Showing results by narrator "Crestina Hardie" in All Categories

Mothering is messy. Our joy and hope in raising children doesn’t change the reality that being a mom can be frustrating, stressful, and tiring. But just as God is using us to shape our children, God is using our children and motherhood to shape us. In The Better Mom, author Ruth Schwenk, herself a mother of four children, encourages us with the good news that there is more to being a mom than the extremes of striving for perfection or simply embracing the mess. We don’t need to settle for surviving our kids’ childhood. We can grow through it.

Meet the people who make it all happen—the photographers, chefs, and the writers who have helped orchestrate and document the perfect day for countless couples—as they find their own happy endings in three sweet novellas.

They've helped orchestrate the perfect day for countless couples. Now 12 new couples will find themselves in the wedding spotlight in the second Year of Weddings novella collection.

Kids bickering? Schedule jam-packed? Dishes and laundry both piled up high? Perhaps it's time you pressed pause and took a moment for yourself. Pressing Pause offers you a calm way to start your day, to refresh yourself in Jesus and drink deeply of His presence so that you are ready to pour out love, time, and energy into the people who matter most to you.

As the companion to the best-selling devotional Pressing Pause, Settle My Soul invites you to carve out a few moments in your day to deepen your relationship with the Lord through 100 encouraging devotions. Authors Karen Ehman and Ruth Schwenk are women who understand all that you're juggling, and they desire for you to experience the refreshment that comes only from the Lord. Each devotional includes a brief but meaningful devotional message, applicable scripture, guided prayer, and reflection questions.

At some point in our lives, we all find ourselves in a boat in the middle of a lake. We might be there due to a job loss or the death of a loved one. Maybe disability, divorce, or financial insecurity has stranded us. Patrick and Ruth Schwenk found themselves feeling battered after five miscarriages and then surrounded by the waves with Patrick’s cancer diagnosis at age 43. They were alone. Drifting. And that’s when their transformation began.

Meeting Nate was truly an accident - but Amelia finds that he's one of the few people she can count on. Amelia Woods is a small-town wallflower and the proud owner of Forget-Me-Nots, a quaint flower shop that once belonged to her mother. Despite her success in business, her love life has always been a bit lackluster. Until she spies on her ex-boyfriend's wedding and ends up in a horrifyingly embarrassing fender bender with handsome wedding guest Nate Gallagher.

MacKenzie "Mac" Davis left her hometown of Red Leaf, Wisconsin, to pursue a degree in journalism. But when her dad, the town's beloved Coach Davis, suffers a mild heart attack, Mac returns home to help out. She takes a job at the weekly newspaper, but instead of covering serious topics her editor wants her to write about social events - like the garden club's flower show and the historical society's afternoon tea.

Moms have been hoodwinked - tricked into believing lies that keep them from not only enjoying motherhood, but forging friendships with other moms who might tackle the tasks of motherhood differently. Myths such as “Mothering is natural, easy, and instinctive” cause moms to feel like failures if they have questions or apprehensions in raising their kids.