It S A Wonderful Death

If you had one chance to change your future, would you? Now in paperback! Seventeen-year-old RJ always gets what she wants. So when her soul is accidentally collected by a distracted Grim Reaper, somebody in the afterlife better figure out a way to send her back from the dead or heads will roll. But in her quest for mortality, she becomes a pawn in a power struggle between an overzealous archangel and Death Himself. The tribunal presents her with two options: she can remain in the lobby, where souls wait to be processed, until her original lifeline expires, or she can replay three moments in her life in an effort to make choices that will result in a future deemed worthy of being saved. It sounds like a no-brainer. She’ll take a walk down memory lane. How hard can changing her future be? But with each changing moment, RJ’s life begins to unravel, until this self-proclaimed queen bee is a social pariah. Is walking among the living worth it if she has to spend the next sixty years as an outcast?

What does it take to face death, loss, and grief with confidence and peace? Cheryl Eckl is reluctantly forced to play hostess to life’s most unwelcome guest when her husband, Stephen, is diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a few short years to live. In A Beautiful Death, her powerful insights, moving story, and unerring guidance show us that we all have the inner resources to face death, and the future, with peace. In fact, she says, with the proper preparation this experience, while rarely easy, can be profoundly beautiful. A Beautiful Death is a compassionate and honest approach to death as an integral part of life-how to think about it, talk about it, and prepare for it. Eckl helps us overcome our fear and avoidance of painful end-of-life issues as she gently takes us by the hand on a transformative journey through loss and unspeakable grief. Her sensitive and deftly written work will help you engage the intensity of life’s deepest sorrow so you can rise up strengthened and able to greet life’s most profound joy. You will explore five liberating steps for facing the end of life, whether your own or a loved one’s. Above all, you’ll find the comfort you need to fully embrace the unwelcome guest with grace, confidence, and peace.

When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert. The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life. This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.

A collection of photographs from the burial grounds of Europe explores the beauty of cemeteries and the emotions the survivors of the dead placed into the making of the tombs.

The Great Death arrived with the man from downriver, the one who came with the light-colored strangers and had little red spots covering his body. Thirteen-year-old Millie and her younger sister, Maura, are fascinated by the guests, but soon sickness takes over their village. As they watch the people they know and love die, the sisters remain unaffected and begin to realize that they will have to find a new home. Alone in the cold Alaskan winter of 1917, struggling to overcome the obstacles nature throws their way, the girls discover that their true strength lies in their love for each other. John Smelcer's spare and beautiful prose shapes the sisters' story with tenderness and skill, presenting a powerful tale of determination, survival, and family.

In this issue we will continue four lines of ministry. The first line--The History of the Lord's Recovery--contains chapters 14 through 17 of Fellowship concerning the Urgent Need of the Vital Groups, which are in volume 3 of The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1991–1992. These chapters cover vital points concerning the vital group practice, an earnest talk concerning the practice of the vital groups, being burdened with God's loving concern for sinners and with converting sinners into members of Christ for the carrying out of God's economy, and fellowship concerning the living contents of the vital groups. The second line--Words for New Believers--contains chapters 9 through 12 of Crucial Truths in the Holy Scriptures, Volume 1, which are in volume 3 of The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1932–1949. These chapters cover topics related to justification, reconciliation, regeneration, and eternal life. The third line--Maturing in Life--continues with chapters 3 through 6 of Reward and Punishment, which are in volume 3 of The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1955. These chapters cover various aspects of the gospel revealed in the Gospels and Acts, God setting aside a portion of His salvation as a reward, reward and punishment in the New Testament, and the time, duration, and intention of reward and punishment. The fourth line--The High Peak of the Divine Revelation--continues with chapters 2 through 5 of God's New Testament Economy, which are in volume 3 of The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1984. These chapters cover the Word's incarnation and the Son's living on the earth, the Son's death in His humanity with His divinity through the Spirit, and the Son's resurrection in His divinity with His humanity.

The editors of Wolfsbane and Mistletoe and Many Bloody Returns deliver a new collection-including a never-before-published Sookie Stackhouse story. New York Times bestselling authors Charlaine Harris, Katie MacAlister, Jeaniene Frost-plus Lilith Saintcrow, Jeff Abbott, and more-send postcards from the edge of the paranormal world to fans who devoured Wolfsbane and Mistletoe and Many Bloody Returns. With an all-new Sookie Stackhouse story and twelve other original tales, editors Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner bring together a stellar collection of tour guides who offer vacations that are frightening, funny, and touching for the fanged, the furry, the demonic, and the grotesque. Learn why it really can be an endless summer-for immortals.