Listening To Your Life

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.

Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award Logos Association Bookstore Award Bookwi.se's Favorite Books of the Year Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year "Be quick to listen, slow to speak." —James 1:19 How would our lives change if we approached every experience with the intention of listening first? In this noisy, distracting world, it is difficult to truly hear. People talk past each other, eager to be heard but somehow deaf to what is being said. Listening is an essential skill for healthy relationships, both with God and with other people. But it is more than that: listening is a way of life. Adam McHugh places listening at the heart of our spirituality, our relationships and our mission in the world. God himself is the God who hears, and we too can learn to hear what God may be saying through creation, through Scripture, through people. By cultivating a posture of listening, we become more attentive and engaged with those around us. Listening shapes us and equips us to be more attuned to people in pain and more able to minister to those in distress. Our lives are qualitatively different—indeed, better—when we become listeners. Heed the call to the listening life, and hear what God is doing in you and the world.

Learn to see God's remarkable works in the everyday ordinary of your life. Your remarkable life is happening right here, right now. You may not be able to see it--your life may seem predictable and your work insignificant until you look at your life as Frederick Buechner does. Named "the father of today's spiritual memoir movement" by Christianity Today, Frederick Buechner reveals how to stop, look, and listen to your life. He reflects on how both art and faith teach us how to pay attention to the remarkableness right in front of us, to watch for the greatness in the ordinary, and to use our imaginations to see the greatness in others and love them well. Pay attention, says Buechner. Listen to the call of a bird or the rush of the wind, to the people who flow in and out of your life. The ordinary points you to the extraordinary God who created and loves all of creation, including you. Pay attention to these things as if your life depends upon it. Because, of course, it does. As you learn to pay attention to your life and what God is doing in it, you will uncover the plot of your life's story and the sacred opportunity to connect with the Divine in each moment.

The Listening Book is about rediscovering the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sounds and for making music, we can awaken and release our full creative powers. Mathieu offers suggestions and encouragement on many aspects of music-making, and provides playful exercises to help readers appreciate the connection between sound, music, and everyday life.

PLEASE NOTE: Some recent copies of Let Your Life Speak included printing errors. These issues have been corrected, but if you purchased a defective copy between September and December 2019, please send proof of purchase to [email protected] to receive a replacement copy. Dear Friends: I'm sorry that after 20 years of happy traveling, Let Your Life Speak hit a big pothole involving printing errors that resulted in an unreadable book. But I'm very grateful to my publisher for moving quickly to see that people who received a defective copy have a way to receive a good copy without going through the return process. We're all doing everything we can to make things right, and I'm grateful for your patience. Thank you, Parker J. Palmer With wisdom, compassion, and gentle humor, Parker J. Palmer invites us to listen to the inner teacher and follow its leadings toward a sense of meaning and purpose. Telling stories from his own life and the lives of others who have made a difference, he shares insights gained from darkness and depression as well as fulfillment and joy, illuminating a pathway toward vocation for all who seek the true calling of their lives.

For those exploring a sense of call- to ordained ministry, another vocation or a change of direction, spiritual director Julia Mourant provides thirty simple spiritual exercises for exploration and discernment, each one rooted in intuitive understanding and God-given inner wisdom.

The Christian life is a life of listening. In this memoir, lifelong minister of the gospel Leighton Ford tells his story as a personal history of listening for God’s voice. Beginning with his earliest memories, he recounts the different ways God has spoken to him, and the different ways he has learned to listen. Through the joys of ministry, first as an international evangelist, often in partnership with Billy Graham, and later as a leader of the Lausanne Movement and a mentor of emerging leaders, he remembers God's voice proclaiming, instructing, reassuring. Through the pain of deep loss, he remembers God's voice calling out to him, even in the deafening silence. What emerges is not just an account of a long and faithful life of Christian service, but a picture of the Christian life—the life of listening. What will it sound like, Ford asks, when God speaks to you?

A unique and engaging perspective of humanity - a journey to wisdom shared through stories of self-awareness, acceptance, and discovery, by acclaimed psychotherapist Dr. Hassan Khalili. In A Life Spent Listening, Dr. Hassan Khalili reflects on four decades of being a frontline community psychotherapist and shares the wisdom he has learned over the years. By inviting the reader into his own life and the lives of his patients, Dr. Khalili explores the human condition and explains his concept of the grid as a guiding principle in his psychological practice. The book takes us from his experience as a young Iranian immigrant in Newfoundland and Labrador to his role as one of the top psychologists in the province, by way of his adventures hiking Machu Picchu and Mount Kilimanjaro. Dr. Khalili illuminates what it means to seek contentment and how we hold the key to our own happiness.