Statistics say that as many as one in three girls will be sexually abused at some point in their childhood. Mandy Smith is one of those girls. Beginning at age three, Mandy's stepfather begins to molest her. When she finally breaks the family’s code of silence at age fourteen, she is shunned—abandonment that leads her down a dark path. When she finds herself pregnant as the result of rape, the deep love she feels for her unborn baby surprises her—and gives her hope for the future. But just as she is in the midst of making plans for their new life together, her parents perform one final act of deception, a betrayal that sends her into an abyss of depression, disordered eating, and PTSD.
Get ready to make a mess . . . and meet God along the way. Through playful experimentation and a dogged determination to meet God in every moment, "Making a Mess and Meeting God" provides new ways to grasp ancient truths. With these creative ideas for prayer, praise, and practice: - learn to slow down and enjoy the process. - rediscover your connection to God and others. - maybe even have a little fun.
Sometimes pastors fear that if people knew who we really are, we'd be disqualified from ministry. Not so, says pastor Mandy Smith. Transparently describing her pastoral journey, Smith shows how vulnerability shapes ministry, unpacking the biblical paradox that God's strength is revealed in our weakness. God has called you to lead just as the human you are.
Smith's sage advice will aid Christians in recognizing the simple joys of practicing their faith."--Publishers Weekly Western culture is in a tailspin, and Christian faith is entangled in it: we do kingdom things in empire ways. Western approaches to faith leave us feeling depressed, doubting, anxious, and burned out. We know something is wrong with the way we do faith and church in the West, but we're so steeped in it that we don't know where to begin to break old habits. Popular pastor and speaker Mandy Smith invites us to be unfettered from the deeply ingrained habits of Western culture so we can do kingdom things in kingdom ways again. She explores how we can be transformed by new postures and habits that help us see God already at work in and around us. The way forward isn't more ideas, programs, and problem-solving but in Jesus's surprising invitation to the kingdom through childlikeness. Ultimately, rediscovering childlike habits is a way for us to remember how to be human. Unfettered helps us reimagine how to follow God with our whole selves again and join with God's mission in the world. Foreword by Walter Brueggemann.
The secrets of the Mile High Club revealed . . . Mandy Smith spent twelve years strutting down the aisles as one of Richard Branson's sexy and sassy flight attendants, and in Cabin Fevershe tells the good, the bad and the downright naughty tales of life in the air. From dealing with projectile vomit and celebrity tantrums to sipping Manhattans and shopping in New York, this is riotous good fun. Set against a backdrop of exotic locations, the cast of zany characters includes everyone from Courtney Love to Sir Richard himself. Mandy's jet-setting job allowed her to search the globe for Mr Right, which led her to many steamy love affairs. She even joined the mile High Club, though not with a clumsy quickie in the toilet but a leisurely bonk in a Cessna. She's no Virgin, and in-flight entertainment has never been so risqu�!
Confession Is Good for the Soul . . . and for Your Leadership Why are so many Christian leaders burning out, losing faith, and abusing power? Rather than relying on our self-sufficiency and toughing our way through the tension, Mandy Smith invites us to confess it. As a pastor who also equips and encourages other pastors, Mandy feels the pain. Instead of offering more strategies to fix our problems, she reminds us of the call that first captured our imagination, directing our passions back to God and God’s people. In her book you will: experience the surprising freedom of grappling with a loving God be released from illusions of control into a lifestyle of healing hope rediscover your passion for ministry and your love for God and God’s people. Confessions of an Amateur Saint is a different kind of leadership book for a different kind of leader. And different is what we need these days—spiritual leadership refined by fire rather than burned out by it, a leadership unencumbered by unrealistic expectations, a leadership reconnected to the God who receives our confession with love and restores our soul for the task ahead. In a time where all Christian leaders are required to be pioneers, let Mandy skillfully guide you to a fresh, spiritually-fueled integrity, not weighted by false expectations but leading your people as your faith is increasingly shaped like Christ.
At every stage of education, sexual harassment is common, and often considered a rite of passage for young people. It’s not unusual for a girl to hear “Hey, Shorty!” on a daily basis, as she walks down the hall or comes into the school yard, followed by a sexual innuendo, insult, come-on, or assault. But when teenagers are asked whether they experience this in their own lives, most of them say it’s not happening. Girls for Gender Equity, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, has developed a model for teens to teach one another about sexual harassment. How do you define it? How does it affect your self-esteem? What do you do in response? Why is it so normalized in schools, and how can we as a society begin to address these causes? Geared toward students, parents, teachers, policy makers, and activists, this book is an excellent model for building awareness and creating change in any community.
Teaching a dog to follow a "target" is the best way to train both simple and complicated behaviors. Targeting is useful for everything from training the family dog to competitive obedience and agility. The detailed instructions in this book will deliver outstanding results! Save your back, work at a distance, or get tricky parts of the dog, such as the back feet, moving the way you want them to move. You'll learn how to train your dog to target your hand, a contact disk or a target stick, then utilize targets to build complex behaviors. Teaches you how to break down a behavior into easily trainable steps. Target training can be used for at-home manners, therapy dog work, canine sports, or to teach tricks. Targeting can help you get to your goal no matter what it is!
Use Best Practice Patterns to Understand and Architect Manageable, Efficient Information Supply Chains That Help You Leverage All Your Data and Knowledge In the era of “Big Data,” information pervades every aspect of the organization. Therefore, architecting and managing it is a multi-disciplinary task. Now, two pioneering IBM® architects present proven architecture patterns that fully reflect this reality. Using their pattern language, you can accurately characterize the information issues associated with your own systems, and design solutions that succeed over both the short- and long-term. Building on the analogy of a supply chain, Mandy Chessell and Harald C. Smith explain how information can be transformed, enriched, reconciled, redistributed, and utilized in even the most complex environments. Through a realistic, end-to-end case study, they help you blend overlapping information management, SOA, and BPM technologies that are often viewed as competitive. Using this book’s patterns, you can integrate all levels of your architecture–from holistic, enterprise, system-level views down to low-level design elements. You can fully address key non-functional requirements such as the amount, quality, and pace of incoming data. Above all, you can create an IT landscape that is coherent, interconnected, efficient, effective, and manageable. Coverage Includes Understanding how a pattern language can help you address key information management challenges Defining information strategy and governance for organizations and users Creating orderly information flows you can reuse and synchronize as needed Managing information structure, meaning, and lifecycles Providing for efficient information access and storage when deploying new IT capabilities Moving information efficiently and reliably to support your processes Determining how information should be processed and maintained Improving quality and accessibility, and supporting higher-value analytics Protecting information via validation, transformation, enrichment, correction, security, and monitoring Planning new information management projects in the context of your existing IT resources
From Lonely Planet, the world's leading travel guide publisher, Better Than Fiction 2, the follow-up to 2012's Better Than Fiction, is a second serving of true travel stories told by some of the world's best fiction writers including Dave Eggers, Jane Smiley and Karen Joy Fowler. Varied in place, plot and voice, these are stirring and evocative pieces that all share one common characteristic-they manifest a passion for the precious gift of travel, from its unexpected but inevitably enriching lessons about other peoples and places, to the truths, sometimes uncomfortable but always enlarging, it reveals about ourselves. By turns comic, dramatic, and moving - from Francine Prose's confrontation of the mysteries of India to DBC Pierre's search for Hemingway's muse in Italy - these 30 short tales reveal the joys, perils, and surprises of travel, and that truth can often be stranger (and better) than fiction. Whether on a plane en route to your own travel adventure, or at home settling in for a vicarious experience of world adventures, embark on this literary journey around the world and explore your passion for travel now! Authors: Lonely Planet, Don George, Dave Eggers, Jane Smiley, Karen Joy Fowler, Stefan Merrill Block, Francine Prose, DBC Pierre, Fiona Kidman, Alexander McCall Smith, Keija Parssinen, MJ Hyland, Catherine Lacey, Rebecca Dinerstein, Lloyd Jones, Porochista Khakpour, Jack Livings, Marina Lewycka, Lydia Millet, Suzanne Joinson, Sophie Cunningham, Christina Nichol, Mandy Sayer, Steven Amsterdam, Marie-Helene Bortino, Shirley Streshinsky, Steven Hall, David Shafer, Avi Duckor-Jones, Lily King, Aliya Whitely, and Natalie Baszile About Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves in. Lonely Planet's award-winning list travel literature anthologies include An Innocent Abroad (Independent Publishers Award, Silver for Essays, 2015) and A Fork in the Road (Lowell Thomas Award, Bronze for Travel Book, 2014; James Bear Award, Nominated for Travel Fiction, 2014). 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' -- Fairfax Media 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times Lonely Planet guides have won the TripAdvisor Traveler's Choice Award in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.
Yay finally your day has come! You are engaged and time to prepare for your wedding! A fun beautiful book to jot down all of your thoughts and ideas for the big day!
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.