None of us wants to be sidelined, stuck, shamed, or silenced. But the difficulties of life have a way of putting us in a corner, and we don't know how to move forward. We see brokenness in our communities, our relationships, and our spirits. It's so easy to blame ourselves or our circumstances, to get bogged down in discouragement and toxic thinking. But that's not what we were meant for, and that's not how God wants us to live.

Just after her fortieth birthday, author Shauna Niequist found herself in a season of chaos, change, and loss unlike anything she'd ever faced. She discovered that many of the beliefs and practices that she usually turned to were no longer serving her.

What happens when life begins to trip us up and failure starts creeping in? Many of us just keep on doing the same thing, hoping for different results. Some of us look for escape, to find a way out of the mess we feel that we've created. But neither enduring nor escaping is ultimately what we need. The answer is to allow ourselves to begin again, every day, in every part of our lives. Through engaging, lyrical prose, Leeana Tankersley shows women how to forgive themselves, develop new and healthier patterns of living, and do away with resentment and regret.

Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned 30, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be. To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. She got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world, all alone. This is the absorbing chronicle of that year.

Follow Naomi as she talks to women working in brothels in Mumbai; survivors of an Indonesian tsunami in which more than 160,000 lives were lost; a young girl waiting on an operation to save her life; and victims of domestic violence horrifically burned by fire. Be still with her when she realizes the pain she feels in the face of these extreme injustices reveals a common struggle that exists within all of humanity. And rise with her as she wrestles with confusion over her identity, comes face to face with redemption, and then begins to understand her own story.

New York Times best-selling author Shauna Niequist invites you to look at the landscape of your own life, consider what it might look like to leave behind the pressure to be perfect, and begin the life-changing practice of simply being present in the middle of the mess and the ordinariness of life. Shauna offers an honest account of what led her to begin this journey and a compelling vision for an entirely new way to live: Soaked in rest, silence, simplicity, prayer, and connection with the people who matter most to us.

Anne Lamott meets Elizabeth Gilbert in this inspirational, side-splittingly funny exploration of the power of living with love, forgiveness, and honesty. Glennon Melton became a sensation when her personal essays started going viral. Giving language to our universal (yet often secret) experiences, her hilarious and poignant observations were read by millions, shared among friends, discussed at water coolers, quoted in The New York Times, and have inspired a social movement.

The best-selling album has inspired a heart-melting audio book. In Love Story, one of Christian music’s most remarkable singer-songwriters brings to listeners her proven gift for mining the gritty soil of everyday experience and emerging with poignant gems of spiritual insight. Based on the songs of the popular album, Music Inspired by The Story, Dove Award winner Nichole Nordeman takes us inside some of the pivotal moments of the people of Scripture, revealing a very human side that we’ve rarely glimpsed.

Serene Jones' epic work of raw truth, fierce love, and spiritual teaching is as muscular as the fractured soul of this century demands. From her abiding Oklahoma roots to her historic leadership of a legendary New York seminary, her story illuminates the deep fault lines of this age - and points beyond them.

Melissa Zaldivar talks honestly about losing everything that once defined her and how God used unexpected opportunities, like working at Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, to spark a journey of working through her grief and encountering the all-sufficient love of Christ. Weaving inspiring passages of Scripture and insights from Little Women into her personal story, Melissa encourages listeners with her discovery that it’s when we have nothing left to offer that we can receive God’s love the most. And that’s something that can never be lost.

Many of us stumbled into Jesus and discovered the one we'd been searching for all our lives, whether we knew it or not. He told us everything was going to be alright. He was a best friend who whispered that he loved us to the exact extent his father loved him. He saw everything we did yet refused to condemn us ever. He was an incredibly powerful and supernatural God who could actually change the outcome of our horror into beauty. Then enter shame, time, failure, disappointment, and bad teaching.

This is a book about discovering what we really need. There are a lot of second-best options, but we weren't made to live a second-best life. Finding what we actually need is different than what we are often offered. There are many books full of opinions, steps and programs. This isn't one of them. This is about craving the things that matter. Things that don't just work, but last.

Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family. But over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age 40 she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence.

Cold Tangerines is a collection of stories that celebrate the extraordinary moments hidden in our everyday lives. It is about God, and about life, and about the thousands of daily ways in which an awareness of God changes and infuses everything. It is about spiritual life, and about all the things that we have called nonspiritual life that might be spiritual after all.

From Catholic schoolgirl to punk rocker to emergent church planter, Angela Doll Carlson traveled a spiritual path that in many ways mirrors that of a whole generation. She takes us with her on a deep and revealing exploration of the forces that drove her toward Orthodoxy and the challenges that long kept her from fully entering in.

Follow Naomi as she talks to women working in brothels in Mumbai; survivors of an Indonesian tsunami in which more than 160,000 lives were lost; a young girl waiting on an operation to save her life; and victims of domestic violence horrifically burned by fire. Be still with her when she realizes the pain she feels in the face of these extreme injustices reveals a common struggle that exists within all of humanity. And rise with her as she wrestles with confusion over her identity, comes face to face with redemption, and then begins to understand her own story.

Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family. But over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age 40 she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence.

The best-selling album has inspired a heart-melting audio book. In Love Story, one of Christian music’s most remarkable singer-songwriters brings to listeners her proven gift for mining the gritty soil of everyday experience and emerging with poignant gems of spiritual insight. Based on the songs of the popular album, Music Inspired by The Story, Dove Award winner Nichole Nordeman takes us inside some of the pivotal moments of the people of Scripture, revealing a very human side that we’ve rarely glimpsed.

On an ordinary September day, 12-year-old Jack is swept away in a freak neighborhood flood. His parents and younger sister are left to wrestle with the awful questions: How could God let this happen? Can we ever be happy again? They each fall into the abyss of grief in different ways. And in the days and months to come, they each find their faltering way toward peace. In Rare Bird, Anna Whiston-Donaldson unfolds a mother's story of loss that leads, in time, to enduring hope.

New York Times best-selling author Shauna Niequist invites you to look at the landscape of your own life, consider what it might look like to leave behind the pressure to be perfect, and begin the life-changing practice of simply being present in the middle of the mess and the ordinariness of life. Shauna offers an honest account of what led her to begin this journey and a compelling vision for an entirely new way to live: Soaked in rest, silence, simplicity, prayer, and connection with the people who matter most to us.

In her moving spiritual memoir, Mary DeMuth reflects on the “thin places” of her life—places where she was acutely aware of God’s presence. Through her own story, DeMuth invites you to discover new ways to experience a God who is ready to break through any ordinary day or extraordinary pain and offer you a glimpse of eternity.

When Nicole Hardy’s eye-opening "Modern Love" column appeared in the New York Times, the response from readers was overwhelming. Hardy’s essay, which exposed the conflict between being true to herself as a woman and remaining true to her Mormon faith, struck a chord with women coast-to-coast. Now in her funny, intimate, and thoughtful memoir, Nicole Hardy explores how she came, at the age of 35, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity.

Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.

Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

There is no one whose brokenness is too broken for God. We know this is true for our friends when we want to encourage them. Yet, when it comes to the places of out innermost sense of regret, we often wonder if it is really true that God can work all things together for good for those who love Him. Angie Smith is one who was quick to encourage a friend, but struggled to believe that God could truly make something spectacular out of her brokenness and disappointments.

After finding Jesus at a suburban megachurch, young Jamie Wright trades in the easy life on the cul-de-sac for the green fields of Costa Rica. There, along with her husband, kids, and the family cat, she intends to serve God and make converts. But she soon loses faith and falls into a funk of cynicism and despair. Fortunately, Knives the cat is there, looking on with just enough disinterest to make her laugh...and dare her to try another way. That other way turns out to be telling the truth. She launches a renegade blog, Jamie the Very Worst Missionary, which wins a large following.

Like many of us, Andrew Palau spent his growing-up years immersed in a selfish and self-centered life, numb to God and to the letters his evangelist father wrote him. In The Secret Life of a Fool, Palau recounts his years of rebellion and reckless living—and the moment when the shame of his life collided with God’s relentless grace, changing everything. It’s an unforgettably gutsy story, packed with honesty and hope for us all.

When unexpected grief brings two families together, how do they start their journey to healing? Join Michael and Gina Spehn--bestselling authors and founders of the New Day Foundation--as they tell their story of resilience, remembrance, and reliance on their shared faith.

"In this life, I have lost. I lost my husband and best friend. My children lost their father. But Stephen didn't lose his life. He found it." Early one morning, just down the street from the local mosque, gunshots shattered the silence. A young American lay in a pool of blood, murdered by al-Qaeda extremists. When God called Emily and Stephen Foreman to bring the gospel to a Muslim nation where Christianity was illegal, they knew they were being called to a life of sacrifice. "We died before we came here" was their common refrain.

For the first 13 years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be 13 years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her.