Live Hard

NOT a great while ago, I was engaged in conversation with a finely-cultured and earnest-hearted gentleman, who had been trained in the old religious faith, and who, I think, is still a member of the Orthodox Church. I found, however, that, in spite of these facts, he was sharing in the discontent, the bewilderment, the questionings, that are touching so many hearts and so many minds at the present time. He had been suddenly smitten with a great affliction,— one that had been great enough and had come near enough to his own life to shock his settled belief, and make him ready to ask the ...

Two years ago, Eric Greitens unexpectedly heard from a former SEAL comrade, a brother-in-arms he hadn’t seen in a decade. Zach Walker had been one of the toughest of the tough. But ever since he returned home from war to his young family in a small logging town, he’d been struggling. Without a sense of purpose, plagued by PTSD, and masking his pain with heavy drinking, he needed help. Zach and Eric started writing and talking nearly every day, and Eric set down his thoughts on what it takes to build resilience in our lives.

Jefferson Bethke burst into the cultural conversation in 2012 with a passionate, provocative poem titled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” The four-minute video of Bethke’s spoken-word performance literally became an overnight sensation, with seven million YouTube views in its first forty-eight hours (and 24+ million within a year). The message hit like a blizzard on social-media sites and in forwarded e-mails, triggering an avalanche of responses running the gamut from encouraged to enraged.

The Boy Who Would Live Forever has a sense of wonder and excitement that will satisfy those who loved Gateway and will delight new listeners as well. In Gateway, long after the alien Heechee abandoned their space-station, Gateway (as humans dubbed it) allowed humans to explore new worlds. The Heechee, alarmed by the alien Kugel whose goal was to destroy all organic lifeforms, had already retreated to the galactic core, where they now lived in peace.

In Love Thy Body, best-selling and award-winning author Nancy Pearcey takes on the hard questions about life and sexuality. She offers a respectful but riveting exposé of the secular worldview that lies behind trendy slogans and political talking points. A former agnostic, Pearcey is a sensitive guide to the secular ideas that shape current debates. She empowers listeners to intelligently and compassionately engage today's most controversial moral and social challenges.

Jesus Christ did not die on the cross so you and I could have a nice day. Ministers and teachers who water down the Gospel of Christ in order to make it more popular and appealing may be leading their fun-loving audiences down the road to eternal punishment. This book is John MacArthur's unflinching, unapologetic treatise on the modern tendency to alter the true message of Christianity in order to meet the whims and desires of a culture hoping for nonconfrontational messages, easy answers, and superficial commitments.

Do you beat yourself up when what you feel doesn’t align with the person you think you should be? You “should” be a good friend, but you feel hurt by past betrayals. You “should” be content, but you feel lonely or unfulfilled. You “should” have faith, but you feel discouraged by unanswered prayers. Instead of working through these inner tensions, you guilt-trip or gaslight yourself, which just leaves you feeling stuck, defeated, and trapped by conflicting feelings. But there is another path.

We all have hard days - the kind that make us want to give up, retreat inside ourselves, and drown our sorrows in a pint of ice cream. And while we may crave all sorts of things to ease the pain we feel, what our hearts really need is to be filled up with truth. We need to be confident in God's character and his promises. We need to remember that we're loved no matter what. We need to know that we're going to be okay.

These 90 devotions are for anyone who is waiting in the dark, wondering when life will get better. Some reflections will encourage you to press on, some will help you process your losses, others will make you laugh, and still others will show you the gift of lament, in both its grittiness and grace. Ultimately, they’re all intended to draw you closer to the God who is always for you–who is nearer than you know and loves you more than you can imagine.

In The Barbarous Coast, Lew Archer's pursuit of a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a big-time gambler who died by his own knife, and finally to an answer he would rather not have known.

An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff's years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how hearing loss taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness. Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning.

Sometimes, life feels like a roller-coaster ride filled with ups, downs, twists, turns, and unexpected sudden drops. Instead of moving forward with peace and purpose, our lives spin out of control. When chaos and uncertainty threaten to make you feel helpless...what do you do?

The Clouds Ye So Much Dread is a beautiful blend of memoir, theology, meditation, and storytelling. Each of these chapters - from dreading the birth of her first child, to living in unfamiliar and dangerous places, to facing the news that her son had been diagnosed with cancer - describes the stories through which Hannah K. Grieser has come to see that hard or uncertain circumstances, rather than being cause for doubt and dread, can instead become the unasked-for means that our loving father uses to turn us toward him and to show us his faithfulness.

Why is suffering the common lot of all people everywhere - believers and non-believers alike - and why does it seem that the world is out of control when it comes to the problem of pain and suffering? Who’s in Charge of a World that Suffers? includes an informative and inspirational new introduction by Franklin Graham that speaks to today’s reader in the midst of painful circumstances.

As one of the best-known honky tonkers to appear in the wake of Hank Williams’ death, Faron Young was a popular presence on Nashville’s music scene for more than four decades. The Singing Sheriff produced a string of top 10 hits, placed over eighty songs on the country music charts, and founded the long-running country music periodical Music City News in 1963.

In times of suffering, simple answers often ring empty and hollow - so how can you find hope in hard times? Learn how to survive the difficult seasons with the comfort and of God's constancy. With sensitive, practical advice, Henri Nouwen gently points you toward a life that is grounded in God’s companionship and rooted within eternal hope. In this newly formatted edition, Turn My Mourning into Dancing discusses five movements we experience during hard times.

Violent wars, harsh laws, pronounced judgments. Christianity proclaims God's goodness, yet the Bible is filled with passages that seem to paint a different picture. On the surface, such depictions can hinder our confidence in God's goodness. But when we're willing to look deeper, we discover a consistent purpose behind everything God does-and that he is greater than we could ever imagine.

Join New York Times best-selling author Shauna Niequist as she invites you to experience the precious gifts and wisdom that only come the hard way - through change, loss, and transition. In this collection of poignant essays, Shauna reflects on her own journey of making peace with change, the nuanced mix of excitement and heartbreak that comes with it, and the practices that offer us strength and hope along the way. A tribute to life at the edges, Bittersweet is a love letter to the bittersweet and sacred work that change does in us all.

All his life, for almost as far back as he could remember, Victor had had a phobia. In prison, inevitably, he reflected on the grotesque way it had begun, about the panics and violent anger. He asked himself, too, why the child of happily married, middle-class parents should have needed to make motiveless and unreasoning attacks on women. Holed up in that house with the girl, he had not meant to pull the trigger. It was panic.

God's strength will carry you through the hard seasons and storms of life. In this beautiful gift book with inspiring photography, God's Strength for Hard Times draws on the words of beloved evangelist Billy Graham and the Bible to offer comfort and hope. When you feel weak or discouraged, you don’t have to face your problems alone! There is infinite power and support awaiting you in Jesus.