Love Within Limits

This is a print on demand book and is therefore non- returnable. An exploration of how ideal love -- selfless love -- can work within the limits of our ordinary lives. Using the magnificent lines of 1 Corinthians 13 as his guide, Smedes discusses the areas of life into which love must fit in order to do its work. Includes discussion questions.

It Doesn’t Take a Perfect Person to Find a Perfect Love Even though he was born without arms or legs, Nick Vujicic created a “ridiculously good life.” But after dating disappointments and a failed relationship, he reached his mid-twenties worried that he would never find a woman to love him and share his life. Then Nick met Kanae and everything changed. But even with undeniable chemistry, they would have to navigate twists and turns worthy of a romantic comedy before becoming "one" in marriage. In Love Without Limits Nick and Kanae tell how they improbably found each other, fell in love, and then fought to overcome skepticism from others about their relationship. Filled with practical insights that will benefit any couple, this inspiring book describes a godly courtship and the early years of the Vujicics’ marriage and parenting journey. Above all, Love Without Limits is an inspiring reminder that when Christ is at the center of a relationship--even with serious challenges--true love will triumph. *** “Despite my optimism about other parts of life, I decided that love in this world had limits after all. I’d become convinced that no woman would want to marry such an obviously imperfect man as me….” As a boy growing up in Australia, Nick Vujicic could not understand why God had allowed him to be born without limbs and if He would ever bring a woman into Nick’s life. On the other side of the world, Kanae Miyahara—a girl growing up in Mexico--saw dysfunction sadly separate her family. She wondered if a loving, lasting marriage was even possible. Later, when Nick realized that God had a purpose for him, his life took on new meaning. But after a long-term relationship ended in heartache, would he ever find someone to marry? Kanae experienced relationships based on superficial attraction, but she longed to find a mate with strong character and faith—a man who would be a godly husband and father. When Nick and Kanae met in the most amazing way, they realized that God—the ultimate Matchmaker-- had used even their discouraging and painful experiences to prepare them for each other…for the love of their life.

"We fail to mandate economic sanity," writes Garrett Hardin, "because our brains are addled by...compassion." With such startling assertions, Hardin has cut a swathe through the field of ecology for decades, winning a reputation as a fearless and original thinker. A prominent biologist, ecological philosopher, and keen student of human population control, Hardin now offers the finest summation of his work to date, with an eloquent argument for accepting the limits of the earth's resources--and the hard choices we must make to live within them. In Living Within Limits, Hardin focuses on the neglected problem of overpopulation, making a forceful case for dramatically changing the way we live in and manage our world. Our world itself, he writes, is in the dilemma of the lifeboat: it can only hold a certain number of people before it sinks--not everyone can be saved. The old idea of progress and limitless growth misses the point that the earth (and each part of it) has a limited carrying capacity; sentimentality should not cloud our ability to take necessary steps to limit population. But Hardin refutes the notion that goodwill and voluntary restraints will be enough. Instead, nations where population is growing must suffer the consequences alone. Too often, he writes, we operate on the faulty principle of shared costs matched with private profits. In Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," he showed how a village common pasture suffers from overgrazing because each villager puts as many cattle on it as possible--since the costs of grazing are shared by everyone, but the profits go to the individual. The metaphor applies to global ecology, he argues, making a powerful case for closed borders and an end to immigration from poor nations to rich ones. "The production of human beings is the result of very localized human actions; corrective action must be local....Globalizing the 'population problem' would only ensure that it would never be solved." Hardin does not shrink from the startling implications of his argument, as he criticizes the shipment of food to overpopulated regions and asserts that coercion in population control is inevitable. But he also proposes a free flow of information across boundaries, to allow each state to help itself. "The time-honored practice of pollute and move on is no longer acceptable," Hardin tells us. We now fill the globe, and we have no where else to go. In this powerful book, one of our leading ecological philosophers points out the hard choices we must make--and the solutions we have been afraid to consider.

Reflecting upon some problems of the moral life, Gilbert Meilaender considers their difficulties within a vision that accentuates not only the limits, but also the promise, of the Christian story. Created by God as finite beings, we make particular attachments. Redeemed by God for a community transcending nature and history, our love always carries us beyond the special bonds of time and place. We live, therefore, with a sense of permanent tension. If this tension heightens our sense of the perplexities of life, it should not free us from the obligation to probe, clarify, and (where we can) resolve some of those difficulties. The author holds that theological ethics must clarify the direction for growth and development within the Christian life. He undertakes such analysis, emphasizing throughout the limits of the human condition, the importance of our nature as embodied persons, and the danger and pretension in some of our attempts to take control of and master human life. This Christian vision is developed in chapters that explore a range of moral problems, such as abortion, artificial reproduction, euthanasia, care for defective infants, provision of artificial nutrition and hydration, and marital and political community. These are throughout, however, theological explorations. Taken together they illumine not only particular problems of the moral life but a vision of life&—classically Christian in its conception, humane in its care for particular bonds of attachment, and modest in its recognition of moral limits on our ability to seek the good. Meilaender has developed a broad recognition both among scholars and students of ethics and among interested general readers. He has the capacity to throw fresh angles of vision on complex problems so as to help both the sophisticated and the uninitiated reader to think more penetratingly about moral questions.

Learn about a child's development, temperament, how to deal with power struggles. Includes suggestions for resources.

Designed for the traditional and nontraditional contemporary parents who want to regain control over their lives and their children, the primary goal of this book is to empower parents to choose the best tool for the job while challenging their personal values and beliefs about parenting and discipline. It equips parents with the tools needed to balance love and limits with there children, and includes over one hundred parenting tools, special information on dealing with grief and loss, anger and blame, and parental disagreement. It also provides the reader with exercises to determine their parenting values and beliefs, as well as a quick reference guide on how to handle the most common and most stubborn child behavior problems.

Author Terry Cole-Whittaker shows us how to release our past and take charge of our present, inspiring women--and men--to overcome fear and self-sabotage while gaining: Success, love, power self-mastery, wholeness and balance, joy and abundance and whatever you desire.