September 29, 2025

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When you hear the word "superstar," you may think of some great athlete or A-list movie star or some television personality - a celebrity. I'm sorry, but I personally think that's a pretty lame use of the word when you hear about the kind of star that astronomers have been discovering. Like the largest known star in the universe! Conventional telescopes had missed it because of vast dust clouds. But the Hubble Space Telescope picked it up. It is (get this) 186 million miles wide and ten million times brighter than the Sun! That's a superstar. Don't even try to comprehend one star that enormous! Interesting footnote - according to many theories on how stars are formed, a star this large is an impossibility! It's there, it is not impossible.

September 26, 2025

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It wasn't very loud. Just three little words, softly spoken. But they were loud enough to drown out a gunshot that had reverberated across the nation.

September 25, 2025

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Our son was falling in love. I mean like the big one - like the girl he ended up marrying. Our beautiful Navajo daughter now. Our son lived on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona, and the girl of his dreams lived in a remote area of the Navajo Reservation. It was about an hour drive to get out to her house to see her, but he managed - frequently. And the road? Oh, boy! It's one of those reservation roads that kills your shock absorbers, covers you with dust, and even opens up a crater or two for you to dodge. It's not that there weren't better roads around in that area; there are some nicely paved highways with some beautiful views. They even had some nice girls living on them probably. But my son didn't take any of those, for one very good reason. There was only one road that led to the destination he wanted.

September 23, 2025

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I guess you could call it creative architecture. Or you could just call it a big stone in the middle of a high brick wall. I saw this phenomenon when I visited the new station of one of our radio partners. The front wall of the station has this big old 230-pound stone about halfway up the wall in the middle of the bricks. There's no way that could be a mistake or an accident. It is, in fact, a message.

September 19, 2025

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When we secured land to build our Ministry Headquarters, we barely noticed the barn that was standing on that land, until God blessed us with some truckloads of donated materials which needed a place to be stored. Suddenly, we were taking a second look at this old pole barn filled with hay. The center was the only part that had walls - walls with rotting wood. The east and west sides of the barn had no walls, just some rotting old poles holding up a makeshift roof. We asked a contractor friend if there was any hope for the barn - especially since some folks had said just to bulldoze it. The contractor said the rafters and the foundation were actually good enough that something might be able to be done.

September 11, 2025

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After watching the World Trade Center as part of my skyline for many years, it hit really hard that awful September 11th to see those towers come crashing down and thousands of lives with them. The day after the first attack on the Trade Center, which was back in 1993, I was greeted by a TV crew as I got off a flight from Newark. Of all things, they asked me as a New Yorker how I felt after that first bombing. And I could only think of one word, "vulnerable." That was my answer.

September 9, 2025

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Our daughter is all grown up now, but she'll never forget that very scary moment when she was four years old. My wife was shopping in a supermarket with our son riding in the grocery cart and our daughter walking with her - well, actually running ahead of her. Karen had warned her to stay in the same aisle she was in, but we're talking a firstborn here - so she had to run ahead to other aisles to explore, of course. Until suddenly she noticed how high those shelves were and how long those aisles were, and the fact that she didn't see anything familiar. And suddenly she felt that awful feeling that she still describes today as "scary" - she was lost. Not too long ago, she told me how it felt. As a grown woman, she said, "Suddenly my security wasn't there." Thankfully, her mother came looking for her. Our daughter got lost, but someone who loved her found her.

September 5, 2025

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I missed that sunset a few nights ago, but I saw something just as beautiful - the afterglow. A sky painted by my favorite Artist in brilliant hues of orange and yellow. Look, I've seen a lot of sunsets all over the country and all over the world. But the show isn't over when the sun goes down. No, the sky is still glowing, often magnificently. The sun may be gone, but its aftermath is still beautifying our horizon.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "After the Sun Sets."

I've seen lives like that. My wife was a life like that. The sun set suddenly on my baby's life. But its brilliant afterglow is continuing to light up so many lives. More than even I knew.

September 1, 2025

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It might have been the scariest moment of my life. I was only ten years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I was with my friends in Lake Michigan. We started out just wading, but they kept getting deeper past the lake bottom where it dropped off. We started swimming. Well, not we because I didn't know how, and I was too embarrassed to tell them. And I started taking on water fast. I mean, I went under twice, and I was thrashing around. As for my buddies, they thought I was just clowning around. I wasn't! I was drinking the lake. And then he came - the man from the shore who saw my predicament and he jumped in to do something about it. He had come to rescue me. I grabbed him with both hands. I hung onto him as if he were my only hope, because He was.

August 28, 2025

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Years ago a major art gallery sponsored a competition for painters. They were offering prizes for the best painting on the subject of "Peace." As the attenders browsed through the entries, most had decided that one certain painting was almost sure to win. It portrayed this lush green pasture under a vivid blue sky, with the cows grazing lazily and a little boy walking through the grass with his fishing pole over his shoulder. It really made you feel all peaceful. But it came in second. The painting that won was a big surprise. The scene was the ocean in a violent storm. The sky was ominous, the lightning was cutting across the sky, and the waves were crashing into the rock walls of the cliffs by the shore. No peace. But you had to look twice to understand what was going on. There, about halfway up the cliff was a birds' nest, tucked into a tiny hollow in the rock. A mother bird was sitting on that nest with her little babies, tucked underneath her, sleeping soundly. That was peace!