Life Growth

In Between Heaven and Mirth, James Martin, SJ, assures us that God wants us to experience joy, to cultivate a sense of holy humor, and to laugh at life’s absurdities—not to mention our own humanity. Father Martin invites believers to rediscover the importance of humor and laughter in our daily lives and to embrace an essential truth: faith leads to joy.

What causes faith to transform from an intellectual knowing about God to a passionate love story with God? Scott MacLellan asked this question as his daughter battled cancer and he looked for purpose in his family’s suffering. He couldn’t believe that God was uninterested, but he also rejected trite reassurances. He finally found a satisfying answer in the three-step passage—based on the writings of Solomon—that Christian mystics identified as a path through pain to true spiritual devotion. In The Ancient Ladder, Scott helps us apply the wisdom of past centuries to our challenges today.

With transformative insights and strategies drawn from Scripture, encouragement, and practical application from his own Spirit-led experience, bestselling author Pastor Samuel Rodriguez challenges you to reconsider what you know-and how you relate to-the Holy Spirit. Discover how to align, appropriate, and unleash the promise, power, and purpose of the Holy Spirit in all areas of your life, starting today.

You have a calling. First, God calls us all to know and love him. Second, for each individual there is a specific call—a defining purpose or mission, with implications for all of life. In this classic book on vocation, Gordon Smith invites you to discover your calling by listening to God and becoming a coworker with him. Smith explores how to pursue excellence in all kinds of work and how to continue growing throughout a lifetime.

In our constant search for a life filled with blessing and abundance, we often follow our human instinct - and then wonder why we come up short. God always has a better idea. And it most often requires us to move in the opposite direction. In The Opposite Life, pastor and author Alex Seeley explains the secret to living a powerful and abundant life through the upside-down kingdom of God. Each chapter unpacks the opposite-life principles that begin with our way of thinking and yield miraculous results.

Recenter God in your life with How Great Is Our God: Living A Worship-Led Life In a Me-Driven World by Grammy Award-winning worship artist Chris Tomlin. In this intimate look at his songs, Tomlin shows how worship music is more than just music but a tool for putting God first.

In this life-changing Bible study, John Eldredge distills a lifetime of wisdom into five practical and ready-to-implement practices for putting your life back together. These practices include: (1) the one-minute pause, (2) benevolent detachment, (3) practicing kindness, (4) getting outside, and (5) stepping back from technology. These practices, ready for the taking, will enable you to begin recovery, focus on what matters most, disengage from the tragedies of this broken world, and discover the restorative power of beauty.

How do I know that I’m good with God? Best-selling author Don Whitney (Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life) gets right to the point with 10 penetrating diagnostic questions. Are you governed increasingly by God’s Word? Are you more loving? Are you a quicker forgiver? These and other questions bring the lofty idea of “sanctification” into a helpful and convicting spotlight. With a new discussion guide optimized for small groups and Christian education, this concise and compelling book will transform your spiritual life and the life of your church.

We all need more energy, the vitality that helps us stay motivated, focused and productive in life. We know we receive energy from good nutrition, along with working out, adequate sleep and maintaining positivity. But there is another major source for the energy we need: having the right kinds of relationships with others. Not the ones that drain us, but the ones that refuel us.

Nichtern examines the Buddhist concept of the Eight Worldly Winds, the four paired opposites of praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and insignificance, and success and failure. By delving into these dichotomies, listeners gain invaluable insights into their relationships with others (including teachers, friends, leaders, the disgraced, and the adored) and themselves. With four transformative meditation exercises, this book empowers listeners to cultivate and access their innate confidence and wisdom.

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.

Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet's rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy's life continually intersects with and is informed by the creatures she meets. This restorative memoir reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 animals - Sy's friends - and the truths revealed by their grace.

What is spiritual direction and my spiritual direction? What are my "blind spots" and how can I uncover them? What keeps me from all the spiritual riches Christ has for me? How can I better understand where I am in my spiritual progress? Daniel Burke's Navigating the Interior Life will give you the tools you need to understand how and why we grow and die in the spiritual life and what we can do about it.

Have you joined a church or small group in hopes of experiencing real life change, only to be disappointed? Have you sat through inspiring sermons about what is possible when Christians gather together in mutually edifying relationships, only to recognize how cynical you have become after many failed attempts? Community may be one of the most over-promised, under-delivered aspects of the Christian life today. Individuals remain selfish and stuck in their ways.

Activists can only go so far for so long before burning out. Including extended spiritual practices in this revised edition, Phileena Heuertz offers her story and helps us see that contemplation is not just a luxury, it is essential - not only to a life of sustained commitment to justice, but to the fully human life in the Holy Spirit.

All of us encounter valleys on our journey with the Lord—those periods of spiritual desolation that are a painful yet unavoidable feature of our prayer life. Spiritual desolation is as complex as we are, so understanding what is happening and responding to it properly are critical to reaching the heights of holiness. With warmth and understanding, Fr. Gallagher carefully identifies in this book the various forms of spiritual and nonspiritual desolation and supplies the remedy for each.

Anxiety leads us to succumb to fear and fight peace. Anxious living is a distortion of good motives, blocking the clarity of stillness and rest. Alan Fadling has also felt mastered by worry, but he brings counsel on how to learn a better way and who to look to for it: Jesus, "the ultimate non-anxious presence." He constructs a posture from which we can rest more deeply, live more fully, and lead better.

Since the Garden of Eden, sin has ravaged people's lives, leaving behind a plethora of troubling problems such as anxieties, fears, insecurities, confusion, unbelief, bitterness, sexual hang-ups, and even addictions. Most people look for answers in all the wrong places. They ought to look within. They ought to look at I. I is the "self-life".

Pastor and author Dr. Derwin L. Gray believes there is a path to true happiness. It is a life lived with Jesus by embracing the Beatitudes found in Matthew 5:1-12. As you walk through these words, Jesus invites you into a new life-giving rhythm that cultivates a flourishing, happy, transformative life.

This unabridged audio edition of The Life God Blesses points out that God is constantly searching for people to bless. He's not looking for men and women with special talents or unusual intelligence or great strength but for those who possess a certain kind of heart. Find out how to have a heart that God cannot resist and you will become a channel of his blessing for your family, your church, and your world.