This book is a quest to recover that image in ourselves and our neighbors, to help us all become human and humane again. For christians who lament the brokenness in themselves, their neighbors, and the world around them, Whole offers a rallying cry to pursue wholeness together. We were made in the image of God.

People and places are broken all around us. We were made for better than this: We were made to be whole, and wholly human, to tend a world that is wholly humane. Look around, and you’ll notice: The world is covered with jagged edges.

Beginnings: The First Seven Days of the Rest of Your Life

It’s easy to think that God is leaving us alone in them. The good news is that the god who spoke the world into existence, who lovingly brought into being everything seen and unseen, is speaking into your big change. These big changes hit us hard—it’s easy to lose our way. By exploring the first chapter in genesis—day by day, creative act by creative act—Steve Wiens shows us how beginnings work, and how God works through our beginnings.

As god orchestrated the ultimate transition when he created everything from nothing, he can handle the overwhelming details in your life. Maybe you’ve moved; maybe you feel stuck. Have you ever found yourself at the beginning of a big life change? Maybe you’re getting married, or divorced. Drawing from the story of creation in Genesis, Beginnings offers an empowering message of how God works through the transition in our lives.

Beginnings is for everyone who faces significant transition—in career, in life stage, in relationships, whether good or bad. Maybe you’re having a child, or burying a parent. Maybe you’ve been promoted, or lost a job you loved.

Shining like the Sun: Seven Mindful Practices for Rekindling Your Faith

We can always come alive. Whether changing diapers, stuck in traffic, or enjoying a glass of wine, we can touch God in any ordinary moment. Shining like the sun offers seven mindful practices--attentiveness, rhythms, and restoration--that guide readers to wake up to God as a living reality and to come alive in their bodies, conversation, ordinariness, delight, simplicity, hearts, minds, and deep in their souls.

Through stories that illuminate each practice, simple observations, and tangible suggestions for how to embody each practice, readers will discover that God is hidden deep inside their own being. Written from a primarily christian perspective, it draws from a variety of sources from the major world religions and will appeal to anyone who wants to cultivate mindfulness to get in touch with God as a living reality.

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Coming Clean: A Story of Faith

Too often we attempt to escape our anxiety through addiction - any old addiction. Christianity today book award winner; ECPA Award FinalistBoldly honest, powerfully told, deeply moving - this is a story about finding yourself. Seth shows us that true wholeness is found in facing our pain and anxieties with the tenacity and tenderness of Jesus, and only through Christ’s passion can we truly come clean.

That evening, he asked his sister to smuggle in a bottle of gin and gave in to addiction. But whether or not you've ever had a drop to drink in your life, this book is for all who have sought ways to stop their pain. Like seth, food, career highs, the internet, shopping, unresponsive God - whether it's through people-pleasing, social media likes, we're all seeking balms for the anxiety of what sometimes seems to be an absent, or even good works and elite theology.

Seth haines' memoir holds up a mirror to all of our stories to show the peace that is possible when we release our addictions and receive the healing presence of God. Seth haines was in the hospital with his wife, planning funeral songs for their not-yet two-year-old, when he made a very conscious decision: this was the last day he wanted to feel.

But it often leaves us feeling even more empty than before. In coming clean, and even more importantly, illuminating how to face the pain we'd rather avoid, Seth Haines writes a raw account of his first 90 days of sobriety, how an abiding God meets us in that pain.

Breathing Room: Letting Go So You Can Fully Live

But she's also discovered that all of the hurt and hostility and pain only add up to a life of holding your breath. And like so many of us, she assumed she was struggling not because life is inherently difficult but because she was personally failing in some way. She knows firsthand what it is to bully yourself, to put yourself down for not being able to keep it all together, to compare yourself to others and find yourself lacking.

Leeana tankersley, like so many of us, began to feel overwhelmed by life. What if we could exhale and let go?Breathing Room is her beautiful release of self-condemnation, her discovery of the rest that comes when we give ourselves some space to breathe. She draws readers in through shared experiences of perfectionism, and striving and shows them how to let go, how to be radically on their own team, jealousy, and how to experience the broad grace that Christ has offered all of us.

Anyone who has been trying to do it all, who has been putting on a strong front and yet secretly struggling, will find in Breathing Room both a trusted friend and a generous Savior.

Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God

Weaving together theology and memoir in her trademark narrative style, Sarah tells us the story of the moment that changed her body and how it ultimately changed her life. She invites us to a path of knowing God that is filled with ordinary miracles, hope in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and other completely reasonable things.

A deeply moving and life-affirming account of wrestling with faith and God and finding miracles in the most unexpected places. The road of healing leads to rome where she met the Pope it’s complicated and encountered the Holy Spirit in the last place she expected. In the brief instant sarah bessey realized that her minivan was, inevitably, going to hit the car on the highway on the bright, clear day of the crash, she knew intuitively that it would have life-changing consequences.

She writes about her miraculous healing, learning to live with chronic pain, and the ways God makes us whole in the midst of suffering. Insightful, and unexpected, miracles and other Reasonable Things is a wild, profound, spirit-filled story of what it means to live with both grief and faith, suffering and joy, as we wrestle with God.

But as she navigated the winding path from her life before the accident—as a popular author, preacher, inhabiting a body that no longer felt like her own, but how it shook her deeply rooted faith, and loving wife and mother—to her new life after, she found that the most unexpected result wasn’t the way this shook her body, upending everything she thought she knew and held so dearly.

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The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self

As you journey deeper in the Christian pilgrimage, you come to realize that the Christian life is more than merely replicating particular spiritual disciplines or practices. M. Not only will you encounter the joy of discovering your own self, you will also find a greater love for others and compassion for the world.

Along the way, you will discover a growing sense of intimacy and abandonment to God. If the goal of the christian journey is Christlikeness, then you must reckon with the unhealthy ways that you root your sense of being in things other than God. You begin to understand that at the core of Christian faith is the transformation of your very identity.

Robert Mulholland Jr. Exposes the false selves that you may be tempted to hide behind and helps you to instead discover the true self that comes from being hidden with Christ in God.

God in the Dark: 31 Devotions to Let the Light Back In

Our eyes, though, are often clouded to those blessings by the thing oppressing us. When we remember and recognize our Father’s faithfulness, when we see reality with the eyes of understanding, the darkness ebbs and the light of hope grows. Life’s painful trials can bring shame about our inadequate and broken faith.

To walk through them with faith, joy, comfort, strength, and hope is part of the divine experience. But the psalmist was loved. Each day for 22 days, a letter arrived with one of the eight-verse sections from Psalm 119 along with a small thought to bring light and hope and to be a reminder that we do not fight our battles alone.

The impossible, unbearable, hope, and unthinkable becomes the hidden passageway to truth, and joy in Christ. These letters were originally written as encouragement to a friend when the darkness began to overtake his path. He didn’t experience this life perfected, and we don’t either. So are we. God was so kind to give us the Psalms.

To walk through darkened days is part of the human experience. The letters, along with nine more devotions on the subject of experiencing God in the dark, make up this powerful, honest, hope-filled 31-day devotional.

Invitation to Retreat: The Gift and Necessity of Time Away with God The Transforming Resources Set

And there’s no question we are better for it! But we need more. Many of us have tried to incorporate regular times of solitude and silence into the rhythm of our ordinary lives, which may mean that we give God twenty minutes here and half an hour there. Based on her own practice and her experience leading hundreds of retreats for others, she will guide you in a very personal exploration of seven specific invitations contained within the general invitation to retreat.

It is not a luxury, but a necessity of the spiritual life. Indeed, we long for more. In these pages transforming center founder and seasoned spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton gently leads us into retreat as a key practice that opens us to God. Academy of parish clergy - 2018 Top Ten List"Come away and rest awhile.

Jesus invites us to be with him, offering our full and undivided attention to him. When we choose retreat, we make a generous investment in our friendship with Christ. You will discover how to say yes to God's winsome invitation to greater freedom and surrender. There has never been a time when the invitation to retreat is so radical and so relevant, so needed and so welcome.

. We are not always generous with ourselves where God is concerned.

Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation Transforming Resources

Picking up on the monastic tradition of creating a "rule of life" that allows for regular space for the practice of the spiritual disciplines, this book takes you more deeply into understanding seven key disciplines along with practical ideas for weaving them into everyday life. Winner of a 2006 logos book awarddo you long for a deep, fundamental change in your life with God? Do you desire a greater intimacy with God? Do you wonder how you might truly live your life as God created you to live it?Spiritual disciplines are activities that open us to God's transforming love and the changes that only God can bring about in our lives.

. Each chapter includes exercises to help you begin the practices--individually and in a group context. The final chapter puts it all together in a way that will help you arrange your life for spiritual transformation. The choice to establish your own sacred rhythm is the most important choice you can make with your life.

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I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

Growing up in majority-white schools, "i had to learn what it means to love blackness, " a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, Austin writes, organizations, and churches, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion. In a time when nearly all institutions schools, businesses claim to value "diversity" in their mission statements, churches, universities, I'm Still Here is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words.

From a powerful new voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America. Austin channing brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man.

Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice, in stories that bear witness to the complexity of America's social fabric--from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations.

For readers who have engaged with america's legacy on race through the writing of ta-nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson, inviting the reader to confront apathy, I'm Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, and discover how blackness--if we let it--can save us all.

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