Unexpected Occasions Of Grace

Here are occasions of grace experienced with a baseball coach, a hotel shuttle driver, during a retreat, at a winery, in a rectory kitchen, at a high school reunion, and many more everyday settings. Reading them will bring your own occasions of grace to the surface.

When Eleanor Pfaehler and I met, we stood on opposite sides of an invisible, and seemingly insurmountable, wall," Sheila Walsh writes. "Eleanor and I talked over this wall. At times we reached up to hug. But the wall was always there. "Then Eleanor was diagnosed with liver cancer. Finally, by the grace and mercy of God alone, the wall came crashing down. Eleanor and I found ourselves swimming in the river of mercy with our arms around each other, holding each other, willing to give our lives for each other." Unexpected Grace is a tender account of the relationship between a mother and daughter-in-law and how they discovered extravagant grace in the midst of what could have been the most tragic experience of their lives. Their story will encourage you and help you see how God can bring good out of even the bleakest circumstances. Previously published as Stories from the River of Mercy.

We are slowly losing the art and the science of creative reading. We must learn how to use what we have read. In Creative Reading, author Dr. Pravin Bhatia offers a dialogue about creative reading and how to make reading inspired and intelligent. Bhatia shows how reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting and suggests we read too much and too randomly to be truly wise. That is why the multitude of books is making us ignorant. The truth is, most of us read poorly and without knowing why we are reading. With a focus on God and the scriptures, Bhatia maintains that reading should improve our lives. Creative Reading discusses the importance of creativity and intelligence. Creativity involves use of imagination and good ideas, which should be repeatedly employed to choose what we read. Bhatia shares how the books we read should serve our purpose. Reading must excite us to self-activity. It should help us to upgrade our minds and character.

The Lord’s Prayer accompanies the lives of Christians. When we are happy or sad, when we eagerly wait for a child to be born or silently keep watch as an elder dies, alone in the woods or together in liturgy, filled with gratitude or emptied by grief, driven to praise or dragged to repent, the Our Father finds its way to our lips. To Dare the Our Father recognizes and respects these experiences but it envisions praying the prayer as a more sustained and challenging undertaking. How does praying the Our Father inform our thinking, feeling, willing, and acting? How does it become for us a transformative spiritual practice? John Shea explores these questions and more to discover what it looks like to become people of prayer.

This book contains twenty four expositions of thirty of the main Parables of Jesus, along with an essay on their interpretation. It gives evidence that, in seeking to proclaim the Word of God in the present day situation, modern preaching is binding itself closely to the text of the Bible.

A moving story of the power of love and the miracles of life—chock full of Southern wit, sass, and charm Grace is an intelligent, (struggling-to-be) independent 31-year-old single woman living (in sin!) with the man she’d marry if they both weren’t so commitment phobic. Michael is a doctor and a scientist and Grace has a good idea that he’s also an atheist. Over the years, this dutiful Catholic girl has become ambivalent about her faith. But her family is as devoutly old-fashioned as it gets. The stage is set for a major showdown that might just change Grace’s outlook on life, family,and the South itself.

This wise and beautiful book draws on the experience of unchosen waiting – in sickness, in old age, and in the struggles and frustrations of everyday life – to explore the challenges of waiting and the skills it demands. A lifeline for anyone who finds themselves in a time of waiting, chosen or unchosen, or accompanying others through such times, it shows how the paradoxical gifts of patience point to the God who kindly waits for us. A book of grace, depth and beauty, destined to become a modern spiritual classic.

Can an old betrayal turn into a brandnew beginning? National bestselling author Joan Medlicott pens a heartwarming tale of a family found. Widowed Amelia always portrayed her marriage to Thomas Declose as complete perfection. They lived in Paris and entertained widely for a glittering crowd; only the tragic loss of their little girl marred what appeared an ideal existence. So when Miriam Smith arrives with her daughter Sadie on Amelia's doorstep in a snowstorm, claiming to be the illegitimate child of the long-dead Thomas, Amelia reacts with shock and fury. Could Thomas possibly have had a secret life he hid from her -- a life that would have made their marriage vows a lie? Rebuffing the wise counsel of her housemates, Grace and Hannah, Amelia dismisses the possibility of a family of her own and buries herself in the pain of betrayal and humiliation. Little Sadie is the spitting image of Amelia's own lost daughter, though, and she cannot help taking mother and child into her heart. But danger stalks Miriam, and it looks as if Amelia might lose this family, too. When Mother's Day arrives, will she be left with empty arms...or with her deepest longings fulfilled? This beautiful tale of mothers and daughters is an enchanting addition to Joan Medlicott's USA Today bestselling Covington books.