13th in a series on long marriages

Frustrated, Pastor Robert Hall walked into the hospital. He’d come to visit a dying church member but hadn’t been able to get the day off from his landscaping job. When he finally made it to the hospital, the man’s room was empty: He had already died.

“Something snapped in me,” Hall recalls. He told God, “I’m not doing what You’ve called me to do well. This is ridiculous.”

As the new coronavirus pandemic extends into another week, many Americans face reduced hours and pay or no jobs at all. Communities need the assistance of nonprofit groups like the winners of WORLD’s 2019 Hope Awards for Effective Compassion even more at this time. The spread of the disease makes it harder to help the poor, but the ministries’ reliance on God provides hope and clarifies their purpose.

12th in a series on long marriages

Mike and Pat Meierhenry both grew up on farms. They met in college at a fraternity dance, where Pat asked her date why Mike was dancing with one hand in his pocket. Her date explained that Mike had lost the use of his left arm from polio—but he still went home to farm on the weekends. Pat wondered how he managed farm work with only one arm. Later, Pat and Mike double-dated, and in September 1960 they married, “between haying and corn-picking.”

By early March the novel coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 respiratory disease had spread to more than 110 countries and topped 118,000 cases worldwide. Three-­quarters of its 4,000 deaths had occurred in China, but non-China cases began multiplying.

COVID-19 first struck the United States in the Seattle area. After the first deaths came at a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., in late February, authorities decided to close schools in an “abundance of caution.” 

On the edge of downtown Austin, Texas, The Sobering Center occupies the first and second floors of a blocky building with cameras above the entrances. Ambulances pull up to the front, and police enter through the side.

Just past the lobby, the center’s paramedics evaluate intoxicated clients in a lab before admitting them to one of the single-sex dorms—large rooms with 24 green cots for clients to sleep in until they are sober. Behind a one-way mirror, a paramedic observes and types notes.

Second in a series on long ministry

For 37 years, Steven Thomas has served as pastor of Huron Baptist Church in Flat Rock, Mich. Looking back, he sees his own ambition as a persistent challenge to his ministry. But fully recognizing the problem took years.

Flight of the Raven by Morgan L. Busse: In this sequel to Mark of the Raven, Selene adjusts to being Lord Damien’s wife. Despite their hasty marriage and enemy families, they are falling in love. But the shadowy goddess known as the Dark Lady haunts Selene’s dreams, forcing her to choose between the Dark Lady or the Light, her husband’s good God. This book has all the charms of its prequel—a setting with interesting culture, likable characters, and pure romance—and also the same annoyances.