Showing results by publisher "Christian Audio" in Relationships, Parenting & Personal Development

When you suffer a loss, you enter the realm of "used to be." You used to be married. You used to be employed. You used to be pregnant, secure, healthy, sober, thin. You used to be a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a mother or father. And in that used-to-be space there is deep emptiness, loneliness, and sorrow. It's a place we all dwell for a while. But it's not a place in which we are meant to remain. The path forward includes exploring the unseen elements of grief. With this book, pastor Chuck Elliott and counselor Ashley Elliott light the way to a better future.

Do you feel like life's kind of kicking you around a bit? Award-winning storyteller and former national sportscaster Rachel Joy Baribeau is the friendly hand reaching for you right now. She knows what those dark moments are like. And she knows the profound joy of healing and finding happiness again. With gut-level honesty, she shares her own story of changing the narrative of her life from stuck, overwhelmed, and anxious to confident in her identity and joyful in her life's purpose.

Grief is all-consuming. Shattering. After the death of a loved one, we ask questions about the meaning of life, the whys of death, and how to carry our sorrow. The Spirituality of Grief honors the complex nature of grief and offers simple comfort: we are not alone, and there is no one right way to grieve.

Women and girls everywhere are being played, hungrily chasing after a brand of broken beauty that leaves us disconnected, damaged, and so desperate for acceptance that we fuel our own exploitation with our shame and money. In the midst of battling an eating disorder, Melissa Johnson, a marriage and family therapist, was given new eyes to see the widespread fallout of this ultimate deceit. With piercing insight and tender encouragement, Melissa helps women capture hope and freedom as she shows that true beauty is not impossible—it abounds all around us.

Living well doesn't happen automatically for followers of Christ—it happens when we have planned ahead by reviewing and recalibrating our lives on a regular basis, and when we transition from one stage of life to the next. Times of transition, especially in midlife or later life, are ideal moments for recalibrating our priorities and habits. Ken Boa and Jenny Abel give us the perspective and practical tools needed to evaluate our God-given gifts, talents, skills, wisdom, knowledge, resources, and opportunities so we can use them to the full extent God desires.

Traumatic experiences happen to nearly everyone, at some time, in some form. The aftereffects—depression, anxiety, addiction, panic attacks, insomnia, and more—can affect us for years or even a lifetime. But the brokenness following a traumatic event is never a life sentence. We are all changed by trauma, but we do not have to be defined by it.

In this inspiring new book from the bestselling author of An Enemy Called Average, you'll find the motivation and encouragement you need to stop settling and start stretching toward the goal of being you in the way only you can! In short, punchy chapters, John Mason shows you how to face down fear, doubt, criticism, and apathy with enthusiasm, decisiveness, persistence, and honesty. He shows you how to seek God's direction, develop wisdom, manage your time and energy, and take risks.

When author and Episcopal priest Erin Jean Warde quit drinking, she heard from many others in a similar situation seeking support. In Sober Spirituality, she combines personal storytelling with theological reflection to offer encouragement, wisdom, and practical insight for listeners who want to reexamine their relationship with alcohol. Warde explores the way our culture promotes alcohol consumption and shows how we can choose to change our perception of alcohol in our spiritual communities.

Today's technology has made sinful experiences and deadly choices accessible to our teenagers and young adults with just a click. And parents are left with the disappointments—and devastating fallout—of their children's choices. Through sharing her own story of praying three very wayward prodigals home, Laine Lawson Craft offers not only hope and insight, but also a practical, tried-and-true battle plan for parents walking this heartbreaking season of life.

Our kids are experiencing an unprecedented sense of isolation, interacting virtually in a world that seems ever more fearful with each news cycle. They absorb and internalize the stress and anxiety they see on their parents' faces and on the phone, laptop, tablet, and TV screens that are ever before their eyes. Not surprisingly, their mental and physical health are suffering. As parents, we want to know how we can help. Practical and encouraging, Raising Healthy Teenagers helps you understand the mental, physical, and social toll the past couple years have taken on your kids.

Romal Tune was raised mostly without a father. He and his dad connected briefly when he was a teenager, and then had no relationship for decades. After years of inner work, Tune realized that neither he nor his dad possessed what they needed to live up to each other's expectations. He began to wonder if other men also longed to have vulnerable conversations with their fathers—about good memories, about pain, and about what their relationship could still become. So he sat down with seventeen men of diverse ages, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds for "I Wish My Dad" conversations.

Stories tether us to what matters most: our families, our friends, our hearts, our planet, the wondrous mystery of life itself. Yet the stories we've been telling ourselves as a civilization are killing us: Fear is wisdom. Vanity is virtuous. Violence is peace. In Between the Listening and the Telling, author and activist Mark Yaconelli leads listeners into an enchanting meditation on the power of storytelling in our individual and collective lives. We tell stories to remember who we are. We tell stories to savor the pleasure of living.

During a bus ride with a group of fellow college students, Jenny Booth Potter came to a life-changing realization. She decided that racism in all its forms—in policies and systems, in organizations and churches, in neighborhoods and families—could no longer be tolerated. And even though Jenny didn't know what to do about racism, she was certain of one thing: doing nothing is no longer an option. That declaration Jenny made to her peers was more than seven words uttered on a bus. It was a vow, a lifetime commitment to seek racial justice.

Perhaps in no other way do we more vibrantly reflect our creator than with our creativity. Whether through music, writing, baking, painting, posting on social media, dancing, or any other form of artistic expression within our grasp, we were created to create. Yet, there are times we may be unsure about our art, times when our creating and making doesn't feel possible or purposeful or practical. Rachel Marie Kang wants you to know that your art is not peripheral to life—it is at the very heart of why you exist and what you have to offer to yourself and to the world.

With a powerful voice, Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt gives us the compassionate nudge and tools we need to access our inner authority. By stepping out of harmful belief systems informed by white supremacy and scarcity, we can step into healthy paradigms of abundance, liberation, and power. A Brown Girl's Epiphany is a love letter to all of us in need of guidance on our journey. Honest, vulnerable, and humble, Pratt imagines a world where the walking wounded become the fully healed and liberated, where our inner work becomes the starting point for creating heaven on earth.

Too often, fatness has been viewed as a moral failing. Fat Christian women in particular are shamed and marginalized by the message that they are failing God because they can't change their bodies. More of You will challenge that status quo, teaching listeners to resist the shame and guilt that is pressed onto them by the world and instead to embrace their bodies, take up space, and learn to navigate the world in ways that allow them to flourish. With wit and candor, Amanda Martinez Beck compiles her hard-won wisdom to give the skinny on thriving in a fat body.

Speaking by the Numbers offers a strategy that combines communication principles with Enneagram wisdom to help leaders, pastors, and teachers understand how to convey content in ways that both inspire and connect with their audiences. Using the Enneagram wisdom of triads and stances, communicators can learn insight into the ways that various Enneagram numbers receive and process information.

In our image-conscious culture, life can become a never-ending performance. The perfection we feel pressured to project to those in our social sphere comes at the expense of our emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being. In the end, we are left exhausted and unfulfilled. How do we flip the script and feed ourselves rather than simply adding to our feeds? In Soul Care to Save Your Life, author, speaker, and recovering performer Manda Carpenter offers an invitation to shift your focus from performing to purposeful living from the inside out.

If you are speaking across generations, you need to understand how different generations hear. Pastor Darrell Hall (a millennial) harnesses the insights of generational science to explore how generations are distinct people groups with their own cultures and languages. With fresh research from the Barna Group on how generations communicate, Hall sheds light on how each generation receives verbal messages, from boomers and Xers to millennials and Gen Z and those not yet named.

Psychotherapist and former pastor Eric Minton claims that the pernicious melding of capitalism and Christianity means a world of competition, perfection, and scarcity disguised as self-help and self-care. Rather than shaming, silencing, or medicating away our disappointment at not having obtained the happiness we were promised, however, Minton posits a radical alternative. In an impertinent, droll, yet pastoral voice, Minton suggests that our "not-okayness" will require rethinking everything we thought we knew.