Showing results by narrator "Nan Mcnamara" in All Categories

Claudia Morgan is overwhelmed. She's a single parent trying the best that she can, but her four-year-old son, Henry, is a handful - for her and for his preschool. When Claudia hears about a school with an atypical teaching style near her Chicagoland home, she has to visit. The Hawthorne School is beautiful and has everything she dreams of for Henry: time to play outside, music, and art. But when Henry brings home stories of ceremonies in the woods and odd rules, Claudia's instincts tell her that something isn't quite right.

When life sends us trouble, we should pray. When we experience blessings, we should pray. When a friend or loved one is going through a difficult time, we should pray. We know this. Yet too often we don't know exactly what to say - so we say nothing.

How can you be sure that your profession of faith is more than just words? Seven Words You Never Want to Hear explores the mystery of salvation through the scriptures and personal stories. Author Denise Wilson invites you to take the challenge that the apostle Paul gave to the church at Corinth - examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith. The gospel changes everything - beliefs, lifestyles, and priorities. Has it changed you? Don’t wait until death to find out if you got it right. 

Faith and prayer and praise and giving and service and commitment to God and our fellow men will begin to happen as a result of our paying attention to the all-important fact of his unswerving commitment to us. Eugenia Price presents a very personal, accessible book about what for her is the central tenet of contemporary Christian life. It is one of her finest inspirationals.

Awestruck serves as a guide to help you tap into the powerful, life-changing benefits of awe. Beginning with a comprehensive explanation of the emotion, Jonah Paquette introduces us to the power of awe and how it can help alleviate struggles in our modern life, including stress, social isolation, and time pressure. Continuing with over 60 practices, this book provides an accessible and tangible path to bring more wonder into your everyday life.

In Light of the World: A Beginner's Guide to Advent, author, professor, and biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine explores the biblical texts surrounding the story of the birth of Jesus. 

When children have a listening companion who hears, acknowledges, and encourages their early experiences with God, it creates a spiritual footprint that shapes their lives. How can we increase our capacity to engage children in spiritual conversations? In this audiobook, Lacy Finn Borgo draws on her own experience of practicing spiritual direction with children. She offers an overview of childhood spiritual formation and introduces key skills for engaging conversation-posture, power, and patterns - from a Christ-centered perspective.

Using her decades of experience in counseling young women and coaching fathers, Michelle Watson has created a step-by-step template for having conversations that build a stronger bond through laughter, vulnerability, honesty, and self-disclosure. Let's Talk is filled with dozens of scripted questions that walk fathers through the levels of creating a heart-to-heart connection with their daughters by communicating the right way. 

Confirmed grump Eddie Valentino placed the ad. Hotshot 20-something Talba Wallis knew exactly how to answer it. And thus was born the dynamic duo of New Orleans private detectives, one cynical, 65-year-old Luddite white dude with street smarts, and one young, bright-eyed, 21st century African-American female poet, performance artist, mistress of disguise, and computer jock extraordinaire. Think Queen Latifah and Danny DeVito.

There Was An Old Woman by Hallie Ephron is a compelling novel of psychological suspense in which a young woman becomes entangled in a terrifying web of deception and madness involving an elderly neighbor.

Giving Thanks for a Perfectly Imperfect Life will dispel the worldly lie that perfection is (1) attainable or (2) desirable. As a recovering perfectionist, Michele Howe can speak from personal experience how damaging and paralyzing spending one's life in pursuit of perfection on any plane is to us spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Perfectionists believe they can control their relationships, lives, and environments, as well as the people around them, when the Bible teaches us that only God is in control.

In Ordinary on Purpose, Mikala shares her heartfelt journey in a raw and revealing way as she invites you to lay down your own endless chase for perfection and embrace this beautiful, messy life exactly as it is with our perfect, loving God right by your side. What would it look like to stop pretending to be "perfect" and be ordinary? Instead of always feeling overwhelmed and alone, you might discover the beauty of a good, hard life grounded in the radiant hope of God's unending love. Life happens in the ordinary, after all. 

No parent enjoys discipling...but we know it's important, so we grit our teeth and make it happen! Or can it be more than something we just "put up with"? Sara Wallace, a mother of five, brings you a personal, frank account of her own journey with discipline - and introduces an entirely new way to look at it. Not as something we do to our children, but as something we do for them. We can be glad when our children disobey while still in our care - they are showing us where they need to be strengthened and encouraged, giving us a chance to shape their hearts.

Fasting is not just the physical practice of giving up food. Fasting can also be a way to combat our culture of endless distractions and busyness. Fasting is an act of letting go, of making more internal space to listen to the sacred whispers of our lives. Join Christine Valters Paintner, online abbess of Abbey of the Arts, on a spiritual journey through seven different kinds of fasts, including fasting from control, from our attachments, from our grasping, and more.

A thriller writer is embroiled in a real-life whodunit when a friend drops dead with her hatpin impaled in his back. The violation of a sealed West Bank tomb, its rock walls intact, provides a Thebes investigator with a mystifying conundrum. Two sisters take shelter in a shuttered old house at the end of a country road . . . only to discover they're not alone. And the author's most beloved characters, Amelia Peabody and Radcliff Emerson, make an appearance in a newly uncovered tale with a witty nod to Sherlock Holmes.

In Witness at the Cross, Amy-Jill Levine shows how the people at the cross each have distinct roles to play. Each Evangelist presents a distinct picture of the death of Jesus. Each portrays different individuals and groups of people at the cross, each offers different images and dialogues, and so from each, we learn how those meanings and messages cross the centuries to any who would come to the cross today.

 Guided by current research from Barna Group, Mettes illustrates the profound physical, emotional, and social toll of loneliness in the United States. Surprisingly, her research shows that it is not the oldest Americans but the youngest adults who are loneliest and that social media can actually play a positive role in alleviating loneliness.

Frances Barnett and Abby Bernacki are two haunted young mothers living in the same house in two different centuries. In 1885, Frances Barnett is in the Northampton Lunatic Hospital, telling her story to a visitor. She has come to distrust her own memories and believes that her pregnancy, birth, and early days of motherhood may have impaired her sanity.

Christmas should be a time of joy and celebration. But in the hurriedness of December, sometimes we find ourselves sacrificing a sacred pace for hustle, leaving us feeling more stressed than blessed. What if you approached this Advent more open to the things of God? What if you decided to be expectant that God would move in your midst? What if you made room for the true joy found in the coming of our king?

According to Eugenia Price, the emotionally healthy person is the one who is focused outside of the self and whose attention is directed toward God and other people. In Leave Yourself Alone, she explores specific areas of life - work, prayer, conversation, relationships - where people can and should “leave themselves alone”.