George Muller stared at the beggar girl. She was no older than five and was piggybacking her little brother. Her mother had died in the cholera epidemic sweeping England. Her father had never returned from the mines. Standing in the muddy street, this little girl gave a face to Bristol's countless orphans.With scarcely enough food or money for his own family, George Muller opened his heart and home. Sustained by God's provision, the Muller house "Breakfast Club" of thirty orphans g...

John Newton's life was in a downward spiral. Impressed into the Royal Navy, John clashed with his fellow seamen and even became a servant alongside slaves in West Africa. When he found himself on a sinking ship, he called out to God for help.John began his conversion to Christianity while he captained a slave ship. Eventually he gave up his former life completely and became a minister with a deep passion for the gospel. A living witness to God's ability to change hearts, John joine...

The icy Arctic cold stabbed at Wilfred's fingers and toes. A howling wind was pushing the ice pan he was stranded on out to sea - and with it hope of rescue. His clothed, soaked when his dogsled fell through the ice, were now frozen. Lying near his sled dog for warmth, Wilfred fought off sleep, knowing he might never wake up.Adventurous Wilfred Grenfell was no stranger to danger. As a new Christian, this English doctor ministered to fishermen on the deadly North Sea. And w...

With the favor William's father enjoyed in Britain's royal court, all William had to do was show himself to be a faithful royalist, and wealth and privilege would be his. Instead he chose to follow his conscience--to expulsion from university, disinheritance, imprisonment, and the threat of death.In a world where freedoms were subject to the whims of rulers, William Penn worked passionately for religious tolerance. When this Quaker reformer secured a land grant in America, he laid ...

William shivered and his teeth chattered. Out on the water it was bone-chillingly cold. He could no longer feel his toes, and the spray splashing over the side of the shallop left a glaze of ice on his jacket. If the cold kept up much longer, William feared that the weather might accomplish what the Indians had tried to do—kill them all.Growing up in a small town in England, William Bradford lived during a time of upheaval and opportunity. Together with a group of Separati...

Once timid and unsure of her own salvation, New Zealander Florence Young rose to her calling and became a fearless and faithful witness for Jesus Christ. Eventually serving in the remote Solomon Islands and, for a season, in China during the deadly Boxer Rebellion, Florence began her service close to home. This one woman's mission to the Solomon Islanders, or Kanakas, working on her family's Australian plantation soon expanded to their home islands. There, as Florence and others helped Kan...

Missionary trio Mildred Cable and Evangeline and Franscesca French were the first Englishwomen to cross the infamous Gobi Desert, living for years among the diverse peoples of northwestern China in places few Europeans ever reached.Educated and rich, Mildred Cable once planned to be a concert pianist. Instead she served the people of China through wars and revolutions. Whether speaking the truth to a brutal general who held her prisoner, educating generations of Chinese girls, buil...

Questions. Questions. Questions. That was how Tom worked--always thinking, always asking questions, until he arrived at a deep understanding or insight that he could use to develop some new invention. As far back as he could remember, Tom had always been asking questions, even as a small boy back in Milan, Ohio.With only three months of formal education, Thomas Edison grew up to be one of the most successful inventors of all time. Applying scientific principles to practica...

Betsy felt her heart lurch. Just over a mile from where she stood, women and children existed in conditions more deplorable than the slums she routinely visited. Why hadn't she investigated this before? Without a second thought, she said, "Something must be done immediately for those poor, suffering children. I will go to them tomorrow."Exposed to the horrendous living conditions of women prisoners and their children, Elizabeth Fry pledged to improve the lives of society's...

In the gloom of the ship’s oil lights, Ernest saw that the blizzard had broken up the ice plain. Huge, jagged ice slabs jutted into the air around the Endurance, jostling and scraping together. Great drifts of windblown snow had piled up behind them. Alone in the polar darkness, on a ship coated and locked in ice, the explorers waited.As adventurers from around the world raced to reach the South Pole and achieve other polar firsts in the early 1900s, outsider Ernest Shackl...

The mainsail cracked above them in the ferocious wind as a group of red-faced men descended on John. "You have brought a curse on us. Overboard with you," one of the men yelled. A chorus of cheers went up. It was the last sound John heard before he was dumped over the side of the ship and engulfed by the dark, roiling ocean."Thrown overboard, enslaved by the Turks, captured by pirates, rescued by a princess-the story of Englishman John Smith (1580-1631) would seem unbelievable were...