Life Growth

The activist, nun, and esteemed spiritual voice who has twice appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday sounds the call to create a monastery within ourselves - to cultivate wisdom and resilience so that we may join God in the work of renewal, restoration, and justice right where we are.

How to keep your marriage together when the trials of life threaten to rip it apart. It's not a question of if your marriage will face trials. It's a question of when. Illness or injury. Job loss or financial burdens. Addiction. Anxiety. Infidelity. Loss of faith. Whether you've been married for five months or fifty years, it's within you and your spouse's power to ensure your marriage is prepared for those seasons and situations—a place of refuge and safety for both of you.

In A Life Ablaze, author Rick Renner offers an on-time message that is crucial for every Christian in this end-time season of the church. Rick’s thought-provoking questions, at the outset, will echo in the listener's heart as they listen on. Do you struggle to keep the fire of the Holy Spirit burning in your heart with the same fiery intensity as the early days of your walk with Jesus? Do you feel like only a few glowing embers remain and even those are growing cold? If you are on fire for God, are you eager to know how you can stay ablaze for Jesus until he comes again?

Newlywed Laura Story thought she had control over the great life ahead of her. After all, she followed Jesus and had a promising new job as a worship leader. Why would God not want to fulfill her dreams? But when Laura and her husband, Martin, faced a brain tumor, infertility, and a son’s birth defect, she realized she’d been looking for a happiness that comes from circumstances, rather than a deeper joy that comes from God. Again and again, Laura had to surrender her vision for her life so she could embrace God’s vision.

The modern world is full of change and upheaval. However, in this inspirational audiobook, Louise Hay reveals that true changes come from within. She points out that when we, as women, are willing to shift our internal ground, we operate on a much more expanded level in life. Louise's goal was to see all women experience self-love, self-worth, self-esteem, and a powerful place in society. You'll see how Louise's penetrating insights from decades ago are still just as relevant today.

Everyone has drive—a very strong energy and determination to achieve a goal or satisfy a need. But drive can remain dormant, and it alone isn't enough to create the kind of success in work and life you want. In What Drives You, former pro athlete, performance guide, and star podcaster Kevin Miller takes you on an enlightening journey to discover how this motivational force works and how to get yourself in the mindset you need to find your true inspiration and fulfillment.

In Reposition Yourself, best-selling author T.D. Jakes shares insights that will help you adjust to the many changes that life brings. This is a shrill wake-up call to take charge of your life now, confronting areas where subtle passivity, or even poor choices, may have stifled your creativity. It's also a how-to for managing change and maximizing life now. Covering financial, relational, and spiritual creativity, Jakes shows how adapting to transitional moments is the path to an enriched existence.

Jentezen pulls back the curtain on the enemy's tactics to hinder your spiritual growth, distract your attention, and keep you from living to your fullest potential during this critical season of prophetic history.

In The Band Director’s Lessons About Life, author Donald Lee draws on his decades as both a band director and religion teacher to create modern-day parables from the classroom. People of any religious persuasion - or none - will be delighted and inspired by how these band-room vignettes shine a spiritual light on everyday experiences. The parables are short enough to read in the bathroom yet deep enough to ponder for days.

What will we do with our lives, and with whom will we do it? In this story of flying and catching, Nouwen invites us all to let go and fly, even when we are afraid of falling. During the last five years of his life, best-selling spiritual author Henri J. M. Nouwen became close to The Flying Rodleighs, a trapeze troupe in a traveling circus. Like Nouwen’s own life, a trapeze act is full of artistry, exhilarating successes, crushing failures and continual forgiveness. He wrote about his experience in a genre new to him: creative non-fiction.

Each sunrise seems to bring fresh reasons for fear.They're talking layoffs at work, slowdowns in the economy, flare-ups in the Middle East, turnovers at headquarters, downturns in the housing market, upswings in global warming. The plague of our day, terrorism, begins with the word terror. Fear, it seems, has taken up a 100-year lease on the building next door and set up shop. Can you imagine your life without fear?

There’s never been anyone in history as radical as Jesus. From the way that He prayed, to how He interacted with sinners, to His sacrificial death on the cross, Jesus was a revolutionary. It’s just who He was. As His followers we are called to be like him. It’s not just something we should aspire to, it’s a reality that we must strive for every day. We can live as Jesus did — be radical like He was — because as Christians, Jesus lives in us and wants to live through us. When Jesus lives his life through us, we begin to do the things that He did.

"God has a plan for our lives", but what does that mean in practical terms? How do we know God's will for important life decisions, like who to marry, what job to take, what church to join? How can we be free if God has a perfect plan for us? Does suffering mean we are off track? How exactly does God speak? Author Jerry Sittser explores these questions and offers a biblically based approach that is truly liberating.

Every follower of Jesus Christ should be able to answer two simple questions: Who is investing in me?Whom am I investing in? God desires to pour an abundance of spiritual and emotional capital into your life - directly and through older and wiser believers. And he wants to use you to pour spiritual and emotional capital into the lives of others. Along the way, you’ll be changed. Others will change. God calls this process of spiritual investing "making disciples". It’s the heart of the Great Commission.

World-renowned Jesus scholar Marcus J. Borg shows how we can live passionately as Christians in today's world by practicing the vital elements of Christian faith. For the millions of people who have turned away from many traditional beliefs about God, Jesus, and the Bible, but still long for a relevant, nourishing faith, Borg shows why the Christian life can remain a transforming relationship with God. Emphasizing the critical role of daily practice in living the Christian life, he explores how prayer, worship, Sabbath, pilgrimage, and more can be experienced as authentically life-giving practices.

In The Storied Life, veteran author Jared C. Wilson explores the ins and outs of writers and writing, exploring the myriad ways the craft is more about transformation than simply communication. From decades of experience and with his signature wit, Wilson brings well-earned insight, autobiographical reflections, and meaningful meditations to the topic of writing as a way of life and as a way of worship, showing how the concept of Story—our personal stories and God's grand story of redemption—shapes fiction and non-fiction writers alike.

If you've ever wondered whether you have what it takes to homeschool your children, look no further. Parenting author, podcaster, and homeschool mom Monica Swanson is here to tell you: you can do it. In fact, it can be the most fun, family-unifying, character-building, life-equipping experience you and your children will ever have.

Years of counseling enabled Dr. Henry Cloud to observe people trying to work out the most important issues of life. If we sincerely want to "get life right" and quit repeating the same mistakes, 9 Things You Simply Must Do provides the practical guidance we need to live life to its fullest.

Behind monastery walls, men of God spend their lives preparing for the passage of death. Best-selling French author Nicolas Diat set out to find what their deaths can reveal about the greatest mystery faced by everyone - the end of life. How to die? How to respond to our fear of death? To answer these and other questions, Diat travelled to eight European monasteries including Solesmes Abbey and the Grande Chartreuse. Through extraordinary interviews with monks, he learned that their death experiences are varied and unique, with elements of peace, pain, humility, sorrow, and joy.

In his acclaimed books, renowned writer, speaker, and philosophy professor Dallas Willard explored the nature of Christian life in God's Kingdom. Yet one topic remained undisclosed: Willard's understanding of heaven and eternal life. In the months before his death, Willard engaged in moving and insightful conversations about the meaning of life and the life to come with close friend and theologian Gary Black, Jr. These inspiring dialogues were steeped in biblical theology as well as practical wisdom grounded in the here-and-now.