Book picks similar to
Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary by William Pringle Livingstone
biography
christian
missions
biographies
A Passion for God: The Spiritual Journey of A. W. Tozer
Lyle Wesley Dorsett - 2008
Men like him are not college-bred but Spirit-taught." Leonard Ravenhill, 20th century British evangelist. Pastor A. W. Tozer, author of the Christian classics The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy, was a complex, intensely private, deeply spiritual man, and a gifted preacher whose impact for the kingdom of God is immeasurable. In this thoughtful biography, bestselling author Lyle Dorsett traces Tozer's life from his humble beginnings as a Pennsylvania farm boy to his heyday as a Chicago pastor--when hundreds of college students would travel to his South Side church to hear him preach and thousands more heard his Sunday broadcasts on WMBI. Eventually, he came to his final pastorate in Toronto. From his conversion as a teen to his death in 1963, Tozer remained true to one passion: to know the Father and make Him known, no matter what the cost. The price he paid was loneliness, censure from other, more secular-minded ministers of the times, and even a degree of estrangement from his family. Read the life story of a flawed but gifted saint, whose works are still impacting the world today.
Medicine Men: Extreme Appalachian Doctoring
Carolyn Jourdan - 2012
National bestseller "Medicine Men" follows the beloved #1 bestselling "Heart in the Right Place". This is a collection of the most memorable moments from more than a dozen rural physicians who each practiced medicine for more than 50 years in the Southern Appalachian Mountains from 1930-2012. Hilarious, heroic, true stories of miracle cures, ghost dogs, and much madcap medical mayhem. Unimaginably funny and touching situations where men with nerves of steel and hearts of gold get stuck between a rock and a hard place in the Smoky Mountains. These men are saints who walk among us and Jourdan's father is one of them. Jourdan's work is often compared to James Herriot and Bill Bryson. This story collection is like "All Creatures Great and Small" but with people instead of animals or vingnettes from country doctors who took "A Walk in the Woods".Jourdan's first book is on hundreds of lists of best books of the year, best book club books, and funniest books. "Heart in the Right Place" was chosen as Family Circle magazine's first ever Book of the Month, won the Elle magazine Reader's Prize, named a Wall Street Journal Nonfiction Bestseller and ranked #1 on Amazon in Biography, Memoir, Science, and Medicine.
The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash
Dave Urbanski - 2003
He's timeless. His appeal spans over many decades and many generations. The Man Comes Around addresses why Cash is so important now and why he's always been important. It unpacks the anchor from which all Cash's artistry comes-his spirituality. From the cotton fields of Arkansas to the air fields of Germany, and from the streets of Memphis to the gospel road in Israel, this comprehensive, dripping-with-detail book on the spiritual journey of Johnny Cash will take the reader on an odyssey of earthy, workingman's music and war-torn, complex Christianity.
After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken
Kent Annan - 2010
Along the way he discovers that he is not alone, that from the psalmists of old to our neighbors today, people have followed life to the edge of meaning and have heard--God even there, calling for honest faith.
Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People
Nadia Bolz-Weber - 2015
But God keeps showing up in the least likely of people—a church-loving agnostic, a drag queen, a felonious Bishop and a gun-toting member of the NRA. As she lives and worships alongside these “accidental saints,” Nadia is swept into first-hand encounters with grace—a gift that feels to her less like being wrapped in a warm blanket and more like being hit with a blunt instrument. But by this grace, people are transformed in ways they couldn’t have been on their own. In a time when many have rightly become disillusioned with Christianity, Accidental Saints demonstrates what happens when ordinary people share bread and wine, struggle with scripture together, and tell each other the truth about their real lives. This unforgettable account of their faltering steps toward wholeness will ring true for believer and skeptic alike. Told in Nadia’s trademark confessional style, Accidental Saints is the stunning next work from one of today’s most important religious voices.From the Hardcover edition.
The Confession of Saint Patrick
St. Patrick
The autobiography of one of the most popular saints in history, now available in a new translation.Beyond being recognized as the patron saint of Ireland (perhaps for having chased some nonexistent snakes off the Emerald Isle), little else is popularly known about Saint Patrick. And yet, Patrick left behind a unique document, his Confession, which tells us much about both his life and his beliefs. This autobiography, originally written in the fifth century, and short by modern standards, is nonetheless a work that fascinates with its glimpse into the life of an intriguing man, and inspires with its testament of faith. Here, in this new edition from internationally acclaimed translator John Skinner, the character of Patrick, his era, and his world vividly come to life. Also included in this volume is the only other document known to have been written by Patrick, a letter he wrote to the soldiers of Coroticus--also Christians--who had raided parts of Ireland and taken away prisoners who were then sold into slavery. This letter is a wonderful demonstration of Patrick's rhetorical fire. Quite irate, Patrick harangues his fellow Christians, and the results are every bit as autobiographically revealing as the Confession. John O'Donohue, author of Anam Cara, provides an insightful foreword that re-creates the unique spirituality of Patrick and of the Irish people, and shows how it applies to our lives today.
Love Undocumented: Risking Trust in a Fearful World
Sarah Quezada - 2017
She was also blissfully unaware of the real situations facing today's immigrants. Until she met someone new. . . who happened to be undocumented.In Love Undocumented, Quezada takes readers on a journey deep into the world of the U.S. immigration system. Follow her as she walks alongside her new friend, meets with lawyers, stands at the U.S.–Mexico border, and visits immigrants in detention centers. With wisdom from Scripture, research, and these experiences, Quezada explores God’s call to welcome the stranger and invites Christians to consider how to live faithfully in the world of closed doors and high fences.Is it possible to abandon fear and cultivate authentic relationships with new arrivals?What if hospitality to immigrant and refugee neighbors puts us at personal risk?How can churches create safe spaces for those living at the precarious edge of our society?With Quezada as your guide, discover a subversive Savior who never knew a stranger. Get to know the God of the Bible, whose love and grace cross all borders. Respond to an invitation to turn away from fear and enter a bigger story.
Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Sara Miles - 2007
Take This Bread is the story of her journey to faith and how she took Jesus' call to feed others by establishing food pantries that feed thousands of people.
A Walk Through the Dark: How My Husband's 90 Minutes in Heaven Deepened My Faith for a Lifetime
Eva Piper - 2013
Don Piper's testimony, told in the "New York Times" bestseller "90 Minutes in Heaven," would one day bring hope to thousands. But all that was in the future. Despite family and friends who kept vigil with her, Eva Piper found herself essentially alone. Walking in the dark. And she had always hated the dark.Though it parallels that of her husband, Eva Piper's account is quite different from his. It takes readers not to heavenly places but through a very earthly maze of hospital corridors, insurance forms, tiring commutes from home to workplace and hospital, and lonely hours of waiting and worrying. This is the story of a woman learning, step by darkened step, to go places she never thought she could go and growing into a person she never thought she could be. Packed with hard-earned wisdom about what it means to be a caregiver, to open yourself to the care of others, and to rest in God's provision, this book" "provides a dependable source of light to help you walk through the dark.
Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God
Sarah Bessey - 2019
Sarah Bessey was in her sweet spot: a popular author, sought-after speaker and preacher, and an active and engaged mother of four, married to the love of her life. Raised within the Word of Faith and prosperity movements, which declared that obedience to God led to untold blessings, her life seemed to prove the preachers of her childhood were right. Then she was in a car accident with life-shattering consequences, and everything she thought she knew about God and faith was upended.Weaving together theology and memoir in her trademark narrative style, Sarah tells us the whole story of the car accident that changed her body and ultimately changed her life. The road of healing leads to Rome where she met the Pope (it’s complicated) and encountered the Holy Spirit in the last place she expected. She writes about her miraculous healing, learning to live with chronic pain, and the ways God unexpectedly makes us whole in the midst of suffering. She invites us to a path of knowing God that is filled with ordinary miracles, hope in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, surprising holiness, and other completely reasonable things.Insightful, profound, and unexpected, Miracles and Other Reasonable Things is a wild spirit-filled story of what it means to live with both grief and faith in our hands as we wrestle with God.
He Gave Us a Valley
Helen Roseveare - 2006
During the war Helen was brutally beaten and raped and left with no choice but to return to Britain (this story is told in 'Give Me This Mountain').She quickly returned to the Congo in 1966 to assist in the rebuilding of the nation. She helped establish a new medical school and hospital (for the other hospitals that she built were destroyed) and served there until 1973. In the eight years following the war, despite endless frustrations, again and again God showed his unfailing guidance and unstinting provision for her needs. This book is the story of the joys and adventures of re-establishing the medical work, the church building programme and the work of forgiveness, necessary after the destruction of the civil war.
A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley
Neal Thompson - 2013
Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation for the strangeness of the world. After selling his first cartoon to Time magazine at age eighteen, more cartooning triumphs followed, but it was his “Believe It or Not” conceit and the wildly popular radio shows it birthed that would make him one of the most successful entertainment figures of his time and spur him to search the globe’s farthest corners for bizarre facts, exotic human curiosities, and shocking phenomena.Ripley delighted in making outrageous declarations that somehow always turned out to be true—such as that Charles Lindbergh was only the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic or that “The Star Spangled Banner” was not the national anthem. Assisted by an exotic harem of female admirers and by ex-banker Norbert Pearlroth, a devoted researcher who spoke eleven languages, Ripley simultaneously embodied the spirit of Peter Pan, the fearlessness of Marco Polo and the marketing savvy of P. T. Barnum.In a very real sense, Ripley sought to remake the world’s aesthetic. He demanded respect for those who were labeled “eccentrics” or “freaks”—whether it be E. L. Blystone, who wrote 1,615 alphabet letters on a grain of rice, or the man who could swallow his own nose.By the 1930s Ripley possessed a vast fortune, a private yacht, and a twenty-eight room mansion stocked with such “oddities” as shrunken heads and medieval torture devices, and his pioneering firsts in print, radio, and television were tapping into something deep in the American consciousness—a taste for the titillating and exotic, and a fascination with the fastest, biggest, dumbest and most weird. Today, that legacy continues and can be seen in reality TV, YouTube, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Jackass, MythBusters and a host of other pop-culture phenomena. In the end Robert L. Ripley changed everything. The supreme irony of his life, which was dedicated to exalting the strange and unusual, is that he may have been the most amazing oddity of all.
Life Without Limits
Nick Vujicic - 2007
Born without arms or legs, Nick Vujicic overcame his disability to live not just independently but a rich, fulfilling life, becoming a model for anyone seeking true happiness. Now an internationally successful motivational speaker, his central message is that the most important goal for anyone is to find their life’s purpose despite whatever difficulties or seemingly impossible odds stand in their way. Nick tells the story of his physical disabilities and the emotional battle he endured trying to deal with them as a child, a teen, and a young adult. “For the longest, loneliest time, I wondered if there was anyone on earth like me, and whether there was any purpose to my life other than pain and humiliation.” He shares how his faith in God has been his central source of strength and explains that once he found his own sense of purpose—inspiring others to make their lives and the world better—he found the confidence to build a rewarding and productive life without limits. Nick offers practical advice for realizing a life of fulfillment and happiness by building trust in others, developing supportive relationships, and gaining strength for the journey. He encourages the reader by showing how he learned to accept what he could not control and focus instead on what he could. “I do believe my life has no limits! I want you to feel the same way about your life, no matter what your challenges may be. As we begin our journey together, please take a moment to think about any limitations you’ve placed on your life or that you’ve allowed others to place on it. Now think about what it would be like to be free of those limitations. What would your life be if anything were possible?”—Nick Vujicic, from Life Without Limits
Twelve Extraordinary Women: How God Shaped Women of the Bible, and What He Wants to Do with You
John F. MacArthur Jr. - 2005
It wasn't their natural qualities that made these women extraordinary but the power of the one true God whom they worshipped and served.In "Twelve Extraordinary Women," you'll learn more than fascinating information about these women, you'll discover-perhaps for the first time-the unmistakable chronology of God's redemptive work in history through their lives. These women were not ancillary to His plan, they were at the very heart of it.Some of the women you'll come to know include:Ruth (Ruth 1-4) Anna (Luke 2:36-38) Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus (Luke 10:38-42) Mary Magdalene (Matthew 27:56-61) Sarah (Genesis 11-25) Hannah (1 Samuel 1-2) The Samaritan woman (John 4 Mary, the mother of Jesus (Luke 1-2)You will be challenged and motivated by this poignant and personal look into the lives of some of the Bible's most faithful women. Their struggles and temptations are the same trials faced by all believers in all ages. And the God to whom they were so committed is the same God who continues to mold and use ordinary people today.
Killing Jesus: A History
Bill O'Reilly - 2013
Nearly two thousand years after this beloved and controversial young revolutionary was brutally killed by Roman soldiers, more than 2.2 billion human beings attempt to follow his teachings and believe he is God. Killing Jesus will take readers inside Jesus's life, recounting the seismic political and historical events that made his death inevitable - and changed the world forever.