A major league baseball player is pitching in to help chronically ill and special needs children. Texas Rangers pitcher Cole Hamels and his wife, Heidi, are donating a mansion and 100 acres of land in southwest Missouri to Camp Barnabas, a Christian charity that provides camps for people with disabilities. The 32,000 square-foot home is worth more than $9 million.

A New York moment: 

A cold and clear Saturday in Central Park is the right time for ice skating and hot chocolate. About 60 children eagerly hit the park’s Wollman ice rink this past weekend as part of Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program. All have incarcerated parents. 

Olympic figure skater JoJo Starbuck and other instructors were carving the rink to train the children, some of whom had never skated before but stayed on the rink for hours despite the unseasonably cold weather. 

HOUSTON—Before Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast on Aug. 25, a fleet of trucks from evangelical nonprofit Convoy of Hope (Springfield, Mo.) was on the road loaded with water, food, and hygiene kits. Two disaster teams from Samaritan’s Purse (Boone, N.C.) headed out on Aug. 26. Southern Baptists, with churches scattered throughout the affected area, quickly activated chainsaw teams that cleared roads and removed fallen trees.

Jesus “saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him’” (John 9:1-3).

On May 22, 2011, a multiple-vortex EF5 tornado ripped up Joplin, Mo., leaving 149 corpses and a city of rubble in its wake. The following July, I spent three days there as a volunteer. I wasn’t sure what one woman could do without muscle or power tools, and honestly it didn’t seem like much. The first day I picked up trash on a couple of city streets, but the next two days I confronted piles of used clothing, canned goods, and stuffed toys to pick through. It felt like one of those fairy tales where the heroine has one night to sort a pile of rice and barley into separate bins.

FARMINGTON, N.M.—The first time Taylor Benally made a snappy remark to his house parents, they silently pumped fists. Making snippy comebacks isn’t extraordinary teenage behavior, but it was a milestone for the 13-year-old Taylor. Like most other kids at Four Corners Home for Children, a childcare program mostly for Navajos in Farmington, N.M., Taylor came from a dysfunctional family. When he first arrived at Four Corners in 2013, the boy was so reserved and insecure that any time he showed signs of self-assertion, everyone cheered.

KALISPELL, Mont.—A 19-year-old girl with a nose ring and hair pulled tight into a ponytail walks into a waiting room, carrying a car seat. A gaggle of women swarms her. She lifts a blue-eyed, fair-haired baby out of the car seat, and the oohs and aahs turn into laughter.

“Sorry we bombarded you,” one nurse says. “You saved her life,” the young mother replies, looking down at her baby. “So I owe it to you guys.”