Showing results for "Held" in Christian Living

Using Psalm 139, Abbey Wedgeworth walks alongside women suffering the heartbreak of miscarriage. Having experienced the sorrow of miscarriage herself, she acknowledges the isolation commonly felt and the impact that such an experience can have on faith.

Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals - church culture seemed so far removed from Jesus. Yet despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing her back. And so she set out on a journey to understand the Church and to find her place in it.

If the Bible isn’t a science book or an instruction manual, then what is it? What do people mean when they say the Bible is inspired? When Rachel Held Evans found herself asking these questions, she began a quest to better understand what the Bible is and how it is meant to be read. What she discovered changed her—and it will change you too.

Drawing on the best in recent scholarship and using her well-honed literary expertise, Evans examines some of our favorite Bible stories and possible interpretations, retelling them through memoir, original poetry, short stories, soliloquies, and even a short screenplay. Undaunted by the Bible’s most difficult passages, Evans wrestles through the process of doubting, imagining, and debating Scripture’s mysteries. The Bible, she discovers, is not a static work but is a living, breathing, captivating, and confounding book that is able to equip us to join God’s loving and redemptive work in the world.

From New York Times best-selling author Rachel Held Evans: a must-listen for anyone on the journey of doubt, deconstruction, and ultimately faith reborn. Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial made a spectacle of Christian fundamentalism and brought national attention to her hometown, Rachel Held Evans faced a trial of her own when she began to have doubts about her faith. Rachel recounts growing up in a culture obsessed with apologetics, struggling as her own faith unraveled one unexpected question at a time.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood is an exercise in scriptural exploration and spiritual contemplation. What does God truly expect of women, and is there really a prescription for biblical womanhood? Come along with Evans as she looks for answers in the rich heritage of biblical heroines, models of grace, and all-around women of valor.

Pain and regret can hold us captive. Our past mistakes and trauma tell us to blame others, feel ashamed, or turn to a temporary fix that often becomes a permanent escape. By the time Satan whispers we need to dress it up and call it home, pain is our new normal. Pastor and motivational speaker Real Talk Kim has a message for us: the pain might not be our fault, but the healing is our responsibility. In You Gotta Get Up, Pastor Kim reminds us as only she can that staying stuck requires as much energy as moving forward.

Rachel Held Evans is widely recognized for her theologically astute, profoundly honest, and beautifully personal books, which have guided, instructed, edified, and shaped Christians as they seek to live out a just and loving faith. At the time of her tragic death in 2019, Rachel was working on a new book about wholeheartedness. With the help of her close friend and author Jeff Chu, that work-in-progress has been woven together with some of her other unpublished writings into a rich collection of essays.

Amanda Held Opelt search for a way to process her grief led her to seek wisdom about how other people have made it through, and she found that generations past embraced rituals that served as vessels for pain and aided in the process of grieving and healing. Today, many of these traditions have been lost as religious practice declines, cultures amalgamate, death is sanitized, and pain is averted. In this raw and authentic memoir of bereavement, Opelt explores the history of human grief practices and how previous generations have journeyed through periods of suffering.

God's face is always shining toward us. Our God is not asleep, nor indifferent. But we don't always experience this nearness or the depth of how beloved we truly are-especially if we have experienced neglect, betrayal, or indifference in our formative human relationships.

Many Christians rightly deny the prosperity gospel—the idea that God wants you to be healthy and wealthy— but instead embrace its more subtle spin-off, the emotional prosperity gospel, or the belief that happiness and spiritual euphoria will inevitably follow if you believe all the right things and make all the right choices. In this view, frustration is deemed unholy, fear is seen as a failure of faith, and sadness is a sign of God’s disfavor. Amanda Held Opelt grapples with her own experience of disillusionment when life with God didn’t always feel the way she expected it to feel.

On one side is a dominant narrative the author believes is universal, which he calls our human "fear story". On the other side is the competing narrative that is also universal called God's "love story". Love's Resurrection: Its Power to Roll Away Fear's Heaviest Stone is the author's account of how human fear stories, including that which now dominates the mood of today's United (yet deeply divided) States of America, culminate in what he calls Great Awakenings of nation, church, and ourselves as individuals.

The Army Reserves took her from basic training and Military Police school to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and then to Bosnia for Operation Joint Guard. Follow Dory's army career as she navigates through the fun and the difficulties of being a Christian woman, a civilian high-school English teacher, in the masculine world of the Military Police.

In October 2017, Margaret was very shocked when she was diagnosed with stage four Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was given two months to live, with the possibility that treatment might not work in a 73-year-old woman. The evil disease held her hostage for months, during which she sought God with all her heart for her freedom. Even though she believed in healing, and had taught others about healing for over 30 years, there was one troubling question: She had to know why this disease came upon her. God gave her the strategy to overcome and be free from cancer and walk in perfect health.

Rejection is inevitable. Yet we spend little time considering the significant impact it makes on an individual's whole self. When we do, we swaddle it in quippy statements and shallow encouragement—meaningful for just a moment. But rejection leaves aching wounds that challenge and forge our most intimate thoughts of who we believe God, others, and ourselves to be. Tabitha Panariso blends biblical truth, candid personal stories, and timeless wisdom forged through personal experience and her vocation as a therapist to invite listeners into a new way of living.

In The Mother and Child Project, Melinda Gates, Kay Warren, Tony Campolo, Christine Caine, and Senator William H. Frist, along with other inspirational leaders, cultural icons, political experts, academics, and service providers, provide a personal yet fact-based narrative exploring the plight of women and children living in extreme poverty in an effort to educate and inspire the church to speak up in support of maternal and child health issues in the developing world.

When the world seems to be spinning off its axis—and we feel like we're spinning with it—anxiety can cause us to question if God is still in charge. This beautiful 100-day devotional answers us with a resounding YES. As the Bible verses, stories, and prayers in Held in Perfect Peace remind us, God's promises and presence never change, no matter how changed today's world seems to be. This thematic devotional from Guideposts—a beloved and trusted source of biblical encouragement for nearly eighty years—brings us back to God's perfect peace on our most anxious days.

In this audiobook, Karen shares the encouragements, miracles, and revelations God poured out to her, believing that they will speak to you and reassure you in your own hard time.

How you perceive God's hand towards you can be the deciding factor on whether you see him as a mildly interested, passive-aggressive being; a cosmic superpower that is so distant and uninvolved in your life you could never be close to him; a cruel, cold judge ready to bop you over the head with a lightning bolt the moment you screw up; or perhaps, an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving Creator who is a Father at heart—one who reaches down to outcasts and desires to comfort, heal, restore, and empower.

Echoes. Through time. Across generations. Women who rejoice in telling their stories! Stories that are unique and intimate. Stories rooted in heartache and struggle where courageous faith is birthed. Stories that draw our hearts to one place. To the one true God, who transcends time and circumstance. The one who is weaving strands of the greatest love story ever told. It started with his son and builds with every new heart that is drawn to trust him. Drawn by cords of love, not force, and held with strength and power that is also tender and abundantly generous.

Do you have a friend, family member, or loved one in the throes of addiction? Do you feel tossed by the storm of their struggle, wondering how to stay anchored in truth and hope as you walk beside them? Deborah Bailey has been there. In God Our Anchor: Held Fast Through a Loved One's Addiction, Deborah has crafted 30 devotionals for those who face a similar journey. Each thoughtful entry helps the listener navigate the storm of a loved one's addiction and hold fast to our great anchor, the Lord.