For decades, Steven Curtis Chapman's music and message have brought hope and inspiration to millions around the world. Now, for the first time, Steven openly shares the experiences that have shaped him, his faith, and his music in a life that has included incredible highs and faith-shaking lows. Readers will be captivated by this exclusive look into Steven's childhood and challenging family dynamic growing up, how that led to music and early days on the road, his wild ride to the top of the charts, his relationship with wife Mary Beth, and the growth of their family through births and adoptions. In addition to inside stories from his days of youth to his notable career, including the background to some of his best-loved songs, readers will walk with Steven down the devastating road of loss after the tragic death of five-year-old daughter Maria. And they'll experience his return to the stage after doubting he could ever sing again. Poignant, gut-wrenchingly honest, yet always hopeful, Steven offers no sugary solutions to life's toughest questions. Yet out of the brokenness, he continues to trust God to one day fix what is unfixable in this life. This backstage look at the down-to-earth superstar they've come to love will touch fans' lives and fill their hearts with hope. Includes black-and-white photos throughout.
The feature these fifteen diverse stories have in common is the humor that comes of pushing the reality of ordinary life just a few inches over the edge. In the first story, Duke Drunk in the Driveway, a family funeral turns into a double funeral seen through the eyes of a little girl, Gwennie, who also tells the story in Webs. Family shames and secrets are observed by a sharp-eyed child whose parents each try to win her allegiance against the other. The Knitting Nancy and Pastures White with Clover are both told by women at the other end of life, one celebrating her 80th birthday by imagining inviting people from all her old address books to a party, the other wheeling out of the nursing home to go searching for her Own True Love. The real world looks familiar enough in Ephesus, New Jersey. Here a young wife, cowed by the moral correctness of her husband, gets help from the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, as she takes her own stand. In Gorgonzola Suns a painter is encouraged by her husband through a bad day at an art fair. A letter carrier visists Alaska, in The Frontier, where his dream of eagles helps him break his attachment to a fickle woman. A grieving father in Concordia awaits the arrival of his paranoid son, trying desperately to stay in the present moment and not be overcome by memories of the past and worries of the future. Reality begins to escape the envelope in When the Gift Fits, when a young man finds himself the recipient of a mysterious gift that will teach him something he needs to know as he discovers its meaning. The mother of an endless brood of children escapes her family in Amelioration to live in a mini-warehouse. The next two stories in this collection are written as though the world were perfectly ordinary, but is it? A young man in The Almost Perfect Flaw discovers that his attraction to the perfect woman, who is "frail and light enough to carry in his arms with her long, dark hair swinging down over his elbow-- stricken down in youth by a death that did not leave marks." Longing to be respectable, he has to settle for a woman who is only almost perfect. The heroine of Change at the Fortune Cookie Factory inherits the family business and enhances both divisions, dough and fortunes, far beyond what her parents had accomplished. In the last two stories we move into a more altered realm. The Other Real World begins when a woman gives birth to twins, one of which is a bear cub. Raising the twins carries her into a realm of possibility other than city government and shopping malls. And the narrator of Melanchthon and the Process Server tries to save her numerous babies from disappearing from a house with sixty-five people living in it. "I can believe that there are already sixty-five only by counting them as they leave each morning to forage for their contributions to the daily soup. It is not possible. I compared the area of the house with the area of a person lying down multiplied by sixty-five; it is not possible. But there they go, out the door with their foraging implements: knives, hooks, nets, ropes, a Bible, a can of Dog-Away by which we snatch choice bones, and a ragged five-dollar bil. Sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five." These stories deal with life's tough issues, but always the humor rescues them from heavy solemnity.
Nadia, the Narrator, is a school teacher in Bordeaux in the same school as her husband, Ange. They live their profession as apostolates and gain an authentic happiness. But for some time, the couple is the subject of a general, harassing and inexplicable vengeance by the students. Nobody wants to sit in the front row anymore; no one wants to hear the sounds of their voices; the children seem to be afraid of them... Nadia tries to understand the nature of this strange conspiracy through the movement of the story.
Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest chilling novel that “will give you nightmares. The good kind, of course” (BuzzFeed) from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones. “Some girls just don’t know how to die…” Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange. Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life. Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.
Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mailroom of a corporate law firm.
These short stories are part of the plan--the plan that builds us up and keeps us going in life. We do not know how our life will be sometimes, but trusting in God helps us to discover life's little secrets and the possibilities.
Real World Poetry contains a group of individual poems, which I wrote over a very extended period of time. Some few of these poems have singularly appeared in some of my other writings. The mood of these poems is intended to address the lack of objective truth within many of the major philosophies of the world's cultures, and to dress those wounds, of cognitive dissonance, with a dressing of hope and guidance towards a more reasonable outlook upon life, and of life's struggles to discover a meaningful perspective, which can be embraced by reasonable peoples, allowing them to find a guiding path to peace-of-mind, and some form of contentment within a world that everyday waxes and wanes between its self proclaimed ancient morals, which have grown so crumbly with time's passing, as to be without any substantial or meaningful substance.
It is the will of God for every soul to be saved. The exodus of your consciousness out of the known and seen, into the unknown and the unseen. Be found in the arc when the flood of perversion reach its full momentum; get inside your human spirit. Let your consciousness be found covered in the Blood; enter into your arc, made and provided by God, hidden in flesh and bone, like the Son of man was hidden in flesh and bone. A new age is dawning upon man. The final battle is about the soul; a time of divine wisdom and discernment, beyond the world of human understanding and emotion; the weapons of our time are spiritual; only the spirit of man can overcome. A war-cry in the heavenlies, do you hear it? The final battle has just begun. Awake oh man of valor, for your time has come. Where are the generals? Where are the soldiers? Where's the watchman? Where are the warriors? Where are the kings? Where are the priests? Do you hear the drums in the distance, do you hear the rain, she's bringing the new sound, do you hear her coming, she carrying My heartbeat? Align o people of valor, awake and align, for the time has come!