Poor Josh Hamilton. He was such an inspiring story.

I checked my email this morning as soon as I turned off the alarm on my BlackBerry. Lying there in bed blinking the sleep from my eyes I stared at a headline: Baseball MVP Josh Hamilton Suffers Addiction Relapse. The 30-year-old slugger for the Texas Rangers took a drink in a Dallas bar before a teammate ushered him out. Hamilton reported the incident to Rangers management the next day.

I’m staring out my office window at the skyline of Manhattan, which is draped in fog and drizzle. A few minutes ago the rain was coming down in torrents. Arguments about climate change aside, it is passing strange that we keep having these 60-degree days in January. It’s not supposed to work like that. This is more like April than the dead of winter, but without the extra sunlight. Warm and dark and dank.

A fellow football fan sent me a cartoon the other day. It showed a downtrodden player speaking to the media: “First I’d like to blame the Lord for our defeat ...”

Isn’t it consistent, my friend teased, that if Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, a devout Christian, thanked the Lord for victories, players should also blame heaven for their losses?

“If you want a friend in Washington,” Harry Truman famously snarled, “get a dog!”

Old Harry wasn’t kidding. He had two for good measure: Feller, a cocker spaniel, and Mike, an Irish setter (more about Irish setters later). In fact, the vast majority of U.S. Presidents have been dog owners, and every president in the twentieth century has owned at least one dog (Calvin Coolidge seems to hold the record at 11). In fact, the family dog has been credited with saving several political careers from ruin.

You never know when—or how—inspiration will hit. 

For instance this year I decided that I’d had it with New Year’s resolutions. I was sick of making lists and forgetting about them or worse, unearthing them later in the year and realizing how completely I’d failed. I’m not sure how I came to this conclusion—perhaps it was just the accretion of failure—but I was determined to stick with it. Besides, were there any resolutions I hadn’t already tackled at one time or another?

Wow, what a year, one of those years that seemed to last forever but was over before it started. Does that make sense? Not really. But that’s the way it feels.

Imagine your child or grandchild waking up in a hospital room alone on Christmas morning.

Everybody loves end-of-year lists, me included. So once again, our editors chose the 10 most inspirational stories that appeared in Guideposts in the past year.

It wasn’t easy. We published literally hundreds of stories this year. Still, some linger in our memories. The story I loved most in 2011 was ...

Wait! I can’t do that! Really, how can I have a favorite?

You never know who you are going to meet in the back of a New York City taxi cab. Today, in fact, I met several inspiring celebrities.

Have any of you ridden in a New York City cab lately? For a couple of years now, all the cabs have been outfitted with interactive TVs that give you news, sports, weather, entertainment and, naturally, commercials (to pay for all those new TVs).

New York, Portland, Atlanta, Nashville, Jacksonville, Birmingham, New York, Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York…..

It’s December, and I feel like I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath all 2011; it’s been that sort of year. When I agreed to work on a book for Guideposts a few years ago I knew the writing would take a lot out of me, particularly writing a book as personal and self-revealing as mine. But nobody really explained the promoting-the-book part. The part where I turn into a ping-pong ball.