In Mike We Trust


Book Description

Honesty. He wanted it. He craved it. He could barely remember what it was. When Garth's uncle comes to visit, he's like a breath of very needed fresh air. Mike is laid-back and relaxed—and willing to accept Garth for who he is, without question. For the first time in a long while, Garth feels like he's around someone who understands him. But before long Garth is helping Mike with some pretty mysterious things and finds himself keeping secrets from everyone around him. He's forced to wonder: Is his uncle Mike really who he says he is, and can Garth trust him? More importantly, can Garth trust the person he's becoming? P. E. Ryan has crafted a clever and compelling novel that asks the question: How far will you go for your family, to find yourself?




We're All in This Together


Book Description

Build trust and achieve high performance in your business by redefining team culture. Have you ever been on a team where the talent was strong, but the team wasn’t very good? On the flip side, have you ever been on a team where not every single member was a rock star, but something about the team just worked? In this book, corporate consultant Mike Robbins dives deep into the ways great businesses build trust, collaborate, and operate at their peak level. As an expert in teamwork, leadership, and emotional intelligence, Mike draws on more than 20 years of experience working with top companies like Google and Microsoft, as well as his baseball career with the Kansas City Royals. And, while each team and organization have their own unique challenges, goals, and dynamics, there are some universal qualities that allow teams to truly come together and thrive. The book’s core principles include facilitating an environment of psychological safety, fostering inclusion and belonging, addressing and navigating conflict, and maintaining a healthy balance of high expectations and empathy. Throughout, Mike shares powerful exercises and tools he’s successfully utilized in the keynote speeches, group sessions, and corporate retreats that he delivers, so that you and your team can communicate more authentically, give and receive feedback with skill, and create deeper connections. “Mike Robbins shares tangible techniques that leaders and teams can use to excel, backs up his ideas with important research, and provides a road map for creating a team environment of personal connection and optimal performance.” — Tom Rath, New York Times best-selling co-author of How Full is Your Bucket?




In Schools We Trust


Book Description

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust. Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want. In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment. Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.




Can We Trust the Gospels?


Book Description

Is there evidence to believe the Gospels? The Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—are four accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings while on earth. But should we accept them as historically accurate? What evidence is there that the recorded events actually happened? Presenting a case for the historical reliability of the Gospels, New Testament scholar Peter Williams examines evidence from non-Christian sources, assesses how accurately the four biblical accounts reflect the cultural context of their day, compares different accounts of the same events, and looks at how these texts were handed down throughout the centuries. Everyone from the skeptic to the scholar will find powerful arguments in favor of trusting the Gospels as trustworthy accounts of Jesus’s earthly life.




In Teachers We Trust: The Finnish Way to World-Class Schools


Book Description

Seven key principles from Finland for building a culture of trust in schools around the world. In the spring of 2018, thousands of teachers across the United States—in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona—walked off their jobs while calling for higher wages and better working conditions. Ultimately, these American educators trumpeted a simple request: treat us like professionals. Teachers in many other countries feel the same way as their US counterparts. In Teachers We Trust presents a compelling vision, offering practical ideas for educators and school leaders wishing to develop teacher-powered education systems. It reveals why teachers in Finland hold high status, and shows what the country’s trust- based school system looks like in action. Pasi Sahlberg and Timothy D. Walker suggest seven key principles for building a culture of trust in schools, from offering clinical training for future teachers to encouraging student agency to fostering a collaborative professionalism among educators. In Teachers We Trust is essential reading for all teachers, administrators, and parents who entrust their children to American schools.




In God We Trust


Book Description

How to invest in high performing companies that do not participate in, contribute to, or support abortion or pornography.




Finding God's Life for My Will


Book Description

ECPA BESTSELLER • The lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist for award-winning contemporary Christian band Tenth Avenue North shows readers that by seeking God first and focusing on serving Him, we can live daily in His will. "Perhaps God isn't giving me the plan because He wants to be the plan." This was the aha moment for Mike Donehey after years of wrestling with his obsession to know God's specific plans for his life. He came to the realization that waiting for absolute certainty from God before making decisions may seem uberspiritual, but it can lead to a life of intense stress, paralyzing fear, and crushing regret--just the opposite of the freedom granted to those living a Christ-filled life. "This is my story...how I gave up begging to know God's will and began to ask His life to come and change my will." With his signature humor and relentless hunger for God, Mike will show you that discovering the Father's purpose and plan for our lives is not the shell game that we all too often make it out to be. If you're unsure what to do next, take heart and accept the ultimate invitation: learn to see God as the plan, not simply the formula to the plan.




Gemini Bites


Book Description

One of the strangest (and funniest) love triangles ever to hit YA fiction, when a pair of twins (one boy, one girl) both fall for the boy who moves in with them...who may or may not be a vampire.Judy and Kyle Renneker are sixteen-year-old fraternal twins in a rambling family of nine. They have a prickly history with each other and are, at least from Judy's perspective, constantly in fierce competition. Kyle has recently come out of the closet to his family and feels he might never know what it's like to date a guy. Judy, who has a history of pretending to be something she isn't in order to get what she wants, is pretending to be born-again in order to land a boyfriend who heads his own bible study.




Saints of Augustine


Book Description

Sam and Charlie used to be best friends. But then Sam cut Charlie out of his life—no explanation, no discussion, nothing. Fast-forward one year, and both Sam's and Charlie's lives are spiraling out of control. Sam has a secret he's finding harder and harder to hide, and Charlie is dealing with an increasingly absent dad and a dealer whose threats are anything but empty. Now, during the sticky Florida summer before their senior year, the ex-best friends are thrown together once again when they have no one else to turn to. A year had passed like smoke in a breeze. Suddenly, later was now.




Bring the Rain


Book Description

This is a story about faith. As simple as that sounds, sometimes all of us need an example of how faith inevitably becomes the single most important component of who we are, what we do, and what we will become. At forty-seven, Mike suffered a widow-maker heart attack, which stopped his heart. This event resulted in multiple cardiac arrests, cardiogenic shock, respiratory failure, pulmonary embolisms, and acute kidney injury. He was given a 0.5 percent chance of survival. His parents were advised to plan his funeral. Mike was unconscious for over two weeks, but he was never alone. Bring the Rain is an inspirational and personal account of Mike Mitcheners encounter with death and his time in heaven. This book is a quick read for anyone who is searching. Mike hopes that sharing his story will encourage others in their spiritual journey.