Living Pain

As Liuan Huska went through years of chronic pain, she wondered why God seemed absent and questioned some of the common assumptions about healing. Countering a Gnosticism that pits body against spirit, Huska takes us on a journey of exploring how healing is not an escape from the limits of the body, but becoming whole as souls in bodies and bodies with souls. As chronic pain forces us to pay attention to our bodies' vulnerability, we come to embrace the fullness of our broken yet beautiful bodies. She helps us redefine what it means to find healing and wholeness.

What is your response when your life turns upside down? When you lose your job? When you receive a difficult diagnosis? Do you blame God or beg Him for a way out of your suffering? In more than a decade of misdiagnoses and debilitating treatments, Stephanie Tait admits she did plenty of both before hearing the two words that had drastically altered her life: Lyme disease. Yet she has discovered it's in her pain that Jesus is most present.

When a 200-pound glass partition fell on Donna Fado Ivery's head resulting in brain injury, disability, and chronic pain, she could no longer count on walking, speaking, or thinking. How would she care for her infant, her preschooler, her husband, and herself? How would she continue to serve as pastor? With humor and humility, this inspirational memoir speaks to Donna’s struggle through medical, social, and church prejudice with the abiding support of family and the Holy Spirit.

Women today often have sources of tremendous pain in their lives, such as infertility, divorce, domestic violence, eating disorders, and more. Yet, most leaders are not prepared to help women who have real pain from such traumatizing issues. If you want to be better equipped to help women in pain, this book was written for you.

When we are in painful circumstances, we tend to want to escape at any cost. Yet in doing so, we can miss the greatest opportunities of our lives. Writing about her own valleys - including loving a struggling son and reeling from the untimely death of her husband - Yolanda Cohen Stith shares hard-won insights. In the midst of her most painful experiences, Stith discovered that God shows up in the valleys in ways he doesn’t on the mountaintops. She came to believe that we need valleys to recognize our desperate need for God.

Is it possible to find strength in struggle and purpose in pain? Ask Dr. April Jones, a young mother who battled her two-year-old son’s cancer while getting her doctorate. Her struggle to make the heart-wrenching decisions with her family led to a discovery of God, courage, and a happiness within that helped her transform scary misfortune into a joy-filled life. In No Mess, No Message, Dr. Jones shares her real, raw journey and reveals insight into how powerful thinking and strong faith can lead to inner healing.

It is a question at the center of many arguments against the existence of God and a conundrum that stumps even the most devout worshipers. What do we make of pain and suffering? What does it cost us? What is its value? How can an all-loving God allow for world catastrophe, grave illness, and devastating carnage?

Whether it's a painful end or a joyful beginning—or even an uncertain middle—theologian and minister Amy Davis Abdallah has found something that helps: rituals. In Meaning in the Moment, she shows why we need rituals to help survive and even thrive through various seasons of life. Starting with the foundation that rituals are a core, and underexplored, part of Christian practice, Davis Abdallah draws from theology, psychology, and personal experiences in creating rituals for herself and others.

El 3 de noviembre de 2020, Tim y Aileen Challies recibieron la impactante noticia de que su hijo Nick había muerto. Estaciones de aflicción incluye una selección de las reflexiones de Tim en las que comparte la intensidad del duelo temprano, las dudas y temores que nos atormentan durante la pérdida, y la fe y el gozo que nos sostienen durante el dolor.

When things go horribly wrong and the world seems to be unraveling, how do you believe in God's goodness? How do you cling to hope? Chad Veach directs listeners away from clichéd Sunday school answers that fail to offer real comfort or provide faith-building insights. Instead he draws from God's promises in the Bible and from the story of his own daughter's diagnosis of a devastating and debilitating disease to reveal simple, purposeful steps for dealing with pain.

When Dr. Gene Baillie's wife, Gini, was diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer, their world was forever changed. This book shares the lessons that Gini and Gene learned as God led them through - and beyond - their darkest valleys on their own journey home.

When the reality of your pain doesn't line up with what you've been taught in church, then what? While many abandon their faith or embrace hopelessness, it is possible to discover the God who heals your heart in the midst of the pain. Matt Bays has been where you are. His unforgettable stories of loss and healing will usher you into a life where gratitude overpowers anger, hope overcomes despair, and hunger for God replaces indifference to God.

This book is a pathway to hope - a road map through the pain of grief and loss. Discover new strength through a new closeness to others and to God and make the decisions that lead to comfort, growth, and life.

Many people give up on God. It’s easy to trust in his goodness and strength when life is easy. But how do we persevere in our faith when life gets hard? Few people can show us how to do that better than Allan Schwartz.

An Indian American immigrant who grew up in white Southern culture, Prasanta Verma names and sheds light on the realities of ethnic loneliness. She unpacks the exhausting effects of cultural isolation, the dynamics of marginalization, and the weight of being other. In the midst of disconnection and erasure, she points to the longing to belong, the need to share our stories, and the hope of finding safe friendships and community. Our places of exile can become places where we find belonging—to ourselves, to others, and to God.

Life is full of challenges and even as Christians, we are not strangers to pain and suffering. The stories in the Bible have shown us that even favored kings like David and Solomon had their share of ordeals. The apostle, Paul, had to walk a lonely and hardship-filled road on his way to greatness. Job, a person worthy of admiration, went through sickness and almost loses the fight for his faith.

More Than You Can Handle, by Pastor Nate Pyle, takes us beyond Christian clichés to acknowledge the overwhelming pain of the world, the tenacious hope required to hold on to faith, and the surprising joy of God’s goodness as we wait for redemption.

Turn your weakest, most discouraging moments into your best, most uplifting moments. Listen and discover how God uses the things that seek to destroy us to become the very things that bring us salvation, bring us hope, bring us to prayer, bring us together, and ultimately bring us to heaven.

A Bridge of Hope tells the heart-wrenching story of the loss of Camilla Neff’s first full-term baby girl, Serena Nadine, who died unexpectedly during delivery. With compassion and empathy for grieving parents everywhere, Neff describes the raw emotions and anguish that she faced. She shares the deeply personal journey of wading through the layers of grief and pain that engulfed her, to learning to live again in a new reality after her world was shattered.

Patty is a licensed mental health professional and a counselor. She was invited to present on Christian Pastoral Counseling for hundreds of indigenous pastors and church leaders. After the unexpected death of their 33-year-old son, both she and her husband, Dennis, invested the next year in mental health counseling from a licensed grief counselor. This time she was the client - not the counselor. As an avid writer, part of her therapy included journal entries as she expressed the emotions of her walk through her grief. Her book is an accumulation of those journal entries.