We all have experienced unwanted parts of our spiritual journey: distance from God, gaps in our character, the fear that our lives will be trivial and empty... Jesus is calling us into more. Calling us to be shaped in his likeness. To experience his abundance of life.

Alan Fadling has spent years coaching leaders and communities on how to live an unhurried life, teaching that productivity and success are not our chief end, but rather living at the pace that our true self longs to live. Designed to help you center your day around God's loving presence, A Year of Slowing Down offers six devotionals for each week of the year. Each day begins with a Scripture passage followed by a short reading and a reflection question.

It is in the heart of every person to want God, but life gets loud, and we forget Him. We get consumed by our problems, our desires, ourselves. We forget our first encounter with the Savior and how much we once wanted Him. But Lisa Whittle believes that if we calibrate our attention, refocusing on God determines the perspective for everything in our life.

Should Christians be politically withdrawn, avoiding participation in politics to maintain their prophetic voice and to keep from being used as political pawns? Or should Christians be actively involved, seeking to utilize political systems to control the levers of power? In Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird call Christians everywhere to discern the nature of Christian witness in fractured political environments.

Everything about the gospel message leads to the cross, and proceeds from the cross. In fact, within the narrative of Scripture, the crucifixion of Jesus is literally the crux of the story—the axis upon which the biblical story turns. But it would be a mistake to think we could sum up the significance of the crucifixion in a tidy sentence or two. That kind of thinking only insulates us from the magnificence of what God has done. In our ongoing quest to make meaning of the cross, we need to recognize that this conversation will never conclude-that there is always something more to be said.

A unique and intimate exploration of how suffering, spiritual formation, and interpersonal neurobiology intersect, The Deepest Place by award-winning author Curt Thompson shows us how it's not through the absence of grief but in the presence of it that we discover the joy of vulnerable community and a deeper sense of God's abundant love.

Through personal experience and countless conversations, speaker and Bible teacher Jennie Allen has come to realize that most of us need to unlearn some deeply damaging messages about our emotions. We've been taught, for example, that emotions are untrustworthy when, in fact, they are a gift from God to help us notice what is wrong and where we need to heal. Your emotions are not something to suppress or ignore. They are meant to be felt, examined, and shared.

Feeling hopeless? Lonely? Anxious? Do you want to experience the presence and love of God through every joy and struggle of life? Do you long to enrich your prayer life and grow your relationship with God? The Psalms will guide you into fresh encounters and a lasting deeper attachment to God. You may have read or studied the Psalms. In Nearing a Far God: Praying the Psalms with Our Whole Selves, you’ll experience the Psalms in fresh, personal, and life-changing ways.

A practicing neurosurgeon and award-winning author shares his roadmap to finding hope and even happiness when the worst happens—by placing trust in God—in this powerful memoir of personal tragedy, grief, and recovery.

N. T. Wright—widely regarded as the most influential commentator and interpreter of Paul—deftly unpacks this dense and sometimes elusive letter, detailing Paul's arguments and showing how it illuminates the Gospel from the promises to Abraham through the visions of Revelation. Wright takes a deep dive into Romans 8, showing how it illuminates so much else that God reveals in Scripture: God the Father, Christology, and the Spirit; Jesus' Messiahship, cross, resurrection, and ascension; salvation, redemption, and adoption; suffering and glory; holiness and hope.

Though it's easy for our overwhelming pain to cloud our view of reality, the truth is that, even though we can’t see it or feel it, God is at work in the darkness. Our Creator is in the business of bringing dead—and nearly dead—things to life. Even now, no matter how fresh your wounds might be, he invites you to unearth his hidden treasures in your hurting, to reframe your darkness as a sacred space in which the light of hope can shine most brilliantly. Come join Katherine Wolf as she vulnerably shares her own places of wounding and the life-changing insights she has found there.

During our chaotic times, discover five forgotten values that can spark internal growth and help us reconcile our Christian faith with the complexities of race, sexuality, and social justice. Most believers live in the state of "being a Christian" without ever being deeply formed by Christ. Our pace is too frenetic to be in union with God, and we don't know how to quiet our hearts and minds to be present. Our emotions are unhealthy and compartmentalized. 

If you are going to care for someone, you must first understand them. If you're going to hire, marry, or befriend someone, you have to be able to see them. And yet we humans don't do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us to do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us. If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person's story should you pay attention to?

Therapist and speaker Jenna Riemersma applies the groundbreaking insights of Internal Family Systems (IFS) for anyone who feels stuck in unwanted feelings and behaviors, with a special focus on personal transformation for listeners of faith. In Altogether You, she explains why our parts are so often at war-parts of us wanting to please others and do things right while other parts seem bent on acting out, shutting down, or engaging in hurtful behaviors.

Whether or not we attend church, deep down we wonder if the biblical story of faith is really enough for the complexity of the world in which we live. We fill our lives with other things, hoping that maybe the next experience or accomplishment will complete us. Yet with every goal we reach, we still feel discouraged and anxious. In Searching for Enough, Pastor Tyler Staton draws on ancient and modern insights to introduce us, as if for the first time, to Jesus' disciple Thomas: history's most notorious sceptic.