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For the first time in five months in Australia, Mark King had money in his pocket and nowhere he had to be. The cattle season was over. After the final roundup, one of the family drove Mark back to Perth. They had treated the 13-year-old American warmly, and
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For several days, the station had been getting ready. The shearing shed, quiet for much of the year, was swept and cleared. Equipment was checked, extra food laid in, sleeping space prepared, and sheep gathered near the shed. Thirteen-year-old Mark King pitched in wherever another pair of hands
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Light filtered through the window well before the 5:09 sunrise, announcing another long summer day. Even after supper, the sun would still be hanging above the western horizon. It was Christmas Day. For someone raised in the northern United States, almost everything about that sentence feels wrong. Christmas belongs
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When I was young, I fell in love with a dark blue 1930 Ford Model A Coupe with a rumble seat. It took nine loads to bring the parts home and another nine months before it became a car again. In Southern California, where freeways ruled the landscape, it barely
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Sometimes God chooses the most ordinary day to begin His greatest work. For my father, Mark King, one such day began in December 1939. At thirteen, Mark had recently arrived on a sheep station in the hills east of Perth, Western Australia. To Mark it was an adventure. To the
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Sometimes you reach a place in life where you quietly wonder whether you've made the right decision. Thirteen-year-old Mark King wondered exactly that as the Australian coastline slowly rose from the Indian Ocean. Behind him lay nearly a month at sea caring for 20 cattle and
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If you've ever found yourself completely out of your depth, you'll understand something of what my father, 13-year-old Robert Mark King, was about to experience. Most of us eventually find ourselves in places we never expected—a diagnosis, a loss, or simply a season
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The valley revealed itself a little at a time. Just beyond the eastern entrance to Yellowstone, the North Fork of the Shoshone River wandered beneath cottonwoods leaning over its banks. Meadows opened into forests of pine and fir while mountains rose until they seemed to surround the valley itself. Morning
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One of the hardest things about life is that we rarely recognize an important season while we're living it. We assume the turning points are the dramatic moments—the bus ticket, the big move, the new opportunity. Looking back, I suspect God often works differently. He prepares us
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One of the hardest parts of faith is that God rarely shows us the whole road. Instead, He asks us to trust Him with the next step and discover the rest along the way. Just two days after his 13th birthday, Robert Mark King stepped off a Greyhound bus in
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Most of us can point to a moment when life asked us a difficult question. Sometimes it comes in adolescence. Sometimes much later. We suddenly find ourselves standing between the life we know and a future we cannot yet see. I think God often uses those moments to reveal who
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Most of us can remember a moment when life changed direction without asking our permission—a move, a loss, or a decision someone else made that altered the course of our lives. Some remember it as the child who was hurt. Others as the parent. Many have been both. By