Pre-Order this book: When I Pray for You by Matthew Paul Turner

This book... oh-- this is a bedtime book for sure. This is one that your child will remember, repeat, and likely you will memorize. But it will be so worth it.

This book has beautiful illustrations, a soothing rhythm, brings tears to your eyes, and a smile to your heart! And even teens and tweens find their page in the story.

Oh and this book embraces #diversity and #special needs children. I'm so excited about it!

For Parents, it brings all the emotions of a being a parent to the surface.  Then it adds in the new sense of trusting God with your whole heart for that child.  As well as sharing with your child the love, care, and dependence you have through Prayer.  

Throughout the book it shows how praying to our Great Big God has the expectation of His power and response in our lives.  It really makes God personal.  

It shares that, as you pray for their lives, you have such a sense of awe and joy for the God whom you know personally.  That both you and your child need Our Heavenly Father right there, helping us and guiding us in Spirit and Truth. 

What a blessing Matthew Paul Turner's new book will be to so many hearts, minds, and souls. 

It's a pretty amazing book with wonderful illustrations, that are so relevant to a kids life- swimming, light sabers, twirling, kicking a ball,...and it even rhymes. It reaches across the ages with the line, "when you're no longer a child but not yet a teen." Sharing prayers through the fun of life and the struggles. 

It's sure to be a hit in any home, children of color, a child in a wheelchair, illustrations that come alive! Illustrator Kimberley Barnes from Bright Agency creates the images that are warm, vibrant, and draw you in.  

Pre-order by February 18th, from ANY retailer and you will get When God Made Light, Matthew Paul Turner's Second Book for free!!  I had the privilege of launching it too and wrote two posts about it.  

Sneak Peek- read the first few pages here. 

Book Review: True You: Letting Go of Your False Self to Uncover the Person God Created You to Be.

Releasing January 1st is perfect! This timing is impeccable as each new year many of us look for a fresh start. A new goal. An improved plan. Or focus. 

My 2018 has been one full of soul searching and reflection- as my word for the year was RESTORE, and yet things in my life occurred very differently than I expected, leaving me feeling very broken, disjointed, lost, and disoriented. 

So as I've committed to allow God to RESTORE me in Him, I have been seeking what He has for me in all of life.  This book came as I have been trying to pull together the Holy Spirit's work and provision in my life, make sense of the loss and changes, and continue to seek God's will no matter how it feels or looks.  

This book shares the author's journey to peel back the layers of herself and find the one whom God calls her to be. She artistically uses the image of pruning a tree to help the reader grasp how to peel back the layers that keep each of us from showing ourselves first and then our community who we really are. 

Her imagery of pruning the tree, was a great visual tool that helped connect the concepts and fully recognize the work that it takes to find the best branches so the tree will thrive in the future growth. 

I found her approach so helpful. At first I wasn't sure how each chapter was different from the next, but as the book progressed, I realized that she was peeling back the layers we have that hide our true selves from the surface to the core, and that they are all inter-connected, but the deeper you go, the more reflective and intuitive your search is. 

Each chapter end with reflective questions to help this process move along at the needed slow transforming pace. The author integrates scripture and quotes from others who have found their true identity in meaningful and engaging ways throughout the book. I found these chapter questions so helpful, and as I said earlier, the first chapters seemed similar as they layers we hide beneath overlap, but as you move in to the core of you are, peeling back the identity, false identity, perceptions, lies you hide beneath, you are finding your true you! I will be revisiting this book often. It helped me begin to find my inner passion and goals, but battling all the layers will take time to breakdown and focus on the core me. 

What I found to be so true, of my true me, is that I have gone through this process without fully realizing it.  When all of my life changed in what seemed like a minute this year, I engaged in what gives me life, brings me joy, and renews my energy- writing curriculum and delivering biblical truth, literacy, and skills to children.  I've restored my role as a children's ministry person in our local church and I have been able to process the changes with contentment and joy, as my time is spent focused on serving others with my best self!  

Thankful to partner with Baker books and read an advance copy to review.

Guest Post:What a Japanese Pruning Technique Can Teach Us about Our Own Souls

Two years ago on a warm June morning, my husband, our two boys, and I met Marsha, avolunteer guide, just inside the front gate of the Portland Japanese Garden.

As we followed Marsha across petite wooden bridges, along pea gravel paths, and over steppingstones set into spongy moss, the garden seemed to wrap us in a shawl of quiet. We spoke in whispers as we strolled, a lullaby of flowing water melding with the rhythmic crunch of gravel beneath our shoes.

Our guide paused beside a large Japanese maple poised regal and elegant like a grand dame on a small, moss-covered hill. Its delicate chartreuse leaves fanned like antique lace over an elaborate network of dark limbs and branches spreading like veins beneath the canopy. 

Marsha explained that a particular Japanese gardening technique called “open center pruning” was responsible not only for the sculptural appeal of this maple, but also for the uncluttered space and serenity in the garden as a whole.

Pruning open enables an individual tree to flourish by removing complicating elements, simplifying structure, and revealing its essence, Marsha explained. Over time, a tree that is pruned open is turned inside out, so to speak, revealing the beautiful design inherent within it.

Our group continued on with the tour, but I held back, reluctant to leave this one captivating tree. There was something mesmerizing about it – the way its limbs and branches spread like an elaborate scaffolding beneath its intricate canopy of delicate green, the way its roots, gnarled and exposed, gripped the mossy hill. I yearned to lean my body against its twisting trunk, to soak upthe wisdom I sensed coursing deep within it. 

Eventually I ran to catch up with my family, but even after the tour had ended, I found myself still thinking about that one tree. In the months that followed our visit, I thought a lot about the practice of pruning open, and I’ve since come to understand it as a beautiful metaphor – one we can look to for guidance in our own lives and along our own spiritual journeys. 

The practice of pruning open is not an easy one. In both gardening and in life, it’s a skill that takes discipline, insight, and years of trial and error, and in many ways, it goes against the grain. 

Metaphorically speaking, pruning is the antithesis of contemporary western culture. It is the path toward smaller, rather than larger; toward quiet, rather than loud; toward slow, rather than fast; toward simple, rather than busy; toward dismantling, rather than building; toward less, rather than more. 

Pruning may not be a popular practice, at least according to what our bigger-better-faster-more society values, but it is an essential one, not only for trees, but also for ourselves and particularly for our souls. It is only in moving toward smaller and less – in cutting back in order to open up –that we uncover who we are at the very center of our God-created selves. 

BIO: A Massachusetts native, Michelle DeRusha moved to Nebraska in 2001, where she discovered the Great Plains, grasshoppers the size of chickens … and God. She’s the wife of an English professor who reads Moby Dick for fun and mom to two teenage boys and the laziest Corgi-beagle in the world. Michelle’s newest book, True You, releasing January 1, guides readerson a journey toward letting go in order to uncover their true God-created selves.  

This post is adapted from True You: Letting Go of Your False Self to Uncover the Person God Created, by Michelle DeRusha, releasing January 1 from Baker Books. 

IVP book review: Spiritual Practices in Community by Diana Shiflett

I

Diana Shiflett is an amazing writer who brings to life how to lead or use spiritual practices in your own life or in the groups you lead. She has a heart for hearing God, training others in learning to be silent and hear God personally, her writing is approachable, helpful, with great examples to help the reader grasp how these strategies work across different ages and groups. And I’m recognizing some of her strategies are practices I’ve adopted, but I didn’t realize had names or were recognized. She’s centered on the Word and her ideas are achievable, simple, relevant and well grounded.

It's been so encouraging with ideas on how to improve my prayer, bible journaling, anxiety with spiritual practices-- The author has a degree in youth ministry, a Masters in Psychology from Wheaton and an MDiv. And she has great teaching skills in print plus she's fun- reminds you to laugh at yourself- and encouraging- it's an easy to read book- but I want to go back and read it slow and try EVERY one of her ideas or her ways of implementing spiritual practices to know God more intimately and experience Him in new ways. I read over 50 books each year- and this one makes the top of my list as beneficial and worthy of your reading it. 

My suggestion for improvement is pictures of journaling examples, labyrinth prayer, etc. to bring it even more alive to those of us unfamiliar with these practices.

Blessed to partner with #intervarsitypress and get to read and advanced copy and review.