Our Beloved Our Friend

The greatest love story of all time culminated in a Cross, yet continues… forever. Do you long to deeply experience this great, eternal love story? Jesus promises if we “draw near to Him, He will draw near to us.” (James 4:8 NAS) Our Beloved, Our Friend is an opportunity to draw near to Jesus, to experience and respond to His love, and to grow in your relationship with Him. You will prayerfully explore the Word and experience Jesus in forty Bible-study meditations that use a simple, instinctive method – a “Pattern” taken from Psalm 119. (Journaling space is provided.) This relationship-based Pattern can become a part of you as you pray the Word into your life. It will enable you to behold Jesus within your soul, in the happenings in your world, and in every facet of your life. It facilitates a closer walk with Jesus that allows His limitless, liberating love to permeate your spirit, then overflow from you and touch others. After you’ve completed the forty Bible study meditations, Our Beloved, Our Friend’s easy-to-use Pattern and Appendix can continue to help you dig into the Word for yourself and deepen your relationship with Jesus. The Pattern can serve you as a tool: - to use in ongoing personal devotional time with Jesus - to share in one-on-one fellowship - to mentor, disciple individuals and groups - to lead Bible studies, retreats, and seminars - to study a single verse, a portion of Scripture or a book of the Bible - to teach Sunday school or other small groups with little or no preparation Our Beloved, Our Friend will assist you – through the lens of the Word and the light of the Holy Spirit – to know and love Jesus more intimately, to fulfill your call to live the Word and share His love.

In the year 2023, after a nuclear Armageddon, only a few pockets of people have survived. One of these groups of survivors, mostly rock climbers and mountaineers, subsists through the leadership of Jude, a biblical archaeologist and rock climber. Jude is given a chance to go back in time by using an invention of a surviving U.S. scientist. Jude is transported back to Palestine during the first century, where he searches for Jesus, to verify if he truly was the Messiah, or a charlatan. Dying from nuclear cancer, Jude spends most of his given time looking for Jesus, finally finding him meditating on a mountaintop. Jude, mesmerized by Ishia’s (Jesus) power becomes his first follower and best friend, Judas. His friendship and his knowledge of Ishia of Nazerat become the pivotal force in the last three years of their lives. Jude becomes the Judas, torn apart between being Ishia’s beloved friend and being his betrayer. The shocking and controversial ending is for you, the reader, to read and discover. It will tear at your very soul but it will rejuvenate and strengthen your faith in Jesus Christ. A must for every Christian to read!

Friend Beloved invites readers to enter the imaginative worlds of two ambitious young scientists: Marie Carmichael Stopes, the paleobotanist who found international fame as a birth control advocate and feminist icon, and Charles Gordon Hewitt, the housefly expert who became one of Canada's trailblazers of nature conservation before he died in the Spanish flu pandemic. Ecology was a new science that connected Stopes and Hewitt, the word coming from oikos, the Greek term for "home." Reproducing a small but significant cache of letters written before the First World War, the book unearths their respective versions of home and shows how these mattered in both domestic affairs and scientific passions. Their co-authored 1909 scientific article, which Hewitt called "the one little sin," is reprinted as an appendix, along with a chapter of Stopes's unpublished novel A Man's Mate, entitled "Friends." Laura Jean Cameron provides a lively, thought-provoking introduction. Her epilogue considers why Stopes and Hewitt's friendship was largely forgotten and how its recollection reveals early ecology's revolutionary promise but also its colonial and eugenic entanglements. Weaving accounts not only of the professional worlds the correspondents traversed in Britain, Japan, and Canada, but also of intensely personal, relationships involved in the changing nature of their field, Friend Beloved connects careers and emotional trajectories at a key moment in the women's suffrage movement and the making of modern science.

The study of Christ in the Scriptures is heart-warming and encouraging at any time. The author's portraits of Christ in the Song of Solomon breathe life and reverence into the interpretation of a book that is so often misunderstood. For the most part, he uses Scripture to interpret Scripture - an exemplary method of Bible study. Where this is not possible, he has used the characteristics of natural life to bring about understanding. The Lord Jesus Christ is honoured on almost every page. Furthermore, he reveals the appreciation of love between the Messiah and Zion (along with that for the Church); and that Jerusalem can look forward to a bright future, after a period of severe persecution. This is a book that stirs up affection for the Son of the living God, leading the reader to worship the Father whose counsels and purposes are centred, as always, in Christ.