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Spring will come to life at the Dallas Arboretum’s Dallas Blooms: Birds in Paradise from February 19 to April 10, 2022. Named by Southern Living as one of “The Best Places to See Stunning Spring Blooms Across the South,” Dallas Blooms is the largest annual floral festival in the Southwest. Presented by Veritex Community Bank, Dallas Blooms will feature larger-than-life peacock topiaries along with more than 500,000 spring blooming bulbs to create the largest and most colorful floral display in the Southwest. An explosion of spring flowers comes from 100 varieties of spring bulbs, thousands of azaleas and hundreds of Japanese cherry trees.

January may be best known for resolutions, new beginnings and snowy weather. But there’s plenty of other trivia tidbits that make the first month of the year stand out.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the most influential figures of the 21st century. King’s tireless activism during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s improved the lives of millions of people, and his tragic assassination on April 4, 1968, marked one of the darkest days in American history.

Is the COVID-19-related payment suspension (also known as a forbearance) on your home loan ending? Ready to resume making mortgage payments? Understanding your options and being proactive can help ensure a smooth process, say experts.

Blowing out 18 candles on your birthday cake is a huge milestone. It happens in an instant. You are an adult! As such, you can vote and get married. You can serve in the military, get a tattoo, go to a casino, donate blood and get called for jury duty. You can even win the lottery (because you are finally old enough to buy a ticket).

A recreational vehicle, also known as an RV or a camper, can be a worthwhile investment for people who want to travel at their leisure. RVs offer the benefit of traversing the open road without having to sacrifice the comforts of home.

The early morning sun shelters behind the Rocky Mountains, and it’s not until you reach Wyoming that it’s up full. Seeing America by car has re-emerged. Perhaps pent-up travelers want to move about with no schedules and restraints. In doing so, you discover things that can’t be seen from 30,000 feet. It is time for the classic American road trip — a journey that so often reminds us that despite our differences, we are family.

Pain occurs for a variety of reasons. Pain may be a byproduct of overuse of a particular part of the body, or it could signal an underlying illness or condition. Sometimes injury is at the heart of aches and pains.

A friend of mine was taking a trip recently, to Paris, no less. Alex, my friend, had this odd premonition moments before his flight was supposed to take off. He suddenly saw something in his mind, with extreme and frightening clarity. “This plane is going to crash,” he blurted out, as the last of the passengers, weary from the long security screenings, stumbled onto the plane. Both Alex and his traveling friends, who were attempting to calm him down as his anxiety skyrocketed, were asked to leave the plane. That’s my nice way of saying all seven of them were escorted off. As they were being rather forcefully directed to those rooms beyond the TSA screening areas, the ones we all hope we never see, the airport was shaken severely as the plane Alex & company had just left exploded upon takeoff, becoming nothing more than a giant fireball in the sky. Astonishingly, Alex’s vision had allowed them to cheat death. But, soon, Alex tells me, things weren’t so peachy in the land of miracles. See, one by one, my friend’s other friends began to experience an extreme rash of horrifying accidents. It seems that the grim reaper does not suffer the premonitions of fools lightly. Sometimes, things are just meant to happen. Okay, I don’t have a friend named Alex. If you’re a scary movie aficionado, you probably caught on to the innuendo in the first sentence or two. This is the plot from one of 2000’s top grossing movies. “Final Destination” earned over $112 million dollars worldwide and spawned 5 sequels, the most recent of which is due to be released in 2022. It is also the theme of my Christmas season this year. Things just did not go according to plan in the weirdest ways. Just wait until you hear what happened.

Who wants to go to Heaven? I have never met a person who does not want to go to Heaven when their life is over. Jesus said that many are called but few are chosen. My own thoughts about that are, Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. I think that means that the whole is actually called, but who are the few that are chosen? A crude example could be that when 100 people hear the gospel preached and only 5 believe the message and accept Jesus as their personal savior, those are the ones who are chosen. It has been said before that the gospel can be summed up into one word and that word is “guilty”. The bible says that there is not a single person on earth that does not commit sin and there is not a single thing that humans can do to get rid of their sins. The sins that unsaved people commit are in their soul. The Bible says that the soul that sins will die. The problem is that even when a lost person dies, that is not enough to pay the sin debt. When a lost person goes into hell the fire burns inside in the soul where the sin is. The fire does not burn up the person but burns for eternity. Jesus said that is where the soul does not die and the fire is not quenched. By human standard there are many “good” people who will not accept Jesus or listen to the gospel. They are the ones who will cry and gnash their teeth when GOD pronounces their final judgment.

Before we look at what my friends had to say about hope, consider this newspaper ad: “Hope chest: Brand new, half price, long story.”

As more people test positive for COVID-19 and hospitalizations climb amid a new wave of coronavirus cases fueled by the omicron variant, Gov. Greg Abbott asked the federal government Friday to open additional testing sites in some of the state’s most populous counties and send new shipments of monoclonal antibody treatments.

The City of Forney is seeking organizations interested in participating in the city’s court ordered community service program. In some circumstances, community service is offered to satisfy court-ordered fines, costs, and fees if residents are unable to pay due to financial hardship.