A January evening on our farm in rural Saskatchewan. Snow banks piled high against the house, faintly glowing in the moonlight.

Time to tuck in my nine-year-old son, Ryan. He was just finishing his prayers as I stepped into his room. “God, please help me have my own ice rink,” he whispered. That same prayer again—the same prayer every night for almost two months.

Like most boys in Canada, Ryan loved to play hockey, but the closest rink was 24 miles away. There was no way he could play. I didn’t blame him for wanting a rink of his own, but I worried his young faith would be shaken as his prayers continued to go unanswered. Ice rinks don’t just appear out of thin air.

What could we do? “Our well doesn’t have enough water to make a rink,” my husband, Ken, told me, shaking his head sadly. “Besides, we don’t have the equipment to build one.” Like Ryan, I could only close my eyes and pray. Please don’t let his faith be hurt by this.

The weeks went by and Ryan’s prayer continued. So did mine. Meanwhile, the weather warmed up, unusual for that time of year. We enjoyed spending time outside, making snowmen. But gradually the snow banks melted and flooded our yard. I looked outside one day to find our garden had turned into a muddy pool.

That night a cold front moved in. The wind howled. We tucked ourselves beneath our quilts. The next morning I was still groggy when Ryan came running to me. “Mom, come look!” he shouted. He grabbed my arm and pulled me outside.

There, in the garden, the pool of water had frozen solid overnight—the perfect size of an ice rink. The only time in the 28 years that we’ve lived here it ever happened. The answer to Ryan’s prayers—and mine.

Download your FREE ebook, A Prayer for Every Need, by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

Twenty-six years in law enforcement and I never had to use my gun. That’s the way it should be. That’s the way I always hoped it would be.

Like I tell graduating cadets at the police academy: “The most important people in your career are the ones who love you, the ones who helped you get here today. Your job is to go home to them every evening. Don’t get yourself into anything you can’t get out of and stay safe for the ones you love.”

Well, it doesn’t always work out that way, as I learned one chilly afternoon last December at the school district headquarters in Bay County, where I’m head of the school police department.

December 14 was supposed to be a vacation day for me. I’d taken off the last week and a half before Christmas to get ready for a toy giveaway program I help run in town. The day before, weather reports had showed a big cold front moving in.

The superintendent had asked me to work one more day to make sure that all of the district’s buildings were prepped for the freeze (we don’t get a lot of cold weather down here on the panhandle).

I spent the morning driving around to schools checking on pipes. That afternoon I was at the district office. Four floors below me the school board was meeting in the ground floor boardroom. My cell phone rang.

“Mike,” said a female voice I didn’t immediately recognize, “there’s someone with a gun in the boardroom and we can’t tell if it’s real or fake. Please get down here!” She hung up.

Training overrode my shock. I raced down the stairs. It can’t have taken more than a minute to get down to the ground floor but suddenly I felt like time had stopped and I was running through a tunnel.

My heart beat fast, my muscles tensed. I saw in a flash all my years as a police officer.

My dad had been an auxiliary policeman and my uncle had worked for highway patrol. Straight out of high school I’d worked odd jobs till I could afford the academy. I’d joined the Panama City department the day I graduated.

I’d seen it all and worked every beat from patrolman to sergeant to homicide detective. I’d retired, then come back for more with the school district after a stint on the school board.

I’d fired my gun plenty of times in my career—at the shooting range. Mostly I’d learned how to stay true to that advice I gave to new recruits. I kept safe. I talked shooters into putting down their guns. I never did anything rash, never tried to be a foolish hero.

For over 20 years I’d come home every night to my wife Colleen. I’d never had to ask God whether I’d done the right thing shooting someone. I’d never felt the dread I was feeling now. Please, Lord, keep us safe.

The boardroom was behind a pair of double doors just down the hall from the building’s main entrance. I wasn’t wearing a police uniform—as an administrator I rarely do—but I did have a small .38-caliber pistol in a holster clipped to my khaki trousers. I drew the gun and cracked open one of the doors.

Straight ahead, past rows of upholstered seats with room for about 150 people, sat six members of the school board at a long desk.

Ginger Littleton, the only woman on the board, wasn’t there. The rest of the room was empty except for a tall, heavyset man in a dark sweatshirt, jeans and tennis shoes pacing around in front of the board members.

The man carried a large automatic pistol in his right hand.

Right away I knew this was a hostage situation. The man for some unknown reason was holding the board at gunpoint. He’d told everyone else, including spectators and all the women in the room, to leave.

There might not be enough time to keep this guy talking until the SWAT team arrived, which is one way of dealing with a hostage-taker. And my little .38-caliber pistol was no match for that man’s automatic.

I had five shots. This guy would riddle everyone in the boardroom with bullets before I could empty my chamber.

There was only one thing to do. I had to get to my car parked a few hundred feet away and grab my automatic pistol and bulletproof vest, which I kept in a lockbox in the back hatch.

I would have to confront this man. I would have to put myself between him and the board members.

“Sir,” I called to him. I wanted him to know I was there before I ducked away. “How you doing?”

The man turned. “Oh, one of the cops,” he said—my parka had the word Police on it. I tried to get a glimpse of his face. Was he deranged? Angry? He didn’t look scared at all.

“No, I’m just a school safety officer,” I told him. “You got a real gun there?” The man began walking toward me.

“Come on in,” he said. He sounded aggressive, not one bit afraid. I closed the door and sprinted to my Ford Explorer. I yanked out my gun and threw the bulletproof vest over my parka, not even bothering to cinch it shut.

I raced back to the boardroom, hoping against hope that my brief exchange with the man had bought the board members some time.

The moment I opened the door I heard a shot. The man stood directly in front of the board members, pointing his gun at the superintendent, Bill Husfelt.

Bill’s body jerked back. The other board members dove behind the desk. I was too late!

The man fired again. I stepped into the room, raised my weapon, aimed and squeezed the trigger. The man stumbled forward.

I shot him again. The man fell to the floor with a grunt. I stepped farther into the room, hoping that now that he was wounded the man would surrender.

His arm jerked up and he fired at me. Shot after shot. I dove behind a row of seats and returned fire over the seat-top, trying to keep the man pinned down.

The world seemed to close in even more. I heard nothing but the popping of the bullets. Everything was by instinct.

The firing stopped. Cautiously I raised my head. The man was on the ground, his gun pointed at his own head. Before I could do or say anything the man pulled the trigger. He died instantly.

Bill. I raced to the shooter’s body to make sure he was dead. I grabbed his gun and flung it away. One by one the board members’ heads lifted from behind their desk.

Then Bill’s head rose up. He stood. He was alive! Oh, Lord, I’m either dead and in heaven or Bill and everyone else really did make it, I thought.

“I’m alive, Mike,” said Bill. “I’m alive.”

“Everyone else okay?” I choked.

“We’re okay!” they cried.

At that moment the tunnel that had closed in around me widened and suddenly I was back in normal time, back in the world. Between us, we’d fired 18 rounds in 13 seconds.

I fell to my knees and the full impact of everything that had just happened slammed into me and I burst out crying. The board members staggered out from behind their desk and we all just stared at each other.

Then we looked at the man lying on the floor. Behind Bill’s seat two bullet holes marked the wall—somehow the man’s bullets had ricocheted off the desk and lodged there, missing Bill by inches.

Six more holes scarred a wall at the back of the room—they formed a perfect circle, exactly where my head had been just seconds before I dove behind the seats. If I’d waited even one more instant, I would not have gone home to Colleen. I would not have lived.

Minutes later the SWAT team arrived. Paramedics tended to me, and before I knew it I was being loaded into an ambulance. My heart was going 188 beats a minute. They ended up having to sedate me to bring the rate down.

When I came to in the hospital, Colleen was there at my bedside. It was night. By the grace of God I was alive and with my wife.

It’s been a year since that harrowing December afternoon. I’ve been on TV to talk about the shooting many times and given lots of speeches. I always give thanks for God’s protection, but I do not in any way celebrate that day.

The man I shot was not just some crime statistic. His name was Clay Duke. He was in the boardroom that day because his wife, a schoolteacher, had recently been laid off in a round of budget cuts.

He was a troubled man with a criminal record and extremist views. Still, he was a human being and I do not believe that God ever intends for people’s lives to end in tragedy.

I know God was present in that boardroom that day and I pray that he ministered to Clay Duke’s troubled soul.

I believe that serving in law enforcement is one of the most solemn trusts a person can be given. Police officers have the power to save lives and to take life.

And so even after being called a hero for protecting the Bay County school board, I still give my same advice to new recruits. It’s the ones we love who mean the most.

We honor them and we honor God when we remember that and do everything we can to come home safe at the end of every day.

Download your FREE ebook, The Power of Hope: 7 Inspirational Stories of People Rediscovering Faith, Hope and Love.

“Manuel…Manuel, wake up. The baby’s coming.” I lifted my head from the pillow and opened my eyes. The dark bedroom slowly came into focus. I could just make out the anxious look on my wife Maria’s face. She brought her hands to her round stomach, where our baby girl, Siara, waited to enter the world. “She’s ready. I can feel it. Today is the day.” I threw off the covers and got dressed. Today is the day, November 27.

Only a year earlier, my son Manuel III had called me while I was at my carpentry job. “Dad, Mom is in the hospital,” he said. “They said she had a miscarriage.” Maria didn’t even know she was pregnant. That made it all the more devastating. We had three teenagers, Manuel, Danny and Cherissa, but another child would’ve been a blessing.

Maria spent hours praying to find some way to move on. Our pastor, our relatives and friends made us meals, helped take care of our kids and sent their prayers. A community of faith got us through. Just like it had when I was a boy.

We lived in Los Angeles, moving from one bad neighborhood to the next. Both my parents had problems with drugs and alcohol. But things began to change when I was 14. My mother was sentenced to a live-in Christian rehabilitation program in Hemet, California. Living there, I learned about faith. These people believed my mother could be helped. They believed I had a future.

I met Maria in Hemet, at a neighbor’s Quinceañera, a coming-of-age celebration for a girl’s 15th birthday. Maria stayed with me despite the mistakes I made over the years. Because of the way I grew up, I didn’t know how to be a husband, how to be a father and how to live a life. But once I trusted God to show me, he didn’t steer me wrong. I had faith that he would find some way to replace our loss.

When we learned Maria was pregnant again after the miscarriage, we were overjoyed, but cautious. Maria is a diabetic, so she was on a strictly controlled diet. The doctors planned to induce labor. I had walkie-talkies so we would be able to communicate with the kids from the delivery room. At Maria’s baby shower all of her friends said blessings over the baby.

It took us six minutes to get to the hospital. “Her contractions are still far apart,” the nurse said. “We have time.” They admitted Maria to the labor room and our kids took turns visiting her.

The contractions came more frequently. Maria grimaced with each one. “I can feel her moving inside of me.” They wheeled her into the delivery room.

“We’re going to induce labor,” the doctor said. “Now.” They broke her water. Suddenly one of the monitors started beeping. The doctor looked up, and the color drained from his face. “Get the crash team,” he shouted. Then, “Code Blue!” More nurses rushed into the room. There were about 20 people now, some around the bed, others setting up a table.

“Okay, Maria,” the doctor said, his voice calm but urgent. “We need you to make this happen now. Push!”

Maria closed her eyes and pushed. A nurse rushed to the doctor’s side, pushing a steel cart carrying different instruments. I stared at my wife’s face, twisted in pain, her teeth gritted. She was trying so hard. I’m pushing with you, Maria. Push! Finally, I saw my daughter’s head poke through. She was blue; she wasn’t moving. They pulled her out, cut the umbilical cord and beelined to the table they’d set up. Why isn’t she crying? A baby is supposed to cry.…

“What’s wrong?” Maria cried weakly. The nurse looked at her through tear-filled eyes. “Pray, Maria. Just pray.”

The emergency team worked frantically. I heard snippets of clipped replies, “no sign of life,” “compressed cord in the birth canal,” “no heartbeat.” They slid a breathing tube down my tiny daughter’s throat. The doctor began gentle compressions on her chest.

Never before had I felt so helpless. I unclipped the walkie-talkie from my belt and called Manuel. I tried to steady my shaky voice. “There are some complications with the baby. You must pray.”

“I will, Dad,” he said. He then told our pastor, who was waiting with him.

I looked at Maria, drenched in sweat. I held her hand lightly and rubbed her shoulder. On the other side of the room, the doctor continued to work. “Zero,” a nurse called out, recording the readings off one of the monitors. Maria and I couldn’t take our eyes off our daughter. Her hair was dark and curly and wet. “I felt her flutter inside of me,” Maria said. “She was alive.” The doctor kept at it. A few more minutes ticked by. The nurse checked the vitals once more.

“Zero,” she said, a flat, hollow sadness to her voice.

The doctor slumped over the table. They removed the breathing tube. The doctor stepped away. “Are you going to call it?” a nurse asked him. He dropped his head. “Yes. We’ve done all we can.”

Maria’s face fell. I held her tight. Lord, no! My wife can’t go home without her baby! All the pain we’d gone through a year ago came flooding back. Most of the staff filed out of the room. Only the doctor and one of the nurses remained.

Suddenly, I was overcome by a strong feeling. An overpowering feeling. Something that was so certain it drove me across the room to the table where Siara lay. I thought about all the prayers we had said. How much God knew we wanted her. No, she could not die.

I went up to my baby and leaned over her. I prayed more intensely than I have in my entire life. Lord, you have never failed. I put my hands on Siara. You raised Lazarus from the dead. Give my daughter your breath of life. I kissed Siara on the forehead.

“Would you like to hold her?” the nurse asked Maria. She nodded weakly. The nurse came over and swaddled Siara in a soft blanket then took her over, laid our baby across Maria’s chest and backed away.

Maria caressed Siara’s tiny face. “Wake up, please,” she said. “You have to fight little one.” She took the baby’s tiny hand and rubbed it against her own cheek. “God, you have to finish what you started.”

Maria wiped away some spittle that had formed on the baby’s lips. Then her eyes went wide. “She’s breathing!” Maria cried out. My heart jumped. Was it possible?

The nurse shook her head. “No, sweetie,” she said sadly. “That’s just the oxygen we pumped into her being expelled.”

Maria’s doctor took his stethoscope and placed it on the baby’s chest. “I don’t believe it! Call Code Blue again!”

A slight pink began to bloom across Siara’s chest. “We’re going to take her to the nursery,” the doctor said. “We’re still working to stabilize her.”

Alone in the room, Maria and I cried together. Tears of joy at what we’d just witnessed. The nurses went back and forth to give us updates. “She has a steady heartbeat. She curled her lip and moved her left arm. These are very good signs.” I radioed my son in the waiting room the good news and he told our pastor. “She’s alive,” I said. The praying continued all through that day and that night, until she was out of danger.

With such a traumatic birth, the doctor was worried about brain and heart damage. She suffered some seizures the first days. But her heartbeat was strong and she didn’t show any signs of being disabled. On December 8 we finally brought Siara home. An early Christmas present. “I can’t explain it,” the doctor said. “Siara is a miracle.”

Today, when I hold my rosy-cheeked, giggling child in my arms, I realize that Siara is a link in a chain of miracles. From the second we heard the silence where cries should have been, despair threatened to make us give up. That same despair that chased my family from neighborhood to neighborhood growing up. That same despair that hit us after the miscarriage. But like those times and so many more in my life, faith replaced despair with hope. We never lost that hope. And that’s a miracle too. The miracle of faith.

A thousand feet. Just over three football fields lined up end to end. But at 28,000 feet above sea level—an altitude climbers call the “death zone”—a single step can require an exhausting effort, even when breathing supplemental oxygen, which I was.

I prayed nothing would go wrong with my equipment on this final, solo push to the summit. Without gas the climb would be almost impossible.

There are very few places on earth where a man can stand at 28,000 feet. Mount Everest is one. It was where I stood that May night last year under the brilliance of a full moon, in my quest to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents.

Of course, Everest was the highest mountain of all, and by far the deadliest of the seven summits.

I checked my watch: 2:30 A.M. It would take all night to reach the top and half of the next morning to get back down. And I’d have to do it alone. Not what I’d planned. And not what I’d promised my wife, JoAnna, back home in Snoqualmie, Washington.

“I’ll have a Sherpa guide the whole time,” I’d said.

Himalayan Sherpas are legendary for their experience and endurance, and I’d engaged a good one for this climb, named Pasang Temba. He’d already summited the mountain three times.

“I’m going to pray for you anyway,” she said. “Constantly. I won’t stop.”

Now I needed those prayers more than my wife could possibly know.

First my climbing partner, Dennis Broadwell, was hit with stomach problems. He was slowly recovering in his tent back at Camp II. Then Pasang got sick.

I thought long and hard about continuing, especially after I might have damaged my goggles. I’d never intended to climb Mount Everest solo.

The risks were much more magnified. A lot of factors were in play—the weather, the conditions, how I felt. I decided to go for it.

Conditions were good—for the next eight or nine hours, anyway. After that you never know. On Everest weather kills more people than anything else. I reminded myself of the reason I’d undertaken this challenge: to raise money for AIDS research.

I tightened my crampons, checked my radio, double-checked the location of the extra oxygen canister Pasang had stashed for me (I’d need it on the way down), and set off up the ropes to the top of the world.

As I did, an image of JoAnna flashed through my mind, her eyes closed in prayer. I recalled our last night together before I left for Nepal two months earlier.

“I’m worried about you, Brian,” she said, clutching me tight.

“Don’t be,” I said gently, listing the reasons I’d return to her and our two young children safe and sound. “I promise I won’t take any foolish chances. You know me better than that.”

I rechecked my equipment, then headed off, my focus toward the top, one slow step at a time. Only a thousand vertical feet. So close….

I felt myself fall into a rhythm, slow and steady. The climbing was hard but not technically difficult. The moon was so huge and close, like a great inflated orb, that the jagged spine of the Himalayas seemed in danger of tearing a hole in it.

Stars punctuated the sky. What a beautiful night it was! I didn’t want this fear and apprehension to ruin it. The wind was baying softly, not screaming as it so often does this close to the jet stream.

Wow, I’m the highest person in the world right now, I thought. Enjoy this moment.

Soon I reached the only real technical challenge on the south approach to the summit: the storied Hillary Step, probably the most celebrated pitch in all of mountaineering.

Named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealand beekeeper who was the first to conquer Everest in 1953, its 40-foot high, near-vertical, ice-encrusted rock face would at sea level be a quick training exercise.

At above 28,000 feet it is a life-or-death obstacle. And I was doing it alone in the dark. Now let’s see what kind of a climber you really are, I thought.

I checked my harness and carabiners then started up the step guided by the beam from my headlamp. By the time I reached the top of the cliff I was monitoring my oxygen.

I lay in the snow feeling the frantic pounding of my heart through my layers of clothing. I was sweating furiously though the temperature was well below zero. Human beings don’t belong up here, I thought as my respiration and pulse returned to what is considered normal at this height.

I gazed up at the shadowy bulge above. The summit. All that separated me from the final slope was a horribly exposed fin of serrated ice and rock several hundred feet in length with sheer drop-offs on either side.

I clutched the rope and headed across, one foot in front of the other. If I had sat down and straddled the ridge I would have had one leg dangling in Nepal and the other in Tibet, thousands of feet straight down.

Nobody ever finds bodies that fall from here, I couldn’t help thinking.

Finally I made the slope and headed for the top. At 6:30 A.M., with a blinding sun spilling across the vast Tibetan plain, I stood on the roof of the world.

I pulled on my sun goggles and radioed down to Camp III. In a voice hoarse with exhaustion and emotion I announced that I’d made it. They roared their congratulations.

“Way to go, Brian!” I heard Dennis croak above the staticky din.

Kaleidoscopic strings of prayer flags left by earlier summiters snapped wildly in the wind. Yanking off my goggles, I extracted my camera from inside my climbing suit and snapped panoramic pictures all the way to China. I was up there for almost an hour.

It was getting late. I had to get off the summit before apoxia and hypothermia set in. Finally I put away my camera and commenced the descent. I glanced below me and saw…nothing. Oh, no… I was snow-blind.

And then I realized: When I’d dropped my goggles the day before, the internal lens had cracked. They were almost useless. Without my goggles for protection, I’d exposed my eyes to the blazing sunlight and effectively sunburnt my corneas. It would be 48 hours of agony before I would see normally again.

I thought about that knife-edge ridge and the four-story Hillary Step to be negotiated. A feeling of doom crept over me. Lord, no…

I grasped for my radio, but there was no way I could call for help. When I had turned it off, my frozen fingers fumbled with the switch, changing the frequency. Without sight, I couldn’t possibly find the right setting.

Don’t panic, I thought. If you panic up here, you die for sure. I calmed myself, recalling my US Naval Aviation Rescue Swimmer Training.

There, daily I was in an oxygen-less environment, where it felt like I was drowning. I’d made it through that. I can do this now, I thought.

Squinting, I could just make out blurs. One step at a time, I told myself. I felt for the rope. Got it! I clipped in and inched my way along.

Now I had another worry. My oxygen canister only held about six hours of air. At the rate I was moving I’d probably run out before I reached the canister Pasang had stashed. How would I ever find it blind?

I forced myself forward, taking baby steps across the dizzying ridge, stopping every few seconds to check my balance. I arrived at the Hillary Step, 40 feet straight down. I’d have to do it blind.

I rappelled to its base, bouncing off the rock and ice all the way down. I paused to rest and wasn’t sure I’d ever get up again. I’d been 30 hours without sleep.

Concentrate, I scolded myself. I took one step, then another—and then felt a sudden snap as my boot slipped. A blurry object bounced down the face of the mountain, one of my crampons.

I took another step. “No!” I heard myself scream as I went into a free fall. I flew like a shot down 20 feet, till my safety rope drew taut. I took a deep, shuddering breath. The loose crampon had landed 15 feet above me.

I climbed back up to get it. I bent to pick it up. As I put it back on, I heard a deep, ominous sound, like some kind of prehistoric thundering herd, something so powerful it shook the mountain.

Avalanche! It felt like the earth was sliding out from under my feet. I wrapped both arms around the rope and held on for dear life.

The snow came roaring down. Somehow I kept my grip. I held on for a long time even after the tsunami of snow had passed. When I let go, I squinted at my gloves. They’d burned right through. I struggled to my feet and started down.

I checked my oxygen tank, pulling the regulator up to my eyes and angling it into the sun. My air supply was down to almost nothing. Lord, I have to get to that spare tank. I picked up my pace. It was getting harder to breathe.

There, down ahead! A cylindrical object glinted in the sun. I practically crawled to it. The oxygen canister! I unscrewed the almost empty one from my breathing apparatus then attached the full canister. I opened the valve. Nothing. No flow at all. Zero.

I tried again. Still nothing. Frantically I reattached the near-empty canister. For some inexplicable reason, I shoved the spare in my pack before moving on even though it made no sense to carry the extra weight.

I tried taking shallow breaths. Anything to preserve precious fuel. I hadn’t gone 100 yards when I felt my lungs collapsing. The tank was empty. I ripped the oxygen mask off my face. I’m suffocating!

I stood still and did the only thing I could. Lord, I prayed, I cannot do this alone. JoAnna’s image passed before me. I was certain at that very moment she was praying along with me and that our prayers were being answered. I felt an incredible peace, then…

Maybe I sensed my wife’s presence from somewhere deep inside me. Maybe I sensed God’s. All I knew was I felt infused with a strange energy.

Try reattaching the canister, I thought. Laboriously I screwed the tank back on and opened the valve once again. Oxygen hissed through the regulator!

I stood up, weak but rejuvenated. I hiked a little farther, rappelled clumsily down a steep section of the mountain and hiked some more. Ahead of me, a field of boulders started moving.

Am I hallucinating? I wondered.

I heard a voice. A man’s voice. “Brian, you’re alive!” Pasang cried.

My Sherpa grabbed and hugged me, then we staggered together the final quarter-mile to our tents.

“I have been watching the mountain for you,” he said.

I slept 15 hours. Even then, my eyes felt as if they were glued shut and my legs felt like rubber. It took another day, and the help of Dennis and our Sherpas, to get me down the mountain, low enough for my eyesight to begin to return.

That night I called JoAnna on a satellite phone. I told her the whole story, about being blind and about my last, desperate prayer.

“I was praying for you, Brian,” she told me. “I knew you were in trouble. I could sense it. I prayed harder than I ever have. It was almost as if I were there on the mountain with you.”

There was another presence with me at that desperate moment too. A presence without whom no one can do great things. I may have reached the summit of the world by the power of my climbing, but I came home safely only by the grace of God.

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