Joy in the Sorrow: How a Thriving Church (and Its Pastor) Learned to Suffer Well


Book Description

This is the moving story of Matt Chandler's battle with a potentially fatal brain tumor. But it's also the stories of those in his church family who taught him, and teach him, how to walk with joy in sorrow. Readers will find encouragement and strength to get through tough times, or to support others to do so.




Understanding Joy And Sorrow


Book Description

The cycle of joy and sorrow is perennial. Yet, they are largely of our own making. There is no market where we can go and buy either. As their source is not outside but within us, therefore, it is possible for us to transform or control them too. This is a vastly complex subject that man has struggled with for aeons. In Understanding Joy and Sorrow, Acharya Mahapragya, the tenth Acharya of the Jain Swetambar Terapanth sect and one of the most respected Jain thinkers of the world, outlines the causes, aspects and remedies of our unhappiness in twenty-one succinct chapters. Given here are chapters that address the role of anger, stress and desire in sorrow and those like detachment and fearlessness which help us be happy. Drawing upon anecdotes and examples, he holds up a mirror to our innermost fears and concerns. Alongside are five key exercises such as kayotsarga and antaryatra that provide a pathway to reaching mental calm. Kayotsarga is the process of relaxation of all the muscles in the body that helps one to release stress; antaryatra is the focussing of attention on the body's centre of energy to reach a state of balance and peace. Together with the other exercises given in the book these make it one of the most accessible books available on the subject, one that any reader can keep handy and benefit from by dipping into time and again.




The Prophet


Book Description

A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.




The Book of (More) Delights


Book Description

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.




Looking for Spinoza


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Hinds Feet on High Places


Book Description

Much-Afraid had been in the service of the Chief Shepherd, whose great flocks were pastured down in the Valley of Humiliation. She lived with her friends and fellow workers Mercy and Peace in a tranquil little white cottage in the village of Much-Trembling. She loved her work and desired intensely to please the Chief Shepherd, but happy as she was in most ways, she was conscious of several things which hindered her in her work and caused her much secret distress and shame. Here is the allegorical tale of Much-Afraid, an every-woman searching for guidance from God to lead her to a higher place.




Your Sorrow Will Turn to Joy


Book Description

Holy Week is not an obligation. It is an opportunity. In the chaos of our increasingly fast-paced and hectic society, the annual coming of Holy Week each spring is a reminder to pause and ponder, to carefully mark each day, and not let this greatest of all weeks fly like every other. It is a chance to walk with the church throughout the world and throughout time as she accompanies her Bridegroom through the eight most important days in the history of the world. And it is an opportunity to focus our minds on, and seek to intensify our affections for, the highest and most timeless realities in the universe. We have assembled a team of eleven pastors and scholars to walk us through Holy Week as we walk together with our Lord. This collection of short meditations includes readings for each morning and evening from Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter.




The Gravity of Joy


Book Description

“My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals.” Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew, only twenty-two years old, to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching at Yale suddenly felt shallow and distant—completely unattainable in the fog of grief she now found herself in. But joy was closer at hand than it seemed. As she began volunteering at a women’s maximum-security prison, she met people who suffered extensively yet still showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: “Joy doesn’t obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering.” This is the story of Angela’s discovery of an authentic, grounded Christian joy. But even more, it is an invitation for others to seize upon this more resilient joy as a counteragent to the twenty-first-century epidemics of despair, addiction, and suicide—a call to action for communities that yearn to find joy and are willing to “walk together through the shadows” to find it.




After Sorrow Comes Joy


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Defiant Joy


Book Description

We all spend a lot of energy reaching for happiness, but we're never quite able to hang on to it. Real life happens, and our circumstances take us on an emotional rollercoaster. Oftentimes, the Bible's call to "be joyful always" seems out of reach--but it doesn't have to be. We are called to live. And, miraculously, to live with joy. Join bestselling author Stasi Eldredge as she shows us how to choose a joy that stands against the tides of life's real and often overwhelming pain. Defiant Joy reminds us that a joy that is defiant in the face of this broken world was meant to be ours. This joy isn't simply happiness on steroids, it's the unyielding belief that sorrow and loss do not have the final say. It's the stubborn determination to be present in whatever may come and interpret both goodness and grief by the light of heaven. Defiant Joy will give you the encouragement you need to: Finally experience daily joy Learn how to have a posture of holy defiance when circumstances threaten to weigh down your soul Find new perspectives on the painful circumstances you've faced In Defiant Joy, Stasi invites us with courage, candor, and tender vulnerability to a place beyond sadness or happiness, leading the way as we learn how to maintain a posture of holy defiance that neither denies nor diminishes our pain but dares to live with expectant, unwavering hope.




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