Devotionals by Chaplain (Col) Stephen W. Leonard, USA, Ret.
Unbleached Pumpkins
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] My granddaughter recently finished a scientific school project appropriate to the season; and she learned a valuable spiritual truth in the process. Using five pumpkins, which she hollowed and carved with typical Halloween faces, she left one pumpkin untouched by any preservative, while the other four were treated with »
Does Thanksgiving Bring Tears To Your Eyes?
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] When thanksgiving is felt in every bone and sinew of your body, it causes your eyes to tear up. This is the passion of being overwhelmed with true thanks-giving, when our hearts “well up and the natural overflow are freely flowing tears. We had the privilege of visiting Prince »
Signs of the Times
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] “America is great because she is good; if she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. Alexis de Tocqueville’s two centuries old prophecy has been fulfilled. America is no longer great, because she by and large has ceased to be good. Truth has stumbled in the »
Heart Reader
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Do you know the Heart Reader? Having just walked in the door of our home from three weeks away we received a phone call to meet an ambulance at the hospital carrying my 95 year old father. He was experiencing severe chest pain and tightness, symptomatic of a heart »
Bold for Truth
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] An evil coward with a gun climbed on a school bus in Pakistan and shot an unarmed 14 year old school girl in the head to silence her courage. From the time she was 11 this Catholic teenager had boldly spoken out for truth, knowing she did so with »
Technicolor Clapping
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Spring rejuvenates flowering dogwood, cherry, pear and the vibrant colors of trees in blossom. Summer reveals the beauty of myriad shapes of leaves gifting you with delightful shade in the heat of the sun. Deciduous trees in the fall erupt into a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors. Who cannot marvel »
Knowing the End from the Beginning Means What?
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] As far as exciting, dangerous adventure stories go you can hardly improve on the shipwreck account of the Apostle Paul on the way to Rome (told in Acts 27) when 276 people on board an ancient sea galley with sails fought for their lives in the onslaught of a »
Hummingbirds, Man and God
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Just outside our window we have hummingbird feeders allowing us to watch the fascinating and spectacularly painted creatures that dart magically about in the air. But this is the time of year when their visits become infrequent and soon come to an end. These tiny creatures will, not in »
Hebetude
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] So you did not know that you suffer at times from hebetude. We all do! This is a word that I had to look up when reading recently in the Sabbath Exercises readings of Thomas Chalmers (1780-1947) the Scottish minister and divine who was the subject of my Masters’ »
The Walking Dead
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Have you ever seen dead men walking? You can go back in time to a Church in Sardis (present day Turkey) or you can look around you and see abundant evidence in churches today. The letters to the seven churches in Revelation are thought by some to speak to »
Prowling Lion, Devouring Menace
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] There is a cosmic battle taking place in the world; one that permeates the stories we create for ourselves, whether to entertain, tell our own or someone else’s story, or simply because this is the way it is in the universe where we live and the truth of it »
“A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle?”
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] This title is Gloria Steinem’s statement that provided a mantra for the feminist movement in the past century. Possibly, Eve could have said something similar after Adam excused his own sin in answer to God by blaming her! The historical account is that Eve succumbed to the cunning of »