Rewriting Your Broken Story

How do you fix a broken story? In this fallen world, life is often not how we thought it would be. Jobs vanish, relationships crumble, health fails. How do we find the hope to persevere? We can make sense of our broken stories by seeing them in the context of a larger and greater story. Kenneth Boa shows how God can transform our lives with an eternal perspective, when we live with the end in mind. In light of eternity, our struggles are temporary and our plot twists are not fatal. We are hard-wired by God with eternity in our hearts, and that longing gives us purpose, blesses others and helps us make a lasting mark on the world. Knowing our future is crucial to living our present. When we see our stories within his greater story, we learn to live with a heavenly perspective and follow it all the way home.

2018 IVP Readers' Choice Award God is everywhere and always with us. So why don't we experience his presence more? Life is full of distractions, and our 24/7 news cycles and social media drown out the voice of God. It's hard to discern God's presence amid the hubbub. But experiencing God is not just for the super-spiritual or ultra-mature. Every Christian can learn to cultivate a greater awareness of God in the everyday. Ken Boa offers a contemporary guide to practicing the presence of God. Using biblical foundations, living and historical examples, and evidence from neuroscience, Ken reveals how we can walk with God and abide in his presence. We need to rethink how we use our time and technology to make room for God, to train ourselves with new habits that deepen our awareness of God. This book offers not a magical technique but dozens of practical exercises and disciplines that help us draw close to God even in the midst of our cacophonous modern culture. Practicing God's presence is not just for the professionals. It's for ordinary people like us. And the more we live in God's presence, the greater our abiding peace and joy.

The things we tell ourselves affect how well or poorly our path in life goes. It’s time to flip the script on the internal stories you tell yourself and live life on your terms. Most of the “self-stories” you tell yourself—the kind of person you say you are and the things you are capable of—are invisible to you because they have become such a part of your everyday mental routine that you don’t even recognize they exist. Yet, these self-stories influence everything you do, everything you say, and everything you are. Choose Your Story, Change Your Life will help you take complete control of your self-stories and create the life you’ve always dreamed you’d have. Author Kindra Hall offers up a new window into your psychology, one that travels the distance from the frontiers of neuroscience to the deep inner workings of your thoughts and feelings. In Choose Your Story, Change Your Life, Kindra will help you: Uncover the truth of how you have created the life you have; Challenge everything you think you know about how your life has been built; Uncover the clear steps you can take to create the life you want; Take control of your self-story to become the author of who you are; and Live your life in a way you never have before. This eye-opening, but applicable journey will transform you from a passive listener of these limiting, unconscious thoughts to the definitive author of who you are and everything you want to be. Changing your life is as simple as choosing better stories to tell yourself. If you can change your story, you can change your life.

A BOOK OF HEALING AND HOPE BY NEW ZEALAND TV JOURNALIST JEHAN CASINADER 'This is a powerful book that triumphantly celebrates life in all its complex forms.' - Mental Health Foundation As an award-winning TV journalist, Jehan Casinader told other people's stories - until he lost control of his own. Severely depressed, he tried everything - from mindfulness to massage; Prozac to Pilates. Was something missing? This Is Not How It Ends chronicles Jehan's four-year battle with depression, and how the power of storytelling helped him to survive. He argues that many of us think our brains are broken, but in fact, our stories are broken. Jehan began an experiment on himself. Could he rewrite his past? Could he reinvent his character? Could he create a whole new plot? This gritty, vulnerable book will challenge readers' understanding of mental distress, and give them the tools to reshape their own life stories.

Nighttime Narratives: Decode Your Dreams, Rewrite Your Story" Focused on the narrative structure of dreams, this book helps readers understand and rewrite their dream stories for emotional and psychological healing. It stands out by treating dreams as personal narratives that reflect our deepest fears and desires, providing tools to alter these narratives consciously and improve mental well-being. This approach is not only therapeutic but also deeply engaging, as it combines elements of storytelling with self-care.

Bestselling author, cofounder of Girlfriends in God, and writer for Proverbs 31 Ministries Sharon Jaynes reveals the secret to living a better story: understanding that the worst parts of our past are the very things God uses most. Many people don't like the story God is writing in their lives. The mistakes, failures, tragedies, and circumstances outside of our control linger in our minds and hold us back. How do we come to grips with the pieces of our stories that we wish weren't there? How do we silence the pain of what has been done to us and the shame of what we've allowed to be done through us? In When You Don't Like Your Story, Bible teacher Sharon Jaynes shows us how God untangles our most painful emotions with the fingers of grace, putting his redemption on display. In the hardest parts of our narratives, we get to see God's greatest work--and this changes the ending of our stories. As we overcome shame, offer forgiveness, and use our stories to help others, we find freedom from the past and learn to live in the restoration of the present.

The losses in our lives are both big and small. We leave home. We experience physical illness. We struggle with vocation. We may long for a spouse or child. We lose people we love to addiction or death. In this book spiritual director Beth Slevcove offers stories of loss from her own life along with distinctive spiritual practices that can guide us back to God.

How does one effectively deal with the tough questions which arise when one is asked to defend Christianity? How do we learn to speak the truth effectively? This bestselling book, published in 1982, will not only help believers understand the strength of their position, but will ultimately help those who are searching to discover Christ.