Recommendations based on "The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary"

An essential set of tools and principles for healing your heart, finding love, and loving life. Finding love can be hard. Being single can feel even harder. In Love Life, world-renowned coach and New York Times bestselling author Matthew Hussey provides a practical roadmap for letting go of past relationships, overcoming the fear of getting left behind, and finding the love we want. Sometimes it feels like life and love are working against us. Just finding someone we like can be a struggle. Even when we do, we often find they're not ready, or they want different things. Then there's the internal fears and anxieties that lead us to self-sabotage--the ones that make us indulge the wrong behavior, hold back from expressing our needs for fear of losing someone, or overinvest in people and lose ourselves in the process. Love Life sheds light on these common patterns and how to overcome them, by showing us how to adopt new standards, elegantly communicate them, and develop the deepest levels of confidence that underpin them. Like many of us, Hussey has gone through major life changes over the past decade, and he opens up about his experiences, vulnerabilities, and mistakes. Love Life is about doing love better. More than a book about romantic relationships, Love Life shows us how to take control of each of the major relationships in our lives: our relationship with others, our relationship with ourselves, and our relationship with life itself. Our love lives have the power to elevate or eradicate the adjacent joy in our lives. Love Life sets you on the path to finding the love of your life, while deepening your love for life.

Many of us find ourselves caught somewhere between unbelieving activists and inactive believers. We can write a check to feed starving children or hold signs in the streets and feel like we've made a difference without ever encountering the faces of the suffering masses. In this book, Shane Claiborne describes an authentic faith rooted in belief, action, and love, inviting us into a movement of the Spirit that begins inside each of us and extends into a broken world.Shane's faith led him to dress the wounds of lepers with Mother Teresa, visit families in Iraq amidst bombings, and dump $10,000 in coins and bills on Wall Street to redistribute wealth. Shane lives out this revolution each day in his local neighborhood, an impoverished community in North Philadelphia, by living among the homeless, helping local kids with homework, and "practicing resurrection" in the forgotten places of our world. Shane's message will comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable . . . but will also invite us into an irresistible revolution. His is a vision for ordinary radicals ready to change the world with little acts of love.

"I am the descendant of drinkers and drifters better at passing on their love for the bottle than family history..." Prepare yourself for an unvarnished, harrowing look at one Christian's life.A powerful memoir of knowing and being known by God through the pain of loss, tragedy, and brokenness—Even in Our Darkness explores what it means to fend off doubt and despair, even in the most painful trials.Jack Deere tells the true story of his life growing up near Fort Worth, Texas in the 1950's and the disintegration of his family following his father's suicide. Despite his difficult childhood and an inclination toward the depression that had crushed his parents, Deere describes how he began to wrestle with Christianity and how "God was...slipping in through the crack of an open wound."In his mid-twenties, Jack rose to fame and success as a leading scholar, popular speaker, and bestselling author. But despite being rescued and exalted, Jack was devastated in the years that followed, losing his troubled son to suicide and his wife to alcoholism. Only then did he fully face his own addictions, surrender control, and experience true healing.An authentic story of the Christian life, Even in Our Darkness is like following an experienced guide through a barren country. Like many believers, Deere has had experiences that nearly destroyed him, and he was shown, by grace, how to overcome life's disappointments and learn to hear God speak in unbelievable ways, despite the darkness that surrounds us."Unmasked, unsettling, and unforgettable . . . this will change the landscape of your soul." —Ann Voskamp, bestselling author of The Broken Way and One Thousand Gifts.

Daily meditations taken from the works of an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and preacher who has articulated what he sees with a freshness and clarity and energy that hails our stultified imaginations.

Like Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's groundbreaking On Death and Dying, Susan Anderson's book clearly defines the five phases of a different kind of grieving--grieving over a lost relationship. An experienced professional who has specialized in helping people with loss, heartbreak, and abandonment for more than two decades, Susan Anderson gives this subject the serious attention it deserves. The Journey From Abandonment to Healing is designed to help all victims of emotional breakups--whether they are suffering from a recent loss, or a lingering wound from the past; whether they are caught up in patterns that sabotage their own relationships, or they're in a relationship where they no longer feel loved. From the first stunning blow to starting over, it provides a complete program for abandonment recovery.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Bird by Bird comes a personal, wise, very funny, and “life-affirming” book (People) that shows us how to find meaning and hope through shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life.  "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." —San Francisco Chronicle Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: "Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." She has a friend whose morning prayer each day is "Whatever," and whose evening prayer is "Oh, well." Anne thinks of Jesus as "Casper the friendly savior" and describes God as "one crafty mother." Despite—or because of—her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. Since Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird, her fans have been waiting for her to write the book that explained how she came to the big-hearted, grateful, generous faith that she so often alluded to in her two earlier nonfiction books. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers—her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. And Traveling Mercies is a welcome return to those lives, as well as an introduction to new companions Lamott treats with the same candor, insight, and tenderness. Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers."

"I am grateful to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God in angry violence. This is a part of a healthy grief which is not often encouraged." - Madeline L'Engle?Written with love, humility, and faith, this brief but poignant volume was first published under a pseudonym, as it was considered too raw. Written moment-to-moment as Lewis processed the loss of his wife to cancer, this is more than a mere book on grief, but a visceral hand outstretched in the darkness, a reluctant guide through the "mad midnight moments" of mourning and loss. ?Key learnings that Lewis discusses are:· Pain is instrumental in the process of spiritual growth· Through hardship we often gain the best wisdom· Memories are treasures that will comfort you tomorrowThis work inspired the award-winning film The Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins.? Writing A Grief Observed as "a defense against total collapse, a safety valve," he came to recognize that "bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love." A Grief Observed reminds us that, “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

Cold Tangerines is a collection of stories that celebrate the extraordinary moments hidden in our everyday lives. It is about God, and about life, and about the thousands of daily ways in which an awareness of God changes and infuses everything.

"How did Yancey manage to survive spiritually despite early encounters with a racist, legalistic church that he now views as almost cultic? In this, his most soul-searching book yet, he probes that very question. He tells the story of his own struggle to reclaim belief, interwoven with inspiring portraits of notable people from all walks of life, whom he calls his spiritual directors. Soul Survivor is his tribute to thirteen remarkable individuals, mentors who transformed his life and work"--Publisher website (November 2006).

From the bestselling author of Start Where You Are comes a vibrantly inspiring look at making peace with fear--to become our truest selvesOn the heels of her bestselling journal Start Where You Are, author and illustrator Meera Lee Patel takes us deeper into her artistic vision and emotional journey in this stunning new four-color book. A mix of personal reflections, inspirational quotes, questions for reflection, and breathtaking watercolor visuals, My Friend Fear asserts that having big fear is an opportunity to make big changes, to discover the remarkable potential inside ourselves.