We Promised A Story Of Abiding Love

C. Clyde Squires depicts abiding love in a print of a couple with a child. This artwork is a part of a series of five prints of the stages of love, given to my grandmother in 1916 for her bridal shower. The prints serve as an inspiration for the novels written for each. The first is mother love in Annies Love, the second is puppy love in Sophie Writes a Love Story, and the third is Out of Darkness to Accepted Love. In love in their high school years, Colin and Carrie marry shortly after graduation while Colin is still in college. Together they face the usual challenges of married life, raising three boys on a farm in the Midwest. As with many women when the children are grown, Carrie reluctantly begins a career in banking. Her life is divided between her children, her career, and her parents in their declining years. The farming business grows substantially, giving them both hope for a happy future. A series of falls and consistent pain in her knees sends Carrie to doctors to determine the cause. The diagnosis of a progressive muscle deterioration changes their future dramatically. Despite the prognosis and their plans for the future, Colin and Carrie work together to research the disease and discover and invent tools to aid Carrie. The love that began in their youth becomes an example of abiding love, one that overcomes all obstacles. The book shares conversations with family members in telling their story. It is filled with laughter, tragedy, and hope for each new day. Those who have faced many life challenges will relate to how the future can quickly change. Books by Linda Kay: Flavors from the Past: Memoirs and Recipes of Wilma Weiland Diekhoff Annies Love Sophie Writes a Love Story Out of Darkness to Accepted Love

There are many missing years and little mention of Mary of Nazareth in the Bible beyond the birth of Jesus. I, Mary fills in these missing years with Mary’s own story of her emotions and her experiences as she cares for her husband and family. The story is interspersed with quotations from biblical texts to make the story one of historical fiction. She demonstrates her very human responses to events and struggles with her own perception of the promises of Jesus’s life. Explore with the author what might have been in Mary’s mind and heart.

Nine short stories create The Wonder, The Joy, The Promise, an uplifting book filled with age-old and contemporary themes, by author Evelyn McCarthy. Mary, the mother of Jesus, keeps a journal. In it she describes her feelings of joy, trepidation and an overwhelming sense of serenity as she readies herself to give birth to her son and the son of God. A young serviceman loses his mother and believes life is over until events after her death lead him to his mother's prayers being answered. A single mother struggles to raise her daughter while bills pile up and life seems as if it's one big chore-what happens to change her outlook? A wealthy family experiences loss of income and fear that life has no meaning, until they find a wealth of meaning by realizing what the most important things in life really are. A couple work at a homeless shelter during the Christmas season and are forever changed by the selfless act of giving to other human beings less fortunate. McCarthy's soothing and beautiful prose is a Godsend and will help you to remember just how precious life is and how the healing power of God can transform difficulty into seeking a new path, appreciating the true beauty of life, and realizing that, with God, anything is possible.

If you listen closely enough to teenagers, you’ll hear their deep yearning to connect with God, and a powerful instinct to belong. And you’ll find out right away the one thing they really hate—being preached to. Here in My Faith, My Life, teenagers learn all about the Christian faith they’ve been baptized into – and the Episcopal Church that offers them a spiritual home. With lively writing that’s always informative and never condescending, the book gives them all the basics they need to know to understand their faith – and claim it as their own. Closely linked to the Book of Common Prayer, My Faith, My Life covers everything from scripture, church history, and sacraments, to the meaning of prayer and ministry in the lives of real teens today. This is the essential handbook for teens in the Episcopal Church – an excellent resource for confirmation classes, youth study groups, and high school Christian education programs. Also available: A complete guide for Christian educators who are using My Faith, My Life as a confirmation resource for teenagers in the parish. It will contain detailed lesson plans, background information, suggestions, newsletter articles, and a wide variety of other materials to help teachers make the best use of My Faith, My Life. This leader guide will be a downloadable PDF for $5.95 from the Church Publishing website

In this unique inquiry into the deepest incarnation of love, author Richard Matzkin has looked to his extraordinary, three decade long marriage to Alice as a living laboratory to research the elements that comprise a truly loving, magnificent partnership. He has discovered 39 Loving promises, statements of intention you pledge to yourself, not to your partner that are the behavioral components of a deep, abiding love. These Promises are a profound path to transform your relationship into a magnificent one. “Immensely practical. I cannot imagine a book that holds more potential to improve relationships. Just reflect on one of these promises a day and the sky is the limit” -Stephen G. Post. PhD, President, Unlimited Love Institute, author – WHY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE. Keywords: Love, Relationships, Marriage, Friendship, Partnership, Alice, Richard, Transform

Thomas and Jean are back! They are back with a romance that started on a computer keyboard in their first novel Love at my Fingertips, and which comes to fruition in this new novel: Abiding Love: The strength of two hearts-and strength you will find! The reader will be drawn into more mystery, murder and romance along with the first book's graphic details of love, lust, suspense and intrigue. You will feel the devastating events and be led into a climax of two people in love, destined to be with each other. This thriller-romance will touch your very heart and soul as never before! It's a love story that is full of surprises!

Each one of us enjoys deep relationships held together by an invisible cord called commitment, and every important community depends on the strength of that unseen cord. At times, we find it a joy to keep our commitments. At others, it seems difficult–even impossible–to honor those spoken and unspoken pledges. If you deeply desire to make and keep commitments… If you want insight into what makes relationships work– or to learn what to do when a relationship is in crisis… If you feel trapped by a bad commitment and wonder if you can experience grace and a new beginning… Best-selling author Lewis Smedes offers insights that will profoundly affect the way you interact with and relate to others. Find out what you and those you love can gain from committed relationships; discover how to cope when someone close to you breaks your trust; and determine which, if any, relationships should continue forever–as well as how you can make these relationships last–in Learning to Live the Love We Promise.

For fans of Educated, Captive, and Leah Remini's Troublemaker comes the gripping true-life story of one young woman's accidental journey into a cult. And her escape a decade later. It's rarely obvious when a group is a cult. Most cults don't advertise themselves as such: they are groups of people who look and act just like you and me. Not dangerous. Not deranged. At least, not at first. The slide toward complete control of your personality, your thoughts, and your life is slow and virtually unnoticeable. Until it's too late. Cult, A Love Story has been studied in university classrooms, featured in an audio documentary and on podcasts, and read by cult survivors and their families all over the world, from remote British Columbia, Canada to Australia, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. In this award-winning memoir, Alexandra Amor shines a light on cults so that others might learn from her heartbreaking experience. Amor gracefully and sensitively explains how ordinary and intelligent people get seduced into joining cults, why they stay despite the emotional and psychological abuse, and what the long process of recovery looks like once someone leaves a cult. Amor's transparency about her decade-long involvement with a Vancouver, Canada cult makes this powerful and gripping book an excellent resource for those wanting to know more about how the mind control of a high demand spiritual or religious group works. In this page-turning, personal memoir you will learn: - how normal, intelligent people can, without knowing what's happening, get sucked into a cult's grip - why it's so very difficult for those in high demand groups (cults) to leave - how to evaluate whether a group you belong to is a cult - what the recovery period after a cult looks like - resources and recommendations if you know someone in a cult, or if you are in recovery from a cult yourself "This excellent memoir reveals how a charismatic, manipulative spirit medium can use love for God and neighbor as a hook to drag a small group of devotees into her cynical web of impossible goals for self-perfection. After a heroic struggle for insight, Alexandra Amor was one of the cult members who broke the abusive spell." Joesph Szimhart, Cult Information Specialist