Every Christmas season our thoughts turn to the birth of Christ and to his mother, Mary. To some extent, we all take the nativity for granted. But why was Jesus born of a virgin? One answer, of course, is to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14: "Behold the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."

Intelligence experts are warning that 1999 is likely to be a year of serious upheaval in the Middle East. King Hussein of Jordan is suffering from lymph cancer, and a major conflict between Turkey and Cyprus over the issue of the delivery of S-300 missiles has been postponed only temporarily until the end of the year.

"Herein is Love, not that we [first] loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." (1 John 4:9-10)

This month, with our celebration of Thanksgiving, we initiate our holiday season: a time for families and a time of reflection. This unique day reflects - perhaps more than any other - our national religious character.

Over the last few months, I've been sharing how God saved our marriage twenty years ago by His supernatural Love. I made the statement that had we not found God's Way of Agape, we would not be together today.

First of all, I want to thank you for your loving and thoughtful cards, letters and e-mail concerning our beloved son, Chip, who went "home" to be with the Lord while jogging on August 1st. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of love, and it truly has helped us weather the shock and hurt of his sudden passing. He was 39.

In the year 1483 in Eisleben, Saxony, a baby boy was born to a poor coal miner. As he grew up and observed the poverty of his father, this boy, named Martin, chose to pursue a different vocation.

As Chuck and I travel around the country, we have been inundated lately with personal questions about marriage problems. I can't believe the number of Christian marriages that are having problems in these "last days." It's shocking and so very tragic. I have felt compelled, therefore, to do a short series on God's Love and how it only can be "the answer" to a failing marriage and "the answer" to falling back in love.

The sounds of gunshots in a small Arkansas town continue to ring like a bell - a bell that tolls for four little girls and a dedicated teacher who put herself in mortal danger to shield a fifth child from a hail of bullets, unleashed, God help us, by a 13-year-old boy and his 11-year-old pal.

The startling discovery of modern science is that our physical universe is actually finite. Scientists now acknowledge that the universe had a beginning. They call the singularity from which it all began the "Big Bang."

God has had me preempt the article I had intended to write this month, in order to write about something that is very near and dear to my heart - our marriages.

The famed double-helix DNA typically includes three billion rungs of a digital, error-correcting code. A digital (symbolic) code derives its significance from arbitrary, but consistent, definitions. A digital language requires context; conventions external to the code itself. An effective digital code demands careful, skillful design.

This past April all sorts of real scientists, as well as hobbyists and amateurs around the world, were treated to the first NASA images of the Cydonia region of Mars since 1976. This time NASA loaded the raw data on web pages which were mirrored around the world as soon as the Mars Global Surveyor orbiting camera had relayed the stored data to earth.

Well, this will be our last newsletter article on the subject of being transformed by the renewing of our minds. To me, Romans 12:1-2 is one of the most important verses in the Bible. (It's also one of my own life verses.) I do pray this series of articles has proved helpful in your walk with the Lord.

Sunday, April 19 marked the fifth anniversary of the BATF/FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Last month we began to explore the four essential steps that we must take each day to renew our minds, so our lives can be transformed (Romans 12:2).

Human vision is utterly amazing in its ability to receive and process a wealth of information concerning levels of light intensity, colors, motion, and stereoscopic depth of field. However, as wonderful as our eyesight is, we are able to see only electromagnetic waves between 400 and 700 nanometers (4 to 7 x 10-9 m) in wavelength.

There has been a great deal of interest in "Bible Codes." The main flurry of controversy has been about the equidistant letter sequences that seem to be hidden within the Biblical text.

We are in the middle of a series of articles on the practical application of renewing our minds.  The past two months, we have explored the four attitudes that are necessary in order to continually "be renewed in the Spirit of our minds." 

When I was a teenager, I was confronted by a skeptic (a Unitarian, actually) concerning an apparent discrepancy in 1 Kings 7:23. This passage deals with Solomon's Temple and the products of Hiram the Bronzeworker: