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Companions in the Darkness
- Seven Saints Who Struggled with Depression and Doubt
- Narrated by: Marie Hoffman
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Categories: Health & Wellness, Psychology & Mental Health
Non-member price: $24.37
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Framed around the nighttime prayer of Compline, Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence. Where do we find comfort when we lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.
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Grace for the Afflicted
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Each day men and women diagnosed with mental disorders are told they need to pray more and turn from their sin. Mental illness is equated with demonic possession, weak faith, and generational sin. As both a church leader and a professor of psychology and behavioral sciences, Michael S. Stanford has seen far too many mentally ill brothers and sisters damaged by well-meaning believers who respond to them out of fear or misinformation rather than grace. Grace for the Afflicted educates Christians about mental illness from both biblical and scientific perspectives.
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This Too Shall Last
- Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers
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This Too Shall Last offers an antidote to our cultural idolatry of effort and ease. Through personal story and insights from neuroscience and theology, Ramsey invites us to let our tears become lenses of the wonder that before God ever rescues us, he stands in solidarity with us. We are all mid-story in circumstances we did not choose, wondering when our hard things will end and where grace will come if they don’t. We don't need to make suffering a before-and-after story.
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The Grumbler's Guide to Giving Thanks
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The apostle Paul instructed the Philippians to be anxious in nothing and thankful in everything. And when he said everything - he meant everything. We can all agree that this is easier said than done. Disappointments and discontent may cause you to slip into dissatisfaction, and grumbling becomes a state of mind - gratitude seems impossible to find. However, what if this is the precise reason you lack the joy of a God-filled life? Instead of a reaction to when things are going well, what if gratitude is actually necessary to knowing the hope of our gracious God?
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Enjoying the Bible
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Many Christians view the Bible as an instruction manual. While the Bible does provide instruction, it can also captivate, comfort, delight, shock, and inspire. In short, it elicits emotion - just like poetry. By learning to read and love poetry, says literature Professor Matthew Mullins, listeners can increase their understanding of the biblical text and learn to love God's word more. Each chapter includes exercises and questions designed to help listeners put the book's principles and practices into action.
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Gentle and Lowly
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How does Jesus feel about his people amid all their sins and failures? This audiobook takes listeners into the depths of Christ's very heart - a heart of tender love drawn to sinners and sufferers.
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Edifying Read
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Prayer in the Night
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- Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
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Framed around the nighttime prayer of Compline, Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence. Where do we find comfort when we lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.
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Grace for the Afflicted
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Each day men and women diagnosed with mental disorders are told they need to pray more and turn from their sin. Mental illness is equated with demonic possession, weak faith, and generational sin. As both a church leader and a professor of psychology and behavioral sciences, Michael S. Stanford has seen far too many mentally ill brothers and sisters damaged by well-meaning believers who respond to them out of fear or misinformation rather than grace. Grace for the Afflicted educates Christians about mental illness from both biblical and scientific perspectives.
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Samson was Bipolar or had a personality disorder?
- By Joyce Sturdy on 15-12-2020
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This Too Shall Last
- Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers
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This Too Shall Last offers an antidote to our cultural idolatry of effort and ease. Through personal story and insights from neuroscience and theology, Ramsey invites us to let our tears become lenses of the wonder that before God ever rescues us, he stands in solidarity with us. We are all mid-story in circumstances we did not choose, wondering when our hard things will end and where grace will come if they don’t. We don't need to make suffering a before-and-after story.
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The apostle Paul instructed the Philippians to be anxious in nothing and thankful in everything. And when he said everything - he meant everything. We can all agree that this is easier said than done. Disappointments and discontent may cause you to slip into dissatisfaction, and grumbling becomes a state of mind - gratitude seems impossible to find. However, what if this is the precise reason you lack the joy of a God-filled life? Instead of a reaction to when things are going well, what if gratitude is actually necessary to knowing the hope of our gracious God?
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Overall
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Many Christians view the Bible as an instruction manual. While the Bible does provide instruction, it can also captivate, comfort, delight, shock, and inspire. In short, it elicits emotion - just like poetry. By learning to read and love poetry, says literature Professor Matthew Mullins, listeners can increase their understanding of the biblical text and learn to love God's word more. Each chapter includes exercises and questions designed to help listeners put the book's principles and practices into action.
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How does Jesus feel about his people amid all their sins and failures? This audiobook takes listeners into the depths of Christ's very heart - a heart of tender love drawn to sinners and sufferers.
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In this book, McKnight and Barringer explore the concept of tov - unpacking its richness and how it can help Christians and churches rise up to fulfill their true calling as imitators of Jesus.
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Follow your heart. You do you. You are enough. We take these slogans for granted, but what if this path to personal happiness leads to a dead end? In Rethink Your Self, Trevin Wax encourages you to rethink some of our society’s most common assumptions about identity and the road to happiness. Most people define their identity and purpose by first looking in (to their desires), then looking around (to express their uniqueness), and finally - maybe - looking up (to add a spiritual dimension to life). Rethink Your Self proposes looking up before looking in.
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From celebrated artist-storyteller Scott Erickson: 25 days of heart-stirring images and thought-provoking meditations to rekindle the wonder of God-with-Us in this season. Honest Advent creates a space for you to encounter the Incarnate Christ in unexpected places: like a pregnancy announcement in an era of political unrest and empirical bloodshed, the morning sickness of a Middle Eastern teenager, and the shocking biology of birth that goes far beyond the sanitized brand of Christmas as we know it.
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It’s always somebody else’s kid - until it’s yours. When Katherine James and her husband found out their son was using heroin, their responses ran the gamut: disbelief, anger, helplessness, guilt. As they struggled to come to grips with their son’s addiction and decide how best to help him, their home became a refuge for an unlikely assortment of their son’s friends, each with their own story, drawn by the simple love and acceptance they found there - “the Lost Boys”, James calls them.
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How to Fight Racism
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How to Fight Racism is a handbook for pursuing racial justice with hands-on suggestions bolstered by real-world examples of change. Tisby offers an array of actionable items to confront racism in our relationships and in everyday life through a simple framework - the A.R.C. Of Racial Justice - that helps listeners consistently interrogate their own actions and maintain a consistent posture of anti-racist action. This book is for anyone who believes it is time to stop compromising with racism and courageously confront it.
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Wait with Me
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To the observer, Jason, a campus minister, active church member, and father with a young family, might not have seemed lonely. But it's how he felt. He has wrestled with loneliness ever since he can remember, perhaps before he can remember...through childhood, college, and into adulthood. When Friar Ugo challenged him to see loneliness as a context for friendship with God, things began to change.
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A Rhythm of Prayer
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- By: Sarah Bessey - editor, Amena Brown - contributor, Barbara Brown Taylor - contributor, and others
- Narrated by: Chanté McCormick, Gisela Chípe, Rachel Perry, and others
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It’s no secret that we are overworked, overpressured, and edging burnout. Unsurprisingly, this fact is as old as time - and that’s why we see so many prayer circles within a multitude of church traditions. These gatherings are a trusted space where people seek help, hope, and peace, energized by God and one another. This book, curated by acclaimed author Sarah Bessey, celebrates and honors that prayerful tradition in a literary form.
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Renovated
- God, Dallas Willard, and the Church That Transforms
- By: Jim Wilder
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
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Christianity has tended to focus on right beliefs and right choices as the keys for personal growth. But biblical evidence and modern brain science show that our character is shaped more by whom we love than what we believe. Through conversations he had with Dallas Willard at the Heart and Soul Conference shortly before Dallas' death, Jim Wilder shows how we can train our brains to relate to God based on joyful, mutual attachment - which leads to emotional and spiritual maturity as our identity and character are formed by our relationship with God.
Publisher's Summary
The church's relationship with depression has been fraught: for centuries, depression was assumed to be evidence of personal sin or even demonic influence. The depressed have often been ostracized or institutionalized. In recent years the conversation has begun to change, and the stigma has lessened - but as anyone who suffers from depression knows, we still have a long way to go.
In Companions in the Darkness, Diana Gruver looks back into church history and finds depression in the lives of some of our most beloved saints, including Martin Luther, Charles Spurgeon, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Without trying to diagnose these figures from a distance, Gruver tells their stories in fresh ways, taking from each a particular lesson that can encourage or guide those who suffer today. Drawing on her own experience with depression, Gruver offers a wealth of practical wisdom both for those in the darkness and those who care for them.
Not only can these saints teach us valuable lessons about the experience of depression, they can also be a source of hope and empathy for us today. They can be our companions in the darkness.
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