Blessing The Bridge

Like a hospice worker, author Rita M. Reynolds cares for sick and dying animals, helping them comfortably cross the threshold into death. She shares stories about dogs, cats, a donkey, a cow, ducks, goats, and even baby wild mice she cares for as they die. Reynolds teaches basic skills in respectfully handling a dying animal, whether it's a newborn bird that's fallen from a tree or a beloved dog that is terminally ill. Her new edition includes blessings and prayers for animals, whether in the process of dying or who have already passed over. Reynolds believes in divine and angelic influences when it comes to helping animals cross over. She believes animals possess unique souls that transform into an afterlife. She even tells of seeing the spirits of dead animals and messages they bring her. Many of Reynolds' lessons are conveyed through real-life stories, where the reader witnesses how she simultaneously releases and embraces dying animals. Like The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this book has functional appeal and longevity. This book appeals to anyone grieving and looking for comfort.

In the wake of tragedy…can they build a future together? Could a complete stranger be the key to his new family? After finally tracking down her long-lost sister only to find she’s gone, Sophie Armstrong wants to connect with her orphaned nieces and nephew. But convincing their guardian, Zach Conrad, that all she wants is a relationship with the only family she has left won’t be easy. As Sophie bonds with the children, she’s determined to win over their uncle’s trust…and possibly his heart.

All the trials and broken pieces you went through in life did not come to break you; they only came to make you. Since you did not break down, it is now time for you to break through. Every trials and broken pieces that you went through in life means that they did not come to kill you but to shape you. Whatever does not break you only comes to make you. If you did not break down, this is your time to break through. God is only using your pieces to make up your pages. Every broken piece of your life will make up the pages to your chapter. Someone is trying to make it through the trials and pieces that you already went through. Your trails and pieces will be their guiding tools and the road map that will build the bridge for their crossing over. You were broken not only to be blessed; you were broken to be a blessing to someone's life. There are some people who were lifted to get to the top while there are some who had to climb ropes and rocks to get there. The ones who had to climb understood that life is defined by what you went through and the ways in which you survived. This means that whatever comes to defy you only comes to define who you are on the inside. Your test will be your testimonies, and all the mess that you went through will be used by God for your messages. Jesus was broken as the living bread, broken to save lives. This means your brokenness will bring healing and restoration. For those going through a brokenness, you will be coming out whole. This book is a guideline with tools that will help you in your journey to recovery.

We all admire humility when we see it. But how do we practice it? How does humility--the foundational virtue of the normal Christian life--become a normal part of our everyday lives? Jerry Bridges sees in the Beatitudes a series of blessings from Jesus, a pattern for humility in action. Starting with poverty in spirit--an acknowledgment that in and of ourselves we are incapable of living holy lives pleasing to God--and proceeding through our mourning over personal sin, our hunger and thirst for righteousness, our experience of persecutions large and small, and more, we discover that humility is itself a blessing: At every turn, God is present to us, giving grace to the humble and lifting us up to blessing.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novel—by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—has been beloved around the world for nearly a century. This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individuals—a noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a child—come to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined lives—snuffed out in one shattering moment—illuminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.