Trials Tribulations Tears

The Essence of this Book This book is about losing that very very special loved one in your life! Sometimes it's more that one person you have lost to the monster of death. However, as Christians we are promised victory over death, even as our forerunner Jesus Christ – having conquered death through his all powerful resurrection, which assures us of victory over death as well. Knowing this gives us hope as we look upon the frail body of the one we love so dear, as they venture through the pathway to death's awaiting arms. We are comforted in the fact that Jesus takes away the "sting" of death for all His children, though to us it looks excruciatingly painful, ugly, gross, and so very unlovely. The great monstrosity death with a all that it has brought to us in life as Christians shall be "swallowed up" in victory! And we all shall shout even as our LORD! O grave where is "thy" victory! O' death! Where is thy "sting"? But thanks be to God Who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15.51-58). This book reveals the happiness and joy you can have even though sickness, pain, heartache, lonely nights, suffering, loss of a dear loved one in this life, yet, in spite of it all you can live the victorious life because you are in the everlasting hand and arms of your loving savior Jesus Christ. (John 10.28 & 29, Deut. 33.27). Friend, God is our "dwelling place" and underneath us are His everlasting arms of love, even in our trouble and trials that strength and love remains. I saw that in losing two wives one to Lupus, and one to breast cancer. Yet their joy and victory stayed intact and remained. Both were awesome women of God in this 21st century. Read on and be immensely blessed by their lives and their circumstances as they eventually faced what many are facing throughout America, the world, and perhaps in your family... the monstrosity called death. God gives victory, joy, peace, care, and love, amidst the pain and sorrow we face. He is a loving God. He is a caring God. He is the omnipotent God, from all our births until we all reach immortality at His coming through His Son Jesus Christ! The author, L.D. Hunter

This is a compilation of quite simply put, a man's life journey expressed in open, honest and quirky poetry. Based on the author's personal experiences this profound collection touches on an array of life matters; parenthood, politics, love & lust, friendship, wrong-doing, successes & failures plus much more. Readers will identify with the author on a personal level. A great weekend read you will find one of those poems to resonate with your own experiences. Francis Xavier has gifted all revenues and royalties from this publication to the charitable trust he helped found. The trust has a charitable arm inspired by his late mother in law who he never got to meet (see the poem he wrote for her inside); The Alice Award seeks to support the pursuit for education and excellence for the girl child and the youth in Zimbabwe. You can find more information at www.citypatronsfoundation.org By purchasing this book you have contributed to the Alice Award's charitable endeavours. Thank you. By Portia Chitanda

After a long battle with substance abuse, Telzia Thomas was blessed to find someone who believed in her and led her to the twelve-step program that set her free from a self-made prison. Telzia did not know, however, that her problems were far from over, as she was soon forced to grieve the loss of her mother and big brother, John, to battles with cancer. She mourned their absence, but more pain was yet to come when her husband fell ill with the same terrible disease. This tough time inspired Telzia to put her pain on the page, and so grew this honest, sometimes heartbreaking poetry collection, written in commemoration, but also as an uplifting tool to those going through similar misfortune. Caring for her daughter, a child with disabilities, opened Telzias eyes to all the amazing things her child was capable ofand that God was capable of, too. She eventually found the silence that allowed her to walk with Jesus and find peace away from the anticipation of death. Through turmoil, she found her closest friend: God the Father.

How can you Read with your eyes shut? I'm not talking about your natural eyes. I'm speaking about the eyes of the Spirit, the eyes of understanding. Open you Internal eyes! Open you Heart and Mind! Are you ready to Read now? -Lets Go-

Sentimentalism emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as a moral philosophy founded on the belief that individuals are able to form relationships and communities because they can, by an effort of the imagination, understand one another’s feelings. American authors of both sexes who accepted these views cultivated readers’ sympathy with others in order to promote self-improvement, motivate action to relieve suffering, reinforce social unity, and build national identity. Entwined with domesticity and imperialism and finding expression in literature and in public and private rituals, sentimentalism became America’s dominant ideology by the early nineteenth century. Sentimental writings and practices had political uses, some reformist and some repressive. They played major roles in the formation of bourgeois consciousness. The first new collection of scholarly essays on American sentimentalism since 1999, this volume brings together ten recent studies, eight published here for the first time. The Introduction assesses the current state of sentimentalism studies; the Afterword reflects on sentimentalism as a liberal discourse central to contemporary political thought as well as literary studies. Other contributors, exploring topics characteristic of the field today, examine nineteenth-century authors’ treatments of education, grief, social inequalities, intimate relationships, and community. This volume has several distinctive features. It illustrates sentimentalism’s appropriation of an array of literary forms (advice literature, personal narrative, and essays on education and urban poverty as well as poetry and the novel) objects (memorial volumes), and cultural practices (communal singing, benevolence). It includes four essays on poetry, less frequently studied than fiction. It identifies internal contradictions that eventually fractured sentimentalism’s viability as a belief system—yet suggests that the protean sentimental mode accommodated itself to revisionary and ironized literary uses, thus persisting long after twentieth-century critics pronounced it a casualty of the Civil War. This collection also offers fresh perspectives on three esteemed authors not usually classified as sentimentalists—Sarah Piatt, Walt Whitman, and Henry James—thus demonstrating that sentimental topics and techniques informed “realism” and “modernism” as they emerged Offering close readings of nineteenth-century American texts and practices, this book demonstrates both the limits of sentimentalism and its wide and lasting influence.

Three nails, 39 lashes, 72 thorns and liters of blood later, the Savior of the whole world, Jesus Christ, gave up His life so that the past, present and future souls of the world can live. Nowhere has there ever been recorded, and will there ever be recorded, love like this. Walking to be like Jesus is not an easy road to travel or a light cross to bear. In the understanding of the Christian lifestyle, these poems have been written and Holy Spirit-breathed into the dust of our humanity so that hope, joy, love, peace, and faith can be restored. Tears Like Christ seeks to replicate the prayers people have prayed; tears cried, thoughts pondered, laughs given and sighs breathed by so many while incorporating the Heart of God into the response of the broken, waiting, wounded and lost. Come to breathe in these pages and allow your heart to live on.