Showing results by narrator "Nan McNamara" in All Categories

No grief is quite like the grief that follows pregnancy loss. But true hope and redemption are available, even in the heartbreak of miscarriage and stillbirth.

Is your church a rowboat church or a sailboat church? Rowboat churches depend largely on human effort. When church budgets shrink and membership declines, rowboat churches frantically row harder against a current. Sailboat churches, on the other hand, take up the oars, hoist sails, and rely on the Holy Spirit to guide them. Arguing that churches should be "sailboats," Joan S. Gray encourages listeners to shift concern from the many daily, practical concerns of their local church to fresh ideas that can be found using the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

We in the church do not speak the same language as the culture. We use many of the same words, but they rarely mean the same thing. And speaking louder isn't the answer. If we are to faithfully and effectively share the Good News, we have to translate Jesus. Embracing and unpacking the bilingual nature of spreading the gospel, pastor and teacher Shauna Pilgreen shows you how to learn the language of the culture so that you can clearly communicate the love of God in the three places Christ and culture meet: the gate, the cross, and the table.

If you've ever taken a personality test, you may have found yourself in enthusiastic agreement about the positive aspects of your personality, while the less desirable traits listed may have made you a bit defensive. Maybe you read up on a different personality type and wished you had more of those qualities. But the truth is, every type can get stuck in unhealthy emotional and spiritual patterns. And no matter what your personality, you have the potential to grow into the healthiest and most loving version of yourself.

God is often at work through the ordinary: ordinary people, ordinary objects, ordinary grace. Through the ordinary, God communicates epiphanies, salvation, revelation, and reconciliation. It is through the mundane that we hear God's quiet voice.

In Practice the Pause, spiritual director and writer Caroline Oakes offers easy-to-understand explanations of how this new brain science is confirming what every spiritual tradition has been telling us for millennia: by practicing the pause, we become more self-aware and better able to understand others.

Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection, says Amy Kenny. It is time for the church to start treating disabled people as full members of the body of Christ who have much more to offer than a miraculous cure narrative and to learn from their embodied experiences. Written by a disabled Christian, this book shows that the church is missing out on the prophetic witness and blessing of disability.

More than anything else, your heart needs a refreshing encounter with God each day. Trusting God in All the Things offers women like you a way forward so you can experience the confident calm you crave. These ninety encouraging devotions will help you face life with God's peace and renewed strength.

Jen Hansen, Kittie Spears, and Cynthia Nichols have been friends since childhood. They are now approaching 40 and their lives have changed, but their insular East Texas town has not. They stay sane by drinking wine in the afternoons, dishing about other women in the neighborhood, and bonding over the heartache of their own encroaching middle age and raising ungrateful teens.

In electric prose T. C. Boyle explores myriad facets of society: greed and excess, parenthood and responsibility, the digital world and the way we understand our mortality. Roaming unrestrainedly through the present and near future, he inhabits his characters’ minds with a ventriloquist’s flair, skewering human motivations and revealing us to ourselves with empathy and wry humour.

Detective Jackson Forge can hardly wait to marry the street-sly swindler who's turned his life upside down. Kit Turner is equally excited to wed the handsome detective, and what better way to show her love than providing him with a gift any man of the law would love? She determines to bring to justice the men who years ago maimed his brother—despite Jackson's warning to leave the past in the past. As she digs into the mystery of what happened, she unwittingly tumbles into her own history and endangers her future happiness with Jackson.

Celebrity—defined as social power without proximity—has led to abuses of power, the cultivation of persona, and a fixation on profits. In light of the fall of famous Christian leaders in recent years, the time has come for the church to reexamine its relationship to celebrity. Award-winning journalist Katelyn Beaty explores the ways fame has reshaped the American church, explains how and why celebrity is woven into the fabric of the evangelical movement, and identifies many ways fame has gone awry in recent years.

Skyboat Media presents, paired together for the first time, both the novel and the play of The Evil Genius by Wilkie Collins. Although both versions of the story were written at the same time, the play has never before been published and was only ever performed once on the stage. In fact, it is almost entirely unknown and is otherwise unavailable. 

1933. Cornelia Stover is headstrong and business-minded—not the kind of woman the men of Boldville, New Mexico, expect her to be. Then she stumbles upon a secret hidden out in the hills. 1970. Decades later, Joanna Riley, a former cop, packs up her car in the middle of the night and drives west, fleeing an abusive marriage and a life she can no longer bear. Eventually, she runs out of gas and finds herself in Boldville, a sleepy desert town in the foothills of the Gila Mountains.

While we can’t see the brain, it sends signals to us and those around us. Just as the colors of a traffic light send drivers a signal to go, slow down, or stop, our brains signal to our emotions and affect our behavior toward others. In Signals, Cherilyn Orr introduces a common language and imagery to help everyone manage their emotions. Rooted in neuroscience and the Bible, this approach has been used around the world because its spans across all cultural contexts. 

This introductory theology text helps students articulate basic Christian doctrines, think theologically so they can act Christianly in a diverse world, and connect Christian thought to their everyday life of faith. Written from a solidly evangelical yet ecumenically aware perspective, this book models a way of doing theology that is generous and charitable. It attends to history and contemporary debates and features voices from the global church.

As women, we tend to shoulder the burdens of our family, friends, and work—not to mention the heaviness of world events. As a result, we often feel overwhelmed, stuck, full of fear, believing we are never enough. We unknowingly build walls that hinder us from thriving in who God created us to be. Sharing from her own story, author Krissy Nelson helps you identify the twelve most common walls that hold women back.

Florence Winslow wakes up in hospital to the news that she has killed a man. On the way to visit her in-laws in rural Connecticut, a car comes out of an unseen junction and ploughs into her. The driver is killed, and Florence is lucky to be alive. Dylan Bodine, a young detective in the Torrington PD, feels she was extremely lucky. Too lucky? Something about the accident doesn’t add up. As he and his partner, experienced Senior Detective Carrie Fuller, whose last case this is, start to dig deeper, they realize that Florence isn’t just anyone. 

Teaching kindergarten in Thailand wasn’t the job Dian Seidel had in mind when, at age sixty and craving adventure, she convinced her husband that they should try working abroad. But coping with rambunctious children, sweltering heat, and COVID-19 turned out to be the challenge she needed. Struggling to understand Thai culture, their school, and their marriage, could she learn Thailand’s essential lesson: mai pen rai, don’t worry, keep cool? Part travel memoir and part second act story, Kindergarten at 60 is a retirement tale like none other.

Somebody's getting married . . . And Jen's going to be a grandma, any minute. Her daughter-in-law's mother has dropped the ball for the baby shower and the wedding has come out of the blue. Faith, Carrie, and Jen have to manage both events—but will any of them be the star of the show?