Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

In 1909 Pierre Curie, a man who along with his wife discovered radium, was run over by a wagon and killed instantly. The loss of her husband was a devastating experience to Madam Curie emotionally. Thereafter for months, she wrote personal notes to him daily in her diary. In one of those notes, she described the funeral service and how they gathered by the graveside a...

I had the privilege this week of meeting Stanley Tam, the president of US Plastics in Lima, Ohio. He is a Christian businessman. I would have said a few years ago, and he would have said too, that he was the owner of US Plastics. But now he is only the president of US Plastics, because he has given his business to God. In fact he has written a book about his life enti...

Last week I read A Short History of the Baptists by H. C. Vedder. In the book he told of a pioneer Baptist preacher who came into the wilderness of East Texas down around Nacogdoches before this land was ever settled country. Here is what that pioneer said about his life: “Every day I travel, I have to swim through creeks or swamps, and I am wet from head to fee...

A Sunday school teacher, a Mr. Kimball, in 1858 led a Boston shoe clerk to give his life to Christ. The clerk, Dwight L. Moody, became an evangelist. In England in 1879, he awakened evangelistic zeal in the heart of Fredrick B. Myer, the pastor of a small church. F. B. Meyer, preaching to an American college campus, brought to Christ a student named J. Wilbur Chapin....

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...

There are some things in life that are priceless. Money cannot buy them and poverty cannot take them away. One of these is a virtuous woman. Proverbs 31:10-31 describes such a lady. The writer asks, “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.” Rich indeed is the man who has a virtuous wife. Fortunate beyond measure is the child who h...

Psychiatrists say that the vast neurotic misery of the world could be termed a “neurosis of emptiness.” Such emptiness is always dangerous, for human nature like physical nature abhors a vacuum. A person must be filled with something. If his life is not filled with good, then he becomes easy prey for evil. Jesus emphasized this when he told the story of a...

A man who had felt he was being pressured by a friend to accept Christ and to join a church once said to me, “I don’t think people ought to do that. They ought to live such happy and contented lives so that just by watching them, other people would want to be like them and have what they have.” He’s right. People do not need pressure but they...

Few people have the ability to see latent potential in others. Most of us look people over, size them up, and then leave them as they are. Many great people have been overlooked in this way. If we had been in England many years ago, we might even have sized up young Winston Churchill and written him off as a failure. He was a redheaded, troublesome boy with a speech i...