Articles

1. LaMeice Harding tells it straight.

AS A GIRL OF EIGHT OR NINE YEARS OLD , I remember walking home in the dark one summer night with my dad. Earlier I had gone to the little brick library near the entrance to our rural road.

AFTER THE DEATH OF A FRIEND in seventh grade, I carried around a feeling of sadness and guilt. I felt that I had made mistakes and let people down, and hadn't always been the friend I could have been.

A few months after the school year started at my boarding school, I had an ear problem. One night I noticed a buzzing of some sort in my left ear when I went to sleep.

YOU'D THINK AFTER BEING HEALED OF A LIFE-THREATENING DISEASE , my great-grandmother on my father's side, Mimi, would have become a devoted student of Christian Science. But the way she told it, she was "ungrateful.

Shortly after my first wife and I got married, we lived in a somewhat rough neighborhood of Brooklyn. One night, while walking home from a movie at a local college campus, we witnessed a mugging in process.

THE PSALMIST DAVID WROTE , "Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man" ( ps. 140:1 ).

Hand-held protection devices. This is the defense that many of my fellow South Africans are seeking in reaction to the surge of crime in our country.

IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES that can come from really living this understanding of wholeness. MY RELIGION PROFESSOR'S THOUGHT-PROVOKING perspective on Jesus' parable of the lost sheep made me think.

NEVER BEFORE had I seen strangers, like the Samaritan, so eager to help others in times of need. THE BOOK OF LUKE says that a certain lawyer tested Jesus, asking, "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" When Jesus threw the question back to him and asked the man what he thought the answer might be, the lawyer responded by saying that Jewish law stated, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind; and thy soul and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.