Vladivostok Life in the Word church, actually had a fiery trial yesterday. There was a fire in her neigbours’ apartment while they were absent. First she did not know what was happenning, but as the lights in her apartment started flickering, God gave her wisdom to unplug all the domestic electrical appliances, she says. Then, as she felt smoke and realized her neighbours were not at home, she called the fire fighters and started praying. “I was very fearful and ran from wall to wall like crazy just calling His name and putting all my trust in Him. And He was faithful and kept my life and my apartment safe. My neighbours’ apartment looks like judgement day now. There is a half foot layer of soot and ashes on everything. My apartment has not been damaged at all. That is a real miracle. Though I was very scared, now I can tell you God is true and we can rely on His power in every situation!”, Galina said as she testified about this incident in church on Sunday. She is not feeling very well at the moment because of CO2 poisoning, yet she trusts the Lord will heal her completely.

In the name of the Lord we have taken an oath. We have promised to be friends. — 1 Samuel 20:42 (NIV)

17-year-old Brian Moore had only a short time to write something for a class. The subject was what Heaven was like. “I wowed ‘em,” he later told his father, Bruce. “It’s a killer. It’s the bomb. It’s the best thing I ever wrote.” It also was the last.

Brian’s parents had forgotten about the essay when a cousin found it while cleaning out the teenager’s locker at Teary Valley High School. Brian had been dead only hours, but his parents desperately wanted every piece of his life near them-notes from classmates and teachers, his homework.

Only two months before, he had handwritten the essay about encountering Jesus in a file room full of cards detailing every moment of the teen’s life. But it was only after Brian’s death that Beth and Bruce Moore realized that their son had described his view of heaven.

“It makes such an impact that people want to share it. You feel like you are there.” Mr. Moore said.Brian Moore died May 27, 1997, the day after Memorial Day. (read more…)

“… I was sitting and just contemplating going to bed when someone with a 12- gauge shot gun came to my window. …sneaked into the garden, put the shotgun close up to the window, and let fire at my head.”

Two days after Christmas of 1997, an assassin was sent on a mission. His objective: to kill Kenny McClinton. Back during Kenny’s loyalist terrorist days, as he fought against the Irish Republican Army, an attack like this would have been expected — just a part of everyday life. A life that had been filled with violence.

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CBN.com — SANTA ANA, CA (ANS) — Probably 80 percent of the house church leaders in China know or have heard the name of this house church leader, but he asked that his name not be used. Possibly as many as 2 million Christians are involved in his house church network. He has been arrested several times and imprisoned a total of 10 years for his faith in Jesus Christ. He spoke recently with an Open Doors team. The following is his testimony.

I was born in a Christian family in China — a fourth generation Christian. My grandparents were very sincere Christians.

In 1949 the new China was established. China went into very deep tragedy. The spiritual warfare increased. Ephesians 6:12 says, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

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NIMULE, SOUTH SUDAN (ANS) — With a physique like Jean Claude Van Dam, 42-year-old Sam Childers has hunted alligators in the U.S. and has smacked down miscreants in Africa. This titan, who could easily pass for Hulk Hogan’s younger brother, sold hard drugs in the late 70s and early 80s and was a rider with the Outlaws, a motorcycle gang in Florida. He has since put his notorious ways behind him and now uses his muscular prowess to save lives in Sudan and Uganda. (Pictured: Sam Childers).

On a recent morning, Sam surveys the orphanage he built on the 36 acres of bush land he cleared four years ago in Nimule, South Sudan. His orphanage is a safe haven for children who are captured out of, or are lucky enough to escape from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel paramilitary group operating in Uganda and Sudan, which has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. Though Sam’s gut is overstocked with intestinal fortitude, the terror that rages around his orphanage is so frightening that just thinking about it can send a cold shiver of electric sparks up and down his sturdy spine.

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I start to worry the week before the date penciled in on my calendar. She is four months old and the second set of vaccinations is late, I must go in. My baby daughter was six weeks old when we came to heat and thunderstorms and her health records were temporarily misplaced in the shuffling of a life started over so I waited. It is time.

Three days to go and my prayers become fervent and worried. I have been through this before, her brothers were vaccinated on this continent too, one has the souvenir of a scarred shoulder from a tuberculosis vaccine, but still I am afraid. I chide myself and remember that she is healthy, it’s just a shot! But she’s just a baby, and this is Africa. AIDS, Hepatitis, will the needle be clean?

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Missionaries in Africa most of their married lives (since 1936…retiring in 1996), they were on a 10-month volunteer effort working in the village of Morija in Lesotho, South Africa. At 2am on 1 Feb. 1998, they awoke with four men (members of an international car-theft ring) surrounding their bed demanding money and the keys to their 10-passenger, all-terrainToyota Ventura. Dragging them to their car and threatening rape and murder, the thieves set off the car alarm by mistake.

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“Hell’s Angel” a “fallen angel”?: Born the same year I was, he was a rider with the Hell’s Angels in the 1960s-70s. He wore a “1%” patch on his jacket in response to a police official’s remark that 99 percent of the public is law-abiding. The only way “out” of the gang is death…that’s the rule of life of the Hell’s Angels, the most notorious and dreaded motor gang in the United States. The life of the Hell’s Angels supposedly only consists of drinking, drugs, power, prostitution, and stolen goods.

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It was a typical Saturday morning; and Brianna, 4, and her brother Trey were up early playing on the back porch. The Temple family had just bought a new home in northeast Columbia, S. C.; and it came with a pool. The kids had only been in it once. Typically, the temples kept the gate locked…but not on this particular morning.
Tiffani, the mom, was cleaning around the pool when her employer called; and she ran inside. In a matter of minutes, Brianna and Trey managed to unlock the screen door and make their way outside. Tiffani remembers hanging up the phone and sensing danger, “And I went back there, and I saw my son standing on the edge of the pool; and immediately I knew something was wrong.” Tiffani saw Brianna at the bottom of the pool, “So I just ran straight to the pool, and I looked for the darkest area; and I just immediately jumped in.” Tiffani frantically carried her daughter to the front yard where her husband Bruce was cutting the grass. “I held this lifeless child…because she was limp, I thought she was dead; and he saw me holding her, and he just screamed. He just screamed, ‘Oh God!’”

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“when i was just twenty-two i murdered my father. he was a priest. after i had done fifteen years in prison no one in my home town would talk to me, even the people that didn’t know me. Then two years after i came out of prison my mum fell ill.the hour before she died she said believe in God and he will believe in you and i will be forever with you.

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Grandma M., in Russia says, “I read the Bible before in Russian, but didn’t realize that Jesus’ death on the cross had anything to do with me personally. When I read the New Testament in Adyghe, I suddenly realized that Jesus died for me. He was waiting for a response from me. I could not refuse this kind of love. I gave Him my life.” She now goes among her people with the Gospel despite being shot at and threatened. One young man told her recently, “Traitors like you, who abandon faith in Islam, should have their legs broken.”

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