For twenty-four years, Ray Martinez served as a police officer in Fort Collins, Colorado, working everything from minor crimes to hard-to-solve homicides. But all that time, a personal mystery nagged at him. Ray was adopted, and he desperately wanted to find his biological mother.Ray delved into his search in April 2005, soon after retiring. He was hopeful but not overconfident since his past searches had always ended in failure. This time, he put the investigative skills he acquired as a police officer to full use.By searching through public records, visiting Web sites to study ancestry, and...

The fall of Saigon was the beginning of Mai Tran's adventure as one of the hundreds of thousands of boat people who escaped from Vietnam. According to the report of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, one third of boat people died at sea by killings, storms, illnesses, and food shortages. Currently, there are more than 1.6 million boat people spread all across the world. This is Tran's resilient journey from darkness to light, from hiding in a secluded jungle area, to floating on a small vessel, and eventually embarking onto the Skyluck ship, packed with thousands of refugees for...

Spiritual growth is a daily process, and as followers of Christ, we should be striving to learn something new about God and his Word every day. Ray Martinez invites you on a forty-day journey of daily inspiration as he captures nuggets of wisdom from life experiences. Follow along as Ray discovers that: When we're in awkward positions in life or feel abandoned, the best remedy is to retreat back to our origin-the very one who designed and created us to find out the solution. We need to draw from what we have experienced in order to encourage and stir the hearts of others. Mini-prayers are...