Standing at that magical place where sand meets sea, you likely have imagined putting a message in a bottle, consigning it to the waves, hoping it might some day reach another shore, and then not only be read but, incredibly across space and time, make a difference in other lives now connected to your own. It has happened to me, and I must sing of it. In the autumn of 1966 I let the waves carry off a poempassed around to students, family and friends, no need for even my name on it. Its message was simple: Keep heart, you are not alone; love, stronger than strong walls, will come, helping your heart in hiding grow wings, feeble perhaps at first, but wings! Word astoundingly began to come back in 1969, and has continued since, that Please Hear What Im Not Saying was indeed reaching other shores, across space and time was indeed making a difference in other lives. What follows attests to the power of words from the heart to touch other hearts, sometimes even to change other lives. Read on. You, too, will sing of it.
There are great rewards that come along with being a foster parent, yet there are also great challenges that can leave you feeling depleted, alone, and discouraged. The many burdens of a foster parent's day--hurting children, struggling biological parents, and a broken system--are only compounded by the many burdens of a foster parent's heart--confusion, anxiety, heartache, anger, and fear. With the compassion and insight of a fellow foster parent, Jamie C. Finn helps you see your struggles through the lens of the gospel, bringing biblical truths to bear on your unique everyday realities. In these short, easy-to-read chapters, you'll find honest, personal stories and practical lessons that provide encouragement and direction from God's Word as you walk the journey of foster parenting.
Charter schools have emerged as one of the central policy debates in U.S. education - and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute team has been a key participant in this debate since day one, both nationally and in Ohio. Despite President Obama's call for states to strengthen the charter sector and widen the options it provides to needy youngsters, established interests in education and politics oppose this disruption of the status quo. Ohio has struggled with these issues for more than a decade, struggles in which the authors of this book have played influential - and controversial - roles, including that of an actual authorizer of charter schools. They write from wide experience on the ground as well as extensive research and nationally-respected policy expertise.
Few things go deeper than relationships with parents, or are more complex. And as children become adults and their parents move inexorably towards decline and death, the complexity only deepens even as a primordial simplicity reemerges. While the reflections in these poems are of course personal, they touch on things universal. Many besides me have struggled with ambivalence towards their parents, and all of us, unless the natural order is reversed, have to live through the fiery crucible of our parents dying. Come learn of the man from whom I learned stability, integrity, roots; come learn of the woman who opened me to beauty, empathy, wings. Ponder in the process whence might have come your own grounding and soaring.
Just what is poetry, and who writes it, and why do they write it, and did they always write it or is it something that develops gradually, and how do they go about it, and what are some of the frustrations, and if the frustrations are great what even greater rewards are sufficient to keep spurring them on, and who are they writing for, and where do their ideas come from, and what influence do other poets and writers have on them, and, after repeated rejections from publishers, what keeps them from chucking it all in favor of less unpredictable not to mention more remunerative undertakings? The poems that follow, addressing in some manner all of these questions, are simply one individual's attempt to discern and then to follow what feels to him a calling or, using Joseph Campbell's word, his bliss. A "Dialogue with Events" section in Ira Progoff's Intensive Journal Program provided me a fruitful place back in the late 1970's to explore the significance in my life of becoming a psychotherapist. In Crafting Soul into Words I am in effect dialoguing with the evolving event in my life of becoming a poet. This collection will likely speak most to other writers, actual or aspiring, who will be able to identify with writing's steep and winding but exhilarating way. It may also appeal to those curious to know something of poetry's allure, as well as something of what makes this particular poet tick. Who knows, it may even have the felicitous effect of giving to one seldom lifting a pen an extravagant notion. Each experiences the universe uniquely, each has a singular story to tell-the joy is in finding the words!
Addiction of one kind or another touches us all. Given its destructive course, it would seem an unequivocal curse to be lamented. The thrust of The Elixir of Air, however, is that it need not be. Addiction can in fact be a hidden blessing for what it forces us to face and change in our lives, for the spirit journey it rudely launches us on. Which is not to glamorize the searing pain experienced by addicts and their loved ones. Addiction''s gathering force is such that only searing pain can stop us in our tracks long enough to make possible a life transformation. We are in the presence here of the great mystery of death required for rebirth. Addressing addiction brings us to holy ground.
Though the words "foster care" are not in the Bible, the act of caring for the vulnerable is clearly important to God. Perhaps nowhere is that kind of tender attention and care for the vulnerable more evident than in the act of fostering a child. But as foster parents pour themselves into the children God has called them to care for, they may find themselves feeling emptied, in need of being refreshed and reinvigorated for the day to come. With 60 devotions written especially for foster parents by a foster parent, Filled offers a special boost of spiritual energy and encouragement particular to the unique joys and challenges faced by those who open their homes and hearts to kids in need of love. Each reading includes Scripture, a real-life anecdote from the author's experience as a foster parent, an explanation of the biblical text, and suggestions for continued reading.
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This is the story of two young men finding their way in the world. It isn't the easiest thing when you either don't have the money or the know how to do it. All these boys had was determination and a higher power to guide them. How else could someone get into so many situations and come out unscathed, and the better for it each time. This book is about learning to do what's right, the strength to overcome all odds despite your circumstances. The most important thing is it doesn't matter where you start, it's where you end up that counts. These boys find out humility is what makes us all stay grounded, and thinking too much of yourself never gets you far. The thought of judging others is out of the question because no two people go through the same experiences or learn the same lessons, you simply make the most out of every journey.
Memento mori," intoned the ancients. But why remember death, why keep the thought of death before us? Is not the goal to live, in effect to fight death, to stave off as long as we can the wrinkles and the gray? "Think positive," intones our culture. "Look on the bright side. Granted death will claim us in the end, it doesn't have to cheat us out of life in the meantime." "On the contrary," Death counters. "If you let me, I can serve you as no other servant, teach you as no other teacher. Keep conscious of me and discover life. Embrace me as your dark lover, and find energy in your mission." Embraced It Will Serve You invites readers to dialogue with the ever-present shadow of death in order to come to the realization amounting to a revelation: the kingdom of life is at hand!
The Clouds Are Big With Mercy is the story of one girl's battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. The narrative is interwoven with factual information about these disorders.
Gentle Warrior John Yungblut--likely challenging and possibly disturbing--presents a radical revisioning of the Christian myth which will fit into the preconceptions neither of creedal Christians holding to a literal, exclusive faith nor of critics of Christianity who have left it behind with a "good riddance!" Make no mistake, his pacifist leanings notwithstanding, John Yungblut was a warrior. He loved Christianity too much not to fight for its life. He passionately believed that, uninformed by evolutionary and depth psychological revelations of the past century and a half, traditional Christianity is not only increasingly antiquated and irrelevant but actually an obstruction to the emergence of a spirituality of the Earth. If you know yourself to be drawn both to the interior life of a contemplative and to the outward manifestation of this life in action on behalf of peace and social justice, and if you have yet to meet the mind and spirit of John Yungblut, you have awaiting you a magnificent discovery.
Pondering the immensity of our bond with Earth carries us beyond Faith I-low love a wave apart from the ocean waving? Only in the context of the story of the Universe is Earth intelligible, so whatever love we feel for her extends naturally to the Universe as a whole, and to the magical dynamic conceiving and unfolding it across literally billions of years. The year-by-year blossoming of a human child that so rightly astounds and delights us mirrors nothing less than the blossoming of the very cosmos! The scientific, necessarily inadequate, nomenclature for the magical dynamic, of course, is evolution, whose presence, power, and stupendous splendor have largely been lost to textbook abstraction and religious contention. How so very sad when the wonder of it is we are not only grounded in this Great Story but called to extend it! Could deeper ancestry, greater dignity, richer identity, loftier destiny be conceived? Think of the poems and quotations in If A Child, Why Not A Cosmos? as lovesongs to Earth and evolution, hoping to coax from readers lovesongs of their own.
Slavery and the Civil War-what is the connection, and does it matter? From the view point of the book in your hands, the connection is absolute and it matters greatly. Steppingstones to the Civil War invites readers to revisit American history, especially those believing that the devastation costing 600,000 lives (think on that figure) and shaking to the foundations the American experiment was at root about states' rights, economy and Northern imperialism and only incidentally about slavery. As the chapters on John Calhoun, Alexander Stephens, Jefferson Davis and the Commissioners from the first seven seceding states (marshalling their strongest arguments to convince other slaveholding states to join the Confederacy) attest, Southern politicians, before the war broke out, proudly and defiantly agreed that the bone of contention, the states' right, the institution worth fighting over even if it meant the dissolution of the Union, was slavery and the racial and economic order it established and perpetuated. As soon as the fighting was over, however, in order to salvage Southern honor and effect reconciliation between once-warring whites, a different story was constructed: the cause though lost was in fact noble since primarily about independence, states rights, and justifiable protection of hearth and home against invasion. This denial of slavery's centrality not only distorts history but, for those whose ancestors were so long abused, literally adds insult to injury. If there is ever to be genuine healing between the races in this country, it will begin with facing and accepting painful truth, which alone can set us free. The cancer infecting the vitals of America, compromised into itsvery founding in order that there could be an America, despite inspiring efforts of a brave minority over many decades was virulent enough to resist every effort short of the radical surgery of civil war. The tragic story can yet set us free, if with courage we face the truth of it.
Charlie Finn unveils the faith and vision of John Yungblut. At the heart of this story, readers will discover a spiritual "genealogy," - Rufus Jones, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Carl Jung influenced John Yungblut, who in turn became a spiritual guide and friend to Charlie Finn. For John Yungblut, mysticism was the "heart and core of all true religion." Yungblut's gospel of evolutionary Christianity, underscoring the call for contemplatives in action, first caught Finn's attention as he read, by chance one evening, Yungblut's contributions to the book Speaking of Silence, a dialogue about contemplative life. Finn's joy and enthusiasm for his subject permeates this biography. Discussion questions included.
This book is unique in the sense that the author, Andra Pickett, actually seeks the message that is embodied in each spoken word or words written herein. The author has challenged the soundness of a tradition that says the spoken word is the spirit of the message. Ironically, he advances the notion that the opposite is true, and that the message is the spirit of the word. In the first chapter for instance, the sub-title: in the search to find one's self, the message is unrevealed, but is it, for example the unrevealed message is that a man's shadow carries his burdens. The author in this book seeks to reveal the messages hidden in words throughout all 21 short chapters, spoken words, short stories and poems. The concept of The Message Seeker is interesting, but reading this book requires one to carefully read with an open mind. The messages that are unrevealed in the sub-titles are indeed revealed from within the content of the chapters. The author and the reader experience, the message seeker's journey through what turns out to be a true story. As you read this book you are mystified by the author's ability to stand beside him self, also, to blend words together as he seeks to reveal the hidden messages contained therein unto his own understanding. Remember, when reading this book; read with an open mind, an inner voice reveals each hidden message that lies beyond consciousness in each word(s). Be prepared to encounter a unique experience in reading this true story written by Andra Pickett. http://www.bookpubco.net/ Arthur Stovall, Ph.D. Story Analyst
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