"From changing diapers to playing chauffeur, it's easy to spend so much time and energy on your kids that at the end of a long, exhausting day, you have nothing left for your spouse. Too often, being a great parent comes at the expense of having a great marriage. In 'Great Parents, Lousy Lovers', relationship experts Dr. Gary Smalley and Ted Cunningham, authors of 'From Anger to Intimacy', show you that it is possible to be a great parent and a great lover. This book will help you and your spouse to begin reinvesting in your marriage--not just your children--because the best foundation for great parenting is a happy, healthy marriage. Filled with wit, wisdom, and practical advice, 'Great Parents, Lousy Lovers' will help you move from a frustrating, fatiguing, out-of-balance, kid-centered marriage to a strong, life-giving, fulfilling, couple-centered relationship" --Cover, p. 4.
Written for every mom who helps too much with homework just to impress the teacher and every dad who takes credit for his daughter’s soccer success, Trophy Child will give parents the encouragement they need to nurture their kids into who God created them to be. Our culture’s obsession with achievement often leads parents to form expectations for their kids based on the world’s standards, not on the Bible. As a result, their kids feel they never measure up. Trophy Child will help modern Christian parents create a home where children find success in following their heavenly Father’s leading for them—and readers know the joy of seeing their children embrace their full potential as children of God.
Over 600,000 copies sold! Crack the code on what motivates your man and how you can build a better marriage together! So you want your husband to . . . Be sensitive to your emotional and romantic needs? Comfort you when you're down? Spend more time with you? Listen to what you have to say? Appreciate you? Do more around the house? Spend time with the kids? Be your most intimate friend? In this revised and updated edition of his classic bestseller, Gary Smalley explains how women can use their natural, God-given qualities to build a better marriage. He helps women understand not only the way men think, but also how to move a man's heart. Using the latest research, stories from his own marriage, and case histories and biblical examples, Gary Smalley offers an insider's perspective into the world of men, including practical help and application so wives can deepen their relationships with their husbands and build a lasting marriage. Companion to If Only He Knew. Spanish edition also available.
For a Good Time, Call Home Ted Cunningham has a surprising definition of marriage: a man and a woman enjoying life together. In fact, God created marriage to be a blast—even when it feels like the rest of life is going to explode. This refreshing book will help you: Laugh together again (it’s easier than you think)Make sex even more exciting than on your honeymoonDiscover how to make doing dishes together a partyFight as teammates, not opponentsFigure out how to break the routine without breaking the bankRemember why your spouse is the most likeable person you know Fun Loving You puts laughter, fun, and even spin-the-bottle back into marriage. After all, life is hard. Marriage doesn’t have to be.
What if We’ve Got This Purity Thing All Wrong? In Young and In Love, pastor, author, and speaker Ted Cunningham boldly argues that young love should be celebrated, even promoted. Early marriages can be God’s will and often provide the key to sexual purity. With this in mind, Cunningham shares the secrets to a successful early marriage with those in their late teens and early twenties who are in love. This book suits anyone experiencing young love who struggles with naysayers who dismiss or hinder a God-designed relationship. It also addresses young adults who struggle with the teachings of other popular books on abstinence or on delaying dating or marriage. And it offers parents and pastors who feel concerned about a relationship a source of wise counsel that carefully prepares young adults for a godly marriage.
In our busy world, family time around the dinner table is easily displaced by other things. Ted and Amy Cunningham call parents to a slower way of living that allows them to intentionally build into their family’s relational and spiritual fabric and into the community around them. No more rushing to the table for a quick bite so we can get back to our other activities. Prioritizing mealtime slows us down long enough to enjoy our food, each other, and Jesus. Inspired by the slow food movement, Come to the Family Table seeks to encourage families with intentional strategies to engage one another and create the table as a space for practical ministry to their community.
ECPA BESTSELLER • A compelling emotional and spiritual case against hurry and in favor of a slower, simpler way of life “As someone all too familiar with ‘hurry sickness,’ I desperately needed this book.”—Scott Harrison, New York Times best-selling author of Thirst “Who am I becoming?” That was the question nagging pastor and author John Mark Comer. Outwardly, he appeared successful. But inwardly, things weren’t pretty. So he turned to a trusted mentor for guidance and heard these words: “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.” It wasn’t the response he expected, but it was—and continues to be—the answer he needs. Too often we treat the symptoms of toxicity in our modern world instead of trying to pinpoint the cause. A growing number of voices are pointing at hurry, or busyness, as a root of much evil. Within the pages of this book, you’ll find a fascinating roadmap to staying emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world.
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
