I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die

I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die

Author: Sarah J. Robinson

Publisher: WaterBrook

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0593193539

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A compassionate, shame-free guide for your darkest days “A one-of-a-kind book . . . to read for yourself or give to a struggling friend or loved one without the fear that depression and suicidal thoughts will be minimized, medicalized or over-spiritualized.”—Kay Warren, cofounder of Saddleback Church What happens when loving Jesus doesn’t cure you of depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts? You might be crushed by shame over your mental illness, only to be told by well-meaning Christians to “choose joy” and “pray more.” So you beg God to take away the pain, but nothing eases the ache inside. As darkness lingers and color drains from your world, you’re left wondering if God has abandoned you. You just want a way out. But there’s hope. In I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die, Sarah J. Robinson offers a healthy, practical, and shame-free guide for Christians struggling with mental illness. With unflinching honesty, Sarah shares her story of battling depression and fighting to stay alive despite toxic theology that made her afraid to seek help outside the church. Pairing her own story with scriptural insights, mental health research, and simple practices, Sarah helps you reconnect with the God who is present in our deepest anguish and discover that you are worth everything it takes to get better. Beautifully written and full of hard-won wisdom, I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die offers a path toward a rich, hope-filled life in Christ, even when healing doesn’t look like what you expect.


To Shake the Sleeping Self

To Shake the Sleeping Self

Author: Jedidiah Jenkins

Publisher: Convergent Books

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1524761397

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “With winning candor, Jedidiah Jenkins takes us with him as he bicycles across two continents and delves deeply into his own beautiful heart.”—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things On the eve of turning thirty, terrified of being funneled into a life he didn’t choose, Jedidiah Jenkins quit his dream job and spent sixteen months cycling from Oregon to Patagonia. He chronicled the trip on Instagram, where his photos and reflections drew hundreds of thousands of followers, all gathered around the question: What makes a life worth living? In this unflinchingly honest memoir, Jed narrates his adventure—the people and places he encountered on his way to the bottom of the world—as well as the internal journey that started it all. As he traverses cities, mountains, and inner boundaries, Jenkins grapples with the question of what it means to be an adult, his struggle to reconcile his sexual identity with his conservative Christian upbringing, and his belief in travel as a way to wake us up to life back home. A soul-stirring read for the wanderer in each of us, To Shake the Sleeping Self is an unforgettable reflection on adventure, identity, and a life lived without regret. Praise for To Shake the Sleeping Self “[Jenkins is] a guy deeply connected to his personal truth and just so refreshingly present.”—Rich Roll, author of Finding Ultra “This is much more than a book about a bike ride. This is a deep soul deepening us. Jedidiah Jenkins is a mystic disguised as a millennial.”—Tom Shadyac, author of Life’s Operating Manual “Thought-provoking and inspirational . . . This uplifting memoir and travelogue will remind readers of the power of movement for the body and the soul.”—Publishers Weekly


Motherland

Motherland

Author: Elissa Altman

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0399181601

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“I’m reading this book right now and loving it!”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild How can a mother and daughter who love (but don’t always like) each other coexist without driving each other crazy? “Vibrating with emotion, this deeply honest account strikes a chord.”—People “A wry and moving meditation on aging and the different kinds of love between women.”—O: The Oprah Magazine After surviving a traumatic childhood in nineteen-seventies New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very different life, settling in Connecticut with her wife of nearly twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, still orbiting around her mother but keeping far enough away to preserve the stable, independent world she has built as a writer and editor. Then Elissa is confronted with the unthinkable: Rita, whose days are spent as a flâneur, traversing Manhattan from the Clinique counters at Bergdorf to Bloomingdale’s and back again, suffers an incapacitating fall, leaving her completely dependent upon her daughter. Now Elissa is forced to finally confront their profound differences, Rita’s yearning for beauty and glamour, her view of the world through her days in the spotlight, and the money that has mysteriously disappeared in the name of preserving youth. To sustain their fragile mother-daughter bond, Elissa must navigate the turbulent waters of their shared lives, the practical challenges of caregiving for someone who refuses to accept it, the tentacles of narcissism, and the mutual, frenetic obsession that has defined their relationship. Motherland is a story that touches every home and every life, mapping the ferocity of maternal love, moral obligation, the choices women make about motherhood, and the possibility of healing. Filled with tenderness, wry irreverence, and unforgettable characters, it is an exploration of what it means to escape from the shackles of the past only to have to face them all over again. Praise for Motherland “Rarely has a mother-daughter relationship been excavated with such honesty. Elissa Altman is a beautiful, big-hearted writer who mines her most central subject: her gorgeous, tempestuous, difficult mother, and the terrain of their shared life. The result is a testament to the power of love and family.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance


Too Much Loss: Coping with Grief Overload

Too Much Loss: Coping with Grief Overload

Author: Alan Wolfelt

Publisher: Companion Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13: 1617222887

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Grief overload is what you feel when you experience too many significant losses all at once, in a relatively short period of time, or cumulatively. In addition to the deaths of loved ones, such losses can also include divorce, estrangement, illness, relocation, job changes, and more. Our minds and hearts have enough trouble coping with a single loss, so when the losses pile up, the grief often seems especially chaotic and defeating. The good news is that through intentional, active mourning, you can and will find your way back to hope and healing. This compassionate guide will show you how.


My Child, My Gift

My Child, My Gift

Author: Madeline Pecora Nugent

Publisher: New City Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1565482913

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A comprehensive guide for parents who are unfortunately given the bad news regarding their preborn child with either an ultrasound or laboratory diagnosis of a potential or real congenital problem. It explains to them both secular and religious faithbased strategies on how to emotionally, psychologically and spiritually prepare for and assimilate the multiple and various emotions they will have to reconcile, as well as how to deal with the mixed messages they will be receiving from family members, friends, physicians, and their own inner conflicting feelings. My prayers have been answered in Madeline Pecora Nugents My Child, My Gift. From the Foreword by MARK X. LOWNEY "This volume is a must read for each parent, grandparent and friend. Nugent has answered every question asked regarding the pains and joys of motherhood. Madeline's words are written to mothers who crave honest counsel and anticipate earnest guidance. To call this book "Every Mother's Bible" would sound irreverent. But sincerely this is undoubtedly the most profound and complete guide to understanding what love means at the heart of becoming a mother. This treasure piece is essential to occupy every woman's library. TERRI GREEN Author of Simple Acts of Kindness Includes many insights and experiences of parents, along with bw photos of their children.


Notes on Grief

Notes on Grief

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 0593320816

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From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.


The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second)

The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second)

Author: Jasmin Lee Cori

Publisher: The Experiment, LLC

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1615193839

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The groundbreaking guide to self-healing and getting the love you missed “Years ago, I was on vacation and read The Emotionally Absent Mother. That book was one of many that woke me up. . . . I began the process of reparenting and it’s changed my life.”—Dr. Nicole LePera, New York Times–bestselling author of How to Do the Work Was your mother preoccupied, distant, or even demeaning? Have you struggled with relationships—or with your own self-worth? Often, the grown children of emotionally absent mothers can’t quite put a finger on what’s missing from their lives. The children of abusive mothers, by contrast, may recognize the abuse—but overlook its lasting, harmful effects. Psychotherapist Jasmin Lee Cori has helped thousands of men and women heal the hidden wounds left by every kind of undermothering. In this second edition of her pioneering book, with compassion for mother and child alike, she explains: Possible reasons your mother was distracted or hurtful—and what she was unable to give The lasting impact of childhood emotional neglect and abuse How to find the child inside you and fill the “mother gap” through reflections and exercises How to secure a happier future for yourself (and perhaps for your children).


Heartbroke

Heartbroke

Author: Chelsea Bieker

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1646221761

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From the acclaimed author of Godshot and “a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity” (T Kira Madden) comes a defining book of Californian stories where everyone is seeking or sabotaging love United by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California’s Central Valley, the characters of Heartbroke boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game with destiny. Heartbroke brims over with each character’s attempt to salvage grace where they can find it. Told in bright, snapping prose that reveals a world of loss and love underneath, Chelsea Bieker brilliantly illuminates a golden yet gothic world of longing and abandonment under an unrelenting California sun.


Dating Detox

Dating Detox

Author: Kevin and Lisa Cotter

Publisher: Ignatius Press

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1681497433

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"If we want love, why do we often settle for less?" — from the Foreword by Jason and Crystalina Evert Tired of toxic relationships, many young adults want to clean up their love lives. They desire to give their lives to Christ and turn away from sin—but without a concrete plan, they quickly fall back into old habits. Featuring daily reflections and resolutions, this forty-day detox provides a practical "cleanse" for those who want to purify themselves from the poisoned dating culture and live a life of authentic freedom, respect, and love. Inside you'll find: Compelling and clear explanations of "God's plans for love, dating, and sex" Hopeful true-life stories of people who have successfully moved from desiring chastity to actually living it Practical tools, habits, and strategies to live more virtuously with joy and freedom