Messy Beautiful Friendship

Women long for deep and lasting friendships but often find them challenging to make. The private angst they feel regarding friendship often translates into their own insecurity and isolation. Christine Hoover offers women a fresh, biblical vision for friendship that allows for the messiness of our lives and the realities of our schedules. She shows women - what's holding them back from developing satisfying friendships - how to make and deepen friendships - how to overcome insecurity, self-imposed isolation, and past hurts - how to embrace the people God has already placed in their lives as potential friends - and how to revel in the beauty and joy of everyday friendship With stories of real friendships and guidance drawn from Scripture, Hoover encourages women to intentionally and purposefully invest in one of the most rewarding relationships God has given us.

Messy Beautiful Love delivers an incredible testimony of grace that offers hope for today’s marriages and a spark for rekindling love. Love gets messy. Financial problems, sickness, aging parents, a chronically unhappy spouse . . . trials will inevitably come that threaten your marriage. No matter how long you’ve been married or how strong your relationship is, sooner or later you are going to have a mess to clean up. Messy Beautiful Love is about cleaning up messes God’s way, exchanging your ideas for His, and being prepared for both the best and the worst that marriage has to offer. When you surrender your relationship to God, then and only then will you experience the blessing of marriage as He intended. This is the blessing of obedience. Messy Beautiful Love is an invitation to that obedience. The cynical world says marriages don’t last, but God knows better. Tune out the world and tune in to Him. When you do that, a beautiful marriage is not only possible, it’s inevitable.

God made you for friendship. Friendship is one of the deepest pleasures of life. But in our busy, fast-paced, mobile world, we've lost this rich view of friendship and instead settled for shallow acquaintances based on little more than similar tastes or shared interests. Helping us recapture a vision of true friendship, pastor Drew Hunter explores God's design for friendship and what it really looks like in practice—giving us practical advice to cultivate the kinds of true friendships that lead to true and life-giving joy.

Every pastor's wife is a faithful servant and leader in her own right. She has great influence on her church, her community, her family, and her husband, and she finds joy in seeing God move in the lives of others. Yet she also faces unique challenges that too often go unnoticed and unaddressed. At times, a pastor's wife may feel she can't talk about her struggles even with those who are closest to her, which can leave her feeling alone, depleted, and misunderstood. She may settle for this way of living, but that's not God's desire for her. Christine Hoover knows firsthand the unique struggles and opportunities afforded a pastor's wife--she's been filling that role for more than 20 years. Coming alongside as an understanding friend, she offers encouragement and guidance to the struggling pastor's wife, showing her how to make meaningful personal relationships with God, her husband, her children, her church community, and other women--relationships that will sustain her and help her thrive.

A sweet and soulful romantic debut about rumors, friendship, and discovering who you really are Alice Dyson knows exactly how she’ll be spending her final year of high school—with her head down, quietly concentrating on her textbooks and homework. She is focused on the future, and nothing and no one is going to get in her way. That is, until a bizarre encounter with Teddy Taualai, the school’s most notorious troublemaker, goes viral, derailing her plans and pushing her into the spotlight. Suddenly Alice’s under-the-radar life is one enormous, messy complication. And the worst part? Teddy Taualai is everywhere she turns. In author Poppy Nwosu’s pitch-perfect debut novel, an unlikely pair of outsiders take the daunting, delicate first steps toward becoming friends and maybe, just maybe, something more. Briskly paced with a complex and appealing cast of characters, this contemporary romance explores the ever-tricky dance of staying true to yourself while opening your heart.

"Nothing in my life goes untouched by my husband’s calling." Christine Hoover’s words in the first chapter describe so well the life of a church planter’s wife, which is enormously difficult yet extraordinarily rewarding. To be married to a church planter is a calling of its own with a richness of its own. In The Church Planting Wife, Hoover explores and encourages the hearts of her readers while teaching what it means to have heart prepared for this unique ministry. She knows the challenges: A church planter's wife must develop a job description, be a wise helper to her husband, develop friendships within the church and community, deal with stress and discouragement, handle wounds, and more. Christine speaks candidly about these challenges while urging readers to grow a heart that wholly reflects Jesus. Spread throughout these pages are stories and interviews from church planting wives. Christine Hoover empathetically and pointedly builds from these testimonies to uplift the reader and offer lessons of hope in the midst of a challenging ministry.

From National Book Award finalist Carrie Arcos--a fresh take on happily ever after, and friendship, that is anything but a love story. When your namesake is Pablo Neruda—the greatest love poet of all time—finding “the one” should be easy. After all, sixteen-year-old aspiring artist Neruda Diaz has been in love many times before. So it’s only a matter of time before someone loves him back. Callie could be that someone. She’s creative and edgy, and nothing like the girls Neruda typically falls for, so when a school assignment brings them together, he is pleasantly surprised to learn they have a lot in common. With his true love in reach and his artistic ambitions on track, everything is finally coming together. But as Neruda begins to fall faster and harder than ever before, he is blindsided by the complicated nature of love—and art—in more ways than one. And when the relationships he’s looked to for guidance threaten to implode, Neruda must confront the reality that love is crazier, messier, and more beautiful than he ever realized—and riskier, too, than simply saying the words. Praise for Crazy Messy Beautiful: "This satisfying and unconventional love story explores the various meanings of the word." --Kirkus Reviews "Arcos has written a classic story of a budding artist finding out the reality behind the artifice, and does sowhile keeping a wonderful sense of humor." --Booklist "Arcos capably probes the mysterious without attempting to solve it as Neruda discovers the difference between crushing on someone he doesn’t know and loving someone he does, learning that friendship, too, is a kind of love." --Publishers Weekly "With readily relatable characters who, nonetheless, surprise readers as they tackle life’s many challenges and gifts, Crazy Messy Beautiful . . . explores the complexities of human emotions, aspirations, creativity, and relationships. This eminently readable book will appeal to male and female readers alike." --VOYA "The thematic thread of love as work between flawed people is woven through both language and situations, its subtlety affording different readings; romantics like Neruda will empathize with his frustration and failures, while more pragmatic readers may feel wryly superior and even slightly amused at the ways his heightened expectations butt up against modern high school life and characters."--BCCB

Our hearts are made for unswaying allegiance to a king and a kingdom, a concept that Jesus talked about more than any other. Yet every day, the false kings of anxiety, approval, comfort, image, escape, power, accumulations, self-sufficiency, supremacy, and shame plot to reign over our hearts instead. Their lies about the true king are so subtle and insidious that we rarely recognize them, and we go on living with divided loyalties that stall our spiritual growth, infect our relationships, and hinder our witness. If you want to find freedom from the forces vying for your heart, let Christine Hoover equip you for the fight. In this approachable yet provocative book, she helps you root out your own misplaced allegiances so that you can live wholly as a subject of the king who made and redeemed you.