Signs & Wonders Blog

Carolyn Mae Tweiten was born on March 28, 1946. She was the second of five children who grew up in a carpenter’s family in Fargo, North Dakota. In 1963 at the age of 17, Carolyn married Richard Post and gave birth to me the following year. My sister Tanya followed a couple of years later. Because Mom loved animals, there were often one or two dogs plus an occasional cat in the household. She was also a teddy bear fanatic. That made it easy to pick out gifts for Christmas and her birthday. Carolyn had grown up with a violent alcoholic father. Therefore, she did her best to make sure Tanya and I had a stable environment at home. Mom often played along with various games my sister and me did. A few Saturday mornings, we played school with me being the teacher. Occasionally Mom would knock on my bedroom door saying Tanya needed to be “excused from class” so she could clean her room or do something else. As we got older, Mom worked outside the house more. One of her jobs was a sa...

Sports fans in America love rooting for the underdog. Just over a year ago, the Chicago Cubs had many people pulling for them (myself included) as they won their first World Series in 108 years. Now another franchise with a reputation of losing big games has a chance of finally winning it all. It happens to be my favorite football team. The Minnesota Vikings began playing in 1961 as an NFL expansion team. Eight years later, they appeared in their first Super Bowl but lost to the Kansas City Chiefs. Three years after that, I started watching Vikings games on TV while growing up in Moorhead, Minnesota. The following season, they reached Super Bowl VIII, which was played on my tenth birthday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a Super Sunday for me as the Vikings lost to the Miami Dolphins. Nevertheless, I remained a Minnesota Vikings fan with quarterback Fran Tarkenton as my favorite player. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, I watched almost every Vikings game on TV. They consistently w...

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, I’m a traveling missionary who’s been using Facebook now for over ten years. It’s a marvelous tool to help me reconnect with old friends, meet new people and minister to them . However, there are a couple of things I don’t like about your social media site. They are serious enough to me where I’ve considered leaving Facebook completely. One of them is being forced to use Messenger if I want to send a private message through my smartphone. It often results in other Facebook friends trying to start up chat sessions with me. I liked it better when my chat room could be kept off and not let everyone know I’m online. I’ve had to use the “block messages” function with individuals who persist in initiating conversations with me. I don’t want to be rude but maintain boundaries and limit distractions. Some of my friends won’t even use Messenger because of privacy concerns .  Another intrusive feature I loathe even more is Facebook groups. Since 2010, fri...

An old Jan & Dean hit featured the repeated lyric: “Two girls for every boy.” Some men think it’s cool to date multiple women at once. When I was in high school, my popularity increased after landing a job at a roller rink. I quickly compiled a list of girlfriends to call. One of them made it clear she didn’t want to be part of anyone’s harem. I really liked this girl and decided to go steady with her but broke off the relationship after a few days. At the time I missed the freedom of seeing other women. Years later after becoming a Christian, I started desiring to be married. God designed men and women to be monogamous. Jesus repeated a commandment from Genesis in Matthew 19:6, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Two women and one man (or vice versa) cannot become one flesh. That’s like trying to plug an electric cord into two sockets at the same time.  The Bible has accounts of men...