Walk With Us And Listen

Effective peace agreements are rarely accomplished by idealists. The process of moving from situations of entrenched oppression, armed conflict, open warfare, and mass atrocities toward peace and reconciliation requires a series of small steps and compromises to open the way for the kind of dialogue and negotiation that make political stability, the beginning of democracy, and the rule of law a possibility. For over forty years, Charles Villa-Vicencio has been on the front lines of Africa's battle for racial equality. In Walk with Us and Listen, he argues that reconciliation needs honest talk to promote trust building and enable former enemies and adversaries to explore joint solutions to the cause of their conflicts. He offers a critical assessment of the South African experiment in transitional justice as captured in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and considers the influence of ubuntu, in which individuals are defined by their relationships, and other traditional African models of reconciliation. Political reconciliation is offered as a cautious model against which transitional politics needs to be measured. Villa-Vicencio challenges those who stress the obligation to prosecute those allegedly guilty of gross violation of human rights, replacing this call with the need for more complementarity between the International Criminal Court and African mechanisms to achieve the greater goals of justice and peace building.

“This is a series of stories of what it looks like to walk with God, over the course of about a year.” So begins a remarkable narrative of one man’s journey learning to hear the voice of God. The details are intimate and personal. The invitation is for us all. What if we could hear from God . . . often? What difference would it make? We have a lot to sort through on any given day. A whole lot to navigate over the course of a week or a month. Am I in the right place? The right relationships? How am I going to come up with enough money to do the things I want to do? And what about love—is this the one? Will it last? What is causing all those fears I keep pushing down inside? Why can’t I overcome those “habits” that look more and more like addictions? Am I at the right church? Should I even go to church? What is God doing in my life? All day long we are making choices. It adds up to an enormous amount of decisions in a lifetime. How do we know what to do? We have two options. We can trudge through on our own, doing our best to figure it all out. Or, we can walk with God. As in, learn to hear his voice. Really. We can live life with God. He offers to speak to us and guide us. Every day. It is an incredible offer. To accept that offer is to enter into an adventure filled with joy and risk, transformation and breakthrough. And more clarity than we ever thought possible.

A memoir of one young man's coming of age on a journey across America--told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the way. Life is fast, and I've found it's easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I'm slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us. At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn't know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn't know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself. Ultimately, it's the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.

A little girl and her father take a quiet walk and identify the sounds around them.

Walk With Me is an invitation to peek into other worlds, other experiences, to peek into the hopes and desires of those around you and possibly yourself. Sometimes it is about an actual walk and what is observed during that walk. Other times is it simply an invitation to step into the shoes of someone else. Too see the world through the eyes of another. An invitation to survey your own beliefs and then ask if there is another way to see the same thing or see the world. At times it is analytical, at other times it is emotional. Sometimes it tells a simple story and invites you into the story to perhaps say that you have experienced something similar. Walk With Me can be serious, it can be romantic, it can be curious, it can be heartfelt, and it can even be humorous. Usually, Walk With Me poems are easy to understand, at other times there might be multiple meanings to the poem. It is ultimately up to each reader to decide their value, their entertainment, their thoughtfulness, and their meaning.

Your Father has been wanting to spend time with you. The question is: will you allow space for Him to speak? Many devotionals are written with a focus on Jesus, or of keeping a listening ear to what the Spirit is saying to us. Both are good. Both are essential. But some often feel the Father is a mystery to them. A Walk With Your Father is a devotional journey that points you back to the Father. The Father who gave His best to be with you again. Who carved a path and did all the work for you to be able to walk tall with Him as a son or daughter. Wherever you are on your walk, it’s time to continue your journey.

Many of us desire to have a closer relationship with God. In TOWARDS A CLOSER WALK WITH GOD, Trevor Hudson takes you on a forty-day journey, based on Jesus’ own words, which starts in the sixth chapter of Matthew and continues with the Sermon on the Mount.

Looking for Inspirational reading and short stories? This book has some of each to lift up your day, give you some restful reading, and help take some of your stress away. As you read, reflect upon how the messages inside can strengthen your faith and help you to grow into your own spiritual walk with the Lord.