Choose Your Own Adulthood

Congratulations, reader! You've successfully navigated through the trials of childhood and adolescence. Now, as you voyage through high school to college and beyond, you're set to begin your next big adventure: adulthood. A few big decisions await you, from majors and minors to jobs and careers (and maybe even marriage!). However, in between the big ones, you'll make a million other smaller, subtler choices that will underpin everything from your friendships to your bank account. These are the daily choices that will truly define you . . . so how will you choose? Choose Your Own Adulthood helps you approach these choices from a more thoughtful, curious, and ultimately self-aware perspective. You'll learn why responding is so much better than reacting, how loyalty is really overrated, which risks are worth taking and which are best avoided, and so much more. Exciting things await you on your journey toward adulthood: which path you take is for you to decide. Choose wisely!

He thought he’d be better at this Christianity thing by now. All his life, John Alan Turner has wanted to be different, to be better than who he is, to improve. Instead, he helped plant a church that folded within a year. He got divorced. He was diagnosed with depression. His car was rear-ended and totaled, which left him with life-altering injuries. It seemed like the harder he pushed to become the person he was supposed to be, the farther away it fled. And now, here he is after all these years, saying, "I’m still me." But in his journey, he has learned difficult lessons about stillness, about surrender, about silence. In Still Me, Turner helps readers examine their own lives and the difference between the life they thought they would have if they tried hard enough and the transformed life God offers to each one of us if we have the courage to sit still and surrender to the silence.

Adulthood is a choice. It does not happen because we reach a certain age or income level. Adulthood happens when we choose to pass through the many interconnected doors that lead to the deeper realms of our own souls. The passage of time and the events around us may propel us toward maturity, but it is up to us to pass through these doors. When you read this book, you will embark on a journey through many layers of soulfulness, including Struggle, Resistance, Entitlement, Disappointment, Narcissism, Trade-offs, Appreciation, Love, Power, Graciousness, Tradition, Integrity and Victimhood. Adulthood is a quality of soul that is chosen and earned through the very deepening struggles that life offers us as we progress from birth to death. We can engage these struggles anytime until the day we die. It is never too late to grow up.

Through the best-selling ScreamFree Parenting, Hal Runkel showed thousands of parents how keeping their cool can revolutionize their family life. In his groundbreaking new book, ScreamFree Marriage, Runkel now shows couples how learning to stay calm, in the face of common marital conflicts, is the key to creating and enjoying a deep, lifelong connection. Every committed couple strives to hold on to the marriage they envisioned back when they first said "I do"--before the end of the honeymoon phase, before kids, mortgages, health crises, and all life's inescapable issues. But the truth is this: conflict is unavoidable--it's impossible for two people to see every single thing, face every issue, and experience every situation in exactly the same way. What results are couples "screaming" at each other--sometimes literally yelling out loud, sometimes shutting themselves down and shutting their partners out, and sometimes avoiding the issue altogether--none of which leads to the passionate, intimate connection we all crave. In ScreamFree Marriage, Hal introduces some radical new concepts about marriage, teaching couples how to embrace this inevitable conflict as a profound vehicle for strengthening a marriage. Rather than just a source of pain and disagreement, these "Fires of Commitment," as Hal describes them, can actually be the exact experience needed to grow couples into new levels of maturity and intimacy. By simply learning the ScreamFree formula of Calming Down, Growing Up, and Getting Closer, you too can cross through these fires and end up with a closer and more passionate marriage than ever before. Using accessible anecdotes and the disarming humor that readers have come to love, Runkel disproves prevailing marital wisdom, puts couples on a path to "intimate independence" and reveals a whole new, fresh approach to marriage.

New York Times bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims is back with a groundbreakingly frank guide to being a grown-up What does it mean to be an adult? In the twentieth century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and they’re all valid, but any one person’s choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult. A former Stanford dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising and author of the perennial bestseller How to Raise an Adult and of the lauded memoir Real American, Julie Lythcott-Haims has encountered hundreds of twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings, too), who, faced with those markers, feel they’re just playing the part of “adult,” while struggling with anxiety, stress, and general unease. In Your Turn, Julie offers compassion, personal experience, and practical strategies for living a more authentic adulthood, as well as inspiration through interviews with dozens of voices from the rich diversity of the human population who have successfully launched their adult lives. Being an adult, it turns out, is not about any particular checklist; it is, instead, a process, one you can get progressively better at over time—becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and gaining the knowhow to keep going. Once you begin to practice it, being an adult becomes the most complicated yet also the most abundantly rewarding and natural thing. And Julie Lythcott-Haims is here to help readers take their turn.

In a world of spiritual options, people constantly tell us what to believe. Yet, while we hear these pleas, we're already functioning with existing beliefs—even if they are beliefs by default. So how do we choose what to believe—especially in the area of faith? Do we need to choose? In Choosing Your Faith, Mark Mittelberg encourages us, as Socrates does, not to lead an unexamined life. He invites us to examine why we believe what we believe. This examination will resonate with Christians and seekers alike.

You want to spend life in health rather than bedridden with fever and pneumonia. This book will help you kick the flu habit to become virus- and disease-free forever for a long, strong life. Fifty thousand years ago, the human established itself as a plant-eating herbivore and was never meant to be a carnivore (meat eating) or omnivore (meat and plant eating). It is plants that provide an alkaline pH value of health. The pH (acid-base scale based on measure of hydrogen-ion concentration) of a baby’s blood is alkaline. No bugs, disease, virus, bacteria can live in an alkaline body; bugs need an acidic host to survive. It is their job to destroy their host and return it to the forest soil; all diseases are scavengers and disposers of sickly acidic organisms. Through the industrial revolution, humans have lost this truth of an alkaline, homegrown, organic fruit-and-vegetable diet by replacing it with processed, factory-made items that are acidic, lacking in nutrition, full of sugars and dangerous chemicals. This may be the cause of present-day diseases. Alkaline diet maintains a healthy, strong, antivirus, antidisease body as designed by the Creator. There are twenty-nine other concepts that are needed to maintain a strong immune (disease-warriors) system in addition to alkaline eating. Health requires a balance between physical alkalinity and mental and spiritual well-being. Nutritionists and medical authors have confirmed that a “clean body” (alkaline) is required to be disease-free and only in a “dirty body” (acidic) can diseases, viruses, and bacteria survive. Only you, the reader, can confirm this truth by adopting an 80 percent fruit and vegetable diet. This book explains the why and how in order to help guide you to achieve a strong body and, ultimately, a long life by fooling the flu forever.

#1 New York Times Bestseller “Funny and smart as hell” (Bill Gates), Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations. FROM THE PUBLISHER: Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices. This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written. Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to. FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book: Pictures Words Stories about things that happened to me Stories about things that happened to other people because of me Eight billion dollars* Stories about dogs The secret to eternal happiness* *These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!