Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

In the days of the potato famine in Ireland, many Irishmen left the country and came to America seeking a new way of life. And among those thousands of people who came as immigrants to our country there was a young man who couldn’t afford passage on the ship, so he hid himself aboard and became a stowaway. Halfway across the Atlantic their ship hit an iceberg an...

One of these weekend widows met her husband at the door when he returned home from his first hunting trip of deer season and said to him, “I’m sick and tired of sitting around the house on weekends by myself. So the next time you go deer hunting I’m going with you.” That’s the last thing he wanted. And so he tried to talk her out of it. H...

Kim Linehan was one of the greatest long-distance swimmers in the world. She held the world record in the 1,500-meter freestyle competition from 1979 to 1987. According to her coach Paul Bergen, Kim did endless exercises and swam seven to 12 miles a day. The hardest part of her regimen? “Getting in the water,” she said. If getting in the water is the hard...

Woody Hayes, the former football coach of Ohio State once spoke to a service club in Memphis, Tennessee. In his speech he gave what he considered to be football’s three great lessons: “When you get knocked down, you get up and go again. When you go again, you go as a team. And there is nothing that comes easy that’s worth a dime. I never saw a footba...

Great men are born out of hardship. If you read enough biographies you will get to thinking that there can’t be a great man except he who suffers. God knows that you can’t develop strong men in easy places. The man who has never had his faith tested doesn’t know whether he has faith. God wants to make you and me into men like Christ and he allows us...

A few years ago I returned to our old home place, deep in the piney woods of East Texas. I can’t remember living there, but I lived there when I was just a baby. And I had to get directions out to those woods, down a little sandy road and had to stop and walk up a trail and finally was able to identify the place by a great big oak tree that my dad had planted be...

The preacher was told that he had cancer, just a little while to live, and he went back to his cabin and one moonlit night he looked out the window and saw the mountains that he loved so much. And that mountain stream that flowed down. He looked up at the stars so clear and bright in the winter sky, and he said to the mountains, “Mountains, when you are no more...

God left Titus in Crete because he wanted to use him as his instrument to change the world. Paul tells Titus that he was left in Crete to “set in order” things that were wanting. The term set in order is a medical term that means to “set in joint.” It describes what a doctor does when you go to him with a broken bone. Because the parts of that...