Empty-nester Grace Dowben finds solace in her marriage, community, and volunteer work, but she suddenly must decide how to resolve her love for a newcomer who is young enough to be her son.
There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory. In September 2006, popular sports columnist and lifelong University of Tennessee fan Clay Travis set out on his "Dixieland Delight Tour." Without a single map, hotel reservation, or game ticket, he began an 8,000-mile journey through the beating heart of the Southland. As Travis toured the SEC, he immersed himself in the bizarre game-day rituals of the common fan, brazenly dancing with the chancellor's wife at a Vanderbilt frat party, hanging with University of Florida demigod quarterback Tim Tebow, and abandoning himself totally to the ribald intensity and religious fervor of SEC football. Dixieland Delight is Travis's hilarious, loving, irreverent, and endlessly entertaining chronicle of a season of ironic excess in a world that goes a little crazy on football Saturdays.
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.
As tenacious aliens transform the war torn Earth into a replica of their own terrifying world, a handful of scientists, soldiers, and citizens prepares to fight back.
Christianity is Facing an Authenticity Crisis... Why do we feel the need to hide our struggles, doubts, and fears? Why is there sometimes a disconnect between our faith and our feelings? Why do we sometimes wonder, God, what are you doing? Are you even there? For some, this comes from being handed a shame-based religion, for others, an image-keeping faith of rules and regulations. For others still, Christianity is a hamster wheel of performance. And this led me to realizing ... I can't do this anymore. I can't pretend. I can't hide the battle we all face in living as sons and daughters of God in a fallen world. I can't deny that more than I'd like to admit, I live from an "orphan identity," stuck in a false narrative of a distant God. But there is another way, and I'd be honored to share it with you. Once you embrace who you really are, that's when the fun begins. I've learned that the path to living "2.0" is through facing our haunting questions with honesty. It's by acknowledging the difficulty of transformation and the struggle to turn to a God who wants something more for you than guilt, shame, and performance. In The Hidden Delight of God, you will learn to walk in what Christianity was intended to be... Freedom. Grace. Authenticity. This book is an invitation for you to discover the simple, but profound truth that God delights in his kids, and that realization is the first step to killing your fear, finding your freedom, and taking back your life.
When Ormond McGill's wife, Delight, died, he was grief-stricken. Ormond wrote this book to bring solace to all those who hold in their hearts a loved one who has passed on. Here, with Ormond as her scribe, Delight answers many questions about life after death.
There's an unspoken tension between happiness and discontentment. You love your family and friends, but complicated relationships drain and discourage you. You're grateful for work but sometimes feel overlooked. You want to follow Jesus yet feel pulled in a dozen different directions. You know God loves you, yet insecurities bully you. The voices of this world are so loud, how can someone possibly hear God's still small voice? The injustice and wounds of this world are so great, how can someone possibly experience lasting joy? Your friends at (in)courage know how you feel and have grappled with these questions too. Find the answers you're looking for in Courageous Joy, a six-week Bible study that celebrates God's goodness and shows you how to experience true joy right where you are. If you want to be able to "rejoice in the Lord always" not just in theory but in everyday practice, if you long for a profound sense of calm and confidence in every season and situation of life, this study will light the way.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As Heard on NPR's This American Life 'The delights he extols here (music, laughter, generosity, poetry, lots of nature) are bulwarks against casual cruelties . . . contagious in their joy' New York Times The winner of the NBCC Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyric essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders. Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an aeroplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything other subject, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world - his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis. The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight. *** 'These charming, digressive "essayettes" surprise and challenge more than a reader might expect . . . experiences of "delight," recorded daily for a year, vary widely but yield revealing patterns through insights about everything from nature and the body to race and masculinity.' New Yorker 'Pure balm for your soul. Savor one at a time every morning, this summer, or wolf them all down en masse on a gorgeous sunny day.' Celeste Ng 'A reminder of what the personal essay is best at: finding the profound in the mundane . . . His delight is infectious. It's hard to read Gay and not to be won over.' Seattle Times
Food is meant to be enjoyed, and Sophie Dahl would have it no other way. Growing up in a family of true food lovers, she began cooking at a young age and never looked back. Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights presents nearly one hundred of her tried-and-true recipes, organized around the four seasons and using the freshest ingredients available. Accented with her stories about how she came to know these foods and why she loves them, Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights provides a complete picture of what a meal should provide. From lemon-scented summer stews, to crisply burnished pies, to salads and soups for breezy lunches, to decadent desserts, Sophie Dahl cooks food that is indulgent, delicious, and wholesome.
You bring God joy.And God intends the feeling to be mutual. This book will help you lean into Joyful Delight, Thoughtful Delight, Playful Delight, Delicious Delight, and Desirable Delight in your life with God. Delight! invites you into a real, accessible, and down-to-earth way of experiencing the adventure of following Jesus. Of course you will know struggle and failure. Of course you will know grief and shame. But you don't have to carry the burden of getting your faith walk right; you already make Jesus jump for joy and sing his happy song. The Creator of the Universe thinks you're something special. Even when life is confusing or difficult, the Spirit is shaping you with care and delight. Are you tired of religion? Are you beat down by anxiety or doubt? Do you long for something more in your life of faith? Let go of your burden. Take a deep breath. And let's explore what it means to follow Jesus on the adventure of your life-an adventure marked by challenge and repentance and difficulty, but marked most fundamentally by mutual delight! The LORD will take great delight in you; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. (Zephaniah 3:17) "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full." (John 15:11) From the Book "Following Jesus isn't supposed to weigh you down; it's supposed to make you dance. Following Jesus isn't supposed to limit your fun; it's supposed to open you up to freedom you have never known before. Following Jesus isn't a burden to carry, even when you carry your cross; to follow Jesus is certainly to know suffering and trouble and dying to self and struggling with doubt, but fundamentally-fundamentally!-following Jesus is about delight. Jesus delights in you; and Jesus loves it when you feel the same about him. That's what following Jesus is all about." What People Are Saying In Delight!, Justin Rossow widens our lens for understanding grace as he explores the delight God has in us and the delight God gives to us. The impact will ripple into every area of your spiritual walk. Delight! brings both lightness and depth to the Scriptures and to our relationships with our Great God. HEIDI GOEHMANN, author of Altogether Beautiful: A Study of the Song of Songs Have we lost our sense of delight? Today delight seems to be reduced to each person's version of personal happiness. Or delight is simply missed altogether because we are too busy and anxious to notice it. In a deeply reflective and devotional way, Rossow puts delight back on the agenda of the theology of the Christian life. Taking us on a biblical journey of discovery around God's vision of delight for us, he invites us to receive this gift, revel in it, and, yes, delight in it! LEOPOLDO A. SANCHEZ M., author of Sculptor Spirit: Models of Sanctification from Spirit Christology I have spent a great deal of my life believing in my head that Jesus loved me, yet living practically as if I were always on the verge of being in big trouble. This book offers a refreshing, biblical vision of how to live a life captivated and covered by the love of God. Even more astonishing is the discovery of a God who is full of delight. JAMIE WIECHMAN, cofounder of Breathe Life Ministries