A Cup Of Hope

Have you lost sight of hope? Have the burdens of the past, the pressures of the present, and the fear of the future left you weary and weighed down? Hope will return. But you rarely get it back in one big swoop. More likely, you rediscover it through small steps and in daily doses. That's what this small booklet offers: 31 days of hope, with Scriptures, personal prayers, and journaling space for reflection. Over time, your eyes will open again to the abundance found each day in the God of hope. As soon as you finish it, you'll start over again. Tuck it in your purse or pocket for a sip of daily refreshment.

"Amy is a gifted teacher and her words are just the right mix of clever, funny, and profound." --Peggy Bodde, founder of Sacred Work When the pain and problems of life barge in, hopes and dreams run out. In these uncertain seasons of personal crisis, national chaos, and global catastrophe, it's easy to wonder if life will ever be anything but sorrow and despair. The apostle Peter knows exactly what it's like when hope is gone. He watched as the Messiah was arrested, crucified, and buried. And Peter himself failed almost every test of his faith, even with Christ right in front of him. But he also knows that God is faithful and true, carrying us through our harshest suffering and redeeming our heaviest regrets. Bible teacher, author, and speaker Amy Lively dives into Peter's first epistle, a short letter with a lot of power, to light the way for today's struggling Christian. In this daily Bible study, she guides readers through the beautiful story of Peter and shows how he embodies the way to set our hope fully in Christ alone. With gentle honesty and a touch of helpful humor, Amy helps readers understand that when it feels like the end of the world to them, it's just the beginning of the power of Jesus. "A beautiful, honest, and in-depth journey into 1 Peter. . . . You'll come away a little more humble, a little more thoughtful and introspective, and best of all, a whole lot more able to set your hope fully on Christ." --Jennifer Hayes Yates, author of Just Like Us and Seeking Truth

Now available for the first time in paperback, "A Cup of Hope" is a special book rich in the life experiences, prayers, and deepest thoughts of a woman who takes each day in step with her God. Connecting woman to woman with humility, grace and wisdom, Barnes writes about the health challenges she recently has faced and God's unfailing peace and loving presence in the midst of the darkest years of her life. (July)

From world-renowned scientist Jane Goodall, as seen in the new National Geographic documentary Jane, comes a fascinating examination of the critical role that trees and plants play in our world. From world-renowned scientist Jane Goodall, as seen in the new National Geographic documentary Jane, comes a fascinating examination of the critical role that trees and plants play in our world. Seeds of Hope takes us from Goodall's home in England to her home-away-from-home in Africa, deep inside the Gombe forest, where she and the chimpanzees are enchanted by the fig and plum trees they encounter. She introduces us to botanists around the world, as well as places where hope for plants can be found, such as The Millennium Seed Bank. She shows us the secret world of plants with all their mysteries and potential for healing our bodies as well as Planet Earth. Looking at the world as an adventurer, scientist, and devotee of sustainable foods and gardening--and setting forth simple goals we can all take to protect the plants around us--Goodall delivers an enlightening story of the wonders we can find in our own backyards.

This is a book about hope. Part 1 is a compact but necessarily limited attempt to describe the actual structure and concrete forms of hope and hopelessness; Part 2 is an exploration of a psychology of hope, the beginning of an investigation of what psychic forms and dynamisms move most toward hope and against hopelessness; and Part 3 is an analogous effort to suggest the outlines of a metaphysics of hope.

This story offers the reader what it so states, a whisper of hope, a measure of faith. For ordinary people, caught in a darkness they did or did not bring on themselves, what is first needed, is a whisper of hope. They are so convinced that the darkness will never go away. It may be the darkness of grief, the darkness that comes from abuse and neglect, the darkness that fighting disease brings, the darkness of addiction, the darkness of depression. They need to know they are not alone. The stories of hope are told through the eyes of John Krayle, a retired Methodist Bishop, who is writing his memoirs in tribute to his beloved wife, Marti. These are fictional people whom I have met time and time again in my little span of time called my life. In this story, set in their early years of their ministry while John was still a Baptist Preacher, John and Marti strive to bring hope into the lives of the people of this community. They want to make a difference. And they do. There is humor sprinkled here and there, and a little romance, but generous on the seeking of hope and the clinging to a measure of faith. In no way do I mean to reflect negatively on my Baptist friends or the Baptist church and hope it is understood by my readers. The setting of the story is rural southern Indiana in the late 1930s and 40s, a time in which the shadow of war became a reality, and the peoples of this small community as well as the rest of the nation needed more than ever the flicker of light of the whisper of hope.

Nearly half of the world's eight million Palestinians are registered refugees, having faced partition and exile. Landscape of Hope and Despair examines this refugee experience in Lebanon through the medium of spatial practices and identity, set against the backdrop of prolonged violence. Julie Peteet explores how Palestinians have dealt with their experience as refugees by focusing attention on how a distinctive Palestinian identity has emerged from and been informed by fifty years of refugee history. Concentrating ethnographic scrutiny on a site-specific experience allows the author to shed light on the mutually constitutive character of place and cultural identification. Palestinian refugee camps are contradictory places: sites of grim despair but also of hope and creativity. Within these cramped spaces, refugees have crafted new worlds of meaning and visions of the possible in politics. In the process, their historical predicament was a point of departure for social action and thus became radically transformed. Beginning with the calamity of 1948, Landscape of Hope and Despair traces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study invokes space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history. The moving stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the use of culture and memory.