Like the apostles who gathered together to tell Jesus “all they had done and taught,” every evening at dinner my sisters and I would report to my father and mother all that we had done and learned during the day. We were filled with enthusiasm, each bursting to tell our stories because they delighted my parents.

A noticeable “buzz” spread through the wedding banquet  hall. Two great-uncles of the groom, brothers who had been so close growing up but who hadn’t spoken to each other in more than 20 years, were soon going to be in the same place at the same time. How would they react?

We remember “firsts” in our lives because they are guideposts to where we’ve been and to where our lives are now pointed. Remember that first kiss? Or that exciting first time driving the family car all alone?

Her peers on the faculty watched as her body wasted away. They sat quietly eating their lunches during meetings, knowing she was in the bathroom purging hers

My family and I were on a walk while at my parents’ cottage on a small lake in Southwest Michigan when we got a lesson about life. Around the bend in the lake we met an old couple sitting on rickety lawn chairs fishing.

Watching television back in the 1950s was a whole lot easier than it is now. Sure, there was no cable or satellite dishes. There weren’t any remote controls to change channels and only a handful of channels to choose from.

When Mrs. Gates, a charity maven, and her husband, a successful Seattle lawyer, looked at their scrawny, scrabbly son, Bill, back in 1967, they would have hardly pegged him as a future world-shaker.

A friend of mine told me he wasn’t going to his high- school reunion. “Why not?” I asked. “Back then everybody thought I was a loser.

Generosity, Saint Paul tells the Corinthians, has a lot to do with equality. Because you have more, and others are in need, it makes sense to balance things out—to take from your surplus to make up for another’s deficit.

Daniel and his sister Daniela have been blind since birth, the consequence of a genetic disease. They were born in a rural area of Ghana, where resources are scarce and disease runs rampant. Before Daniel reached his teen years, his father died, and his mother struggled to keep herself and her four children alive.