Take twelve stones and build a memorial for your children. This was God's command to His people. Make sure your children know who I am and what I have done for you. Miracles shape who we are and what we believe as families and as individuals. We need to appreciate God for His divine work in our lives and make sure our children, family and friends hear those stories. The first 12 stories reflect God's intervention in the author's life. The borrowed stories are amazing testimonies that reflect God's great love, patience and power in His children's lives.

Christians face a conundrum when it comes to naming God, for if God is unnamable, as theologians maintain, he can also be called by every name. His proper name is thus an open-ended, all-encompassing list, a mystery the Church embraces in its rhetoric, but which many Christians have found difficult to accept. To explore this conflict, Valentina Izmirlieva examines two lists of God’s names: one from The Divine Names, the classic treatise by Pseudo-Dionysius, and the other from The 72 Names of the Lord, an amulet whose history binds together Kabbalah and Christianity, Jews and Slavs, Palestine, Provence, and the Balkans. This unexpected juxtaposition of a theological treatise and a magical amulet allows Izmirlieva to reveal lists’ rhetorical potential to create order and to function as both tools of knowledge and of power. Despite the two different visions of order represented by each list, Izmirlieva finds that their uses in Christian practice point to a complementary relationship between the existential need for God’s protection and the metaphysical desire to submit to his infinite majesty—a compelling claim sure to provoke discussion among scholars in many fields.

Twelve Stones is the story of Barbara Ilaynia, a secular Jew who worships Art and Romance, who tries to unravel the meaning of existence and make every moment a masterpiece. She lives and loves with passion, though not always with wisdom, in Parisian garrets and in Moroccan villages, in the light of Southern France and in sunny California. While embracing the drama of life and inhaling the fragrance of flowers along her path, her search is sometimes misguided by intensity and misled by intellectualism. At the zenith of her quest, Barbara discovers something even more meaningful than truth: She encounters the Source of love. Her life-changing confrontation with God transforms a strong willed, sensual, tough-minded individualist . . . and then her real journey begins. This book is Barbara's altar of remembrance, built from the stones she has pocketed along her winding path. She builds this altar to honor the God of miracles.

What is the secret to a healthy, happy, fulfilling marriage? Nearly every marriage starts out happy, and if we're honest, nearly every marriage at some point becomes unhappy. Is there a solution? Can an unhappy marriage really get back to being happy? Can it be truly and authentically happy--even better than it was at first? Kevin and Marcia Myers, married for thirty-seven years through nearly every challenge a couple can face, emphatically say yes. Revealing seven practices that offer help and hope for a happy and enduring marriage, The Second Happy is a captivating, practical resource that provides the tools necessary to tune-up, overhaul, or even rebuild your marriage. Practices to sustain and strengthen marriage include the following: breaking the quit cycle; picking a fair fight so both people win; keeping disagreements from escalating; and removing pretense from your relationship. Rooted in Scripture and contemporary insights from the Myers' marriage, as well as real stories from other couples, this revelatory book shows how any marriage can regain depth, meaning and, yes, happiness.

From the acclaimed author of Floating in My Mother’s Palm and Children and Fire, a stunning story about ordinary people living in extraordinary times—“epic, daring, magnificent, the product of a defining and mesmerizing vision” (Los Angeles Times). Trudi Montag is a Zwerg—a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he’s a girl, to the Jews Trudi harbors in her cellar. Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a small town, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional power, humanity, and truth.

The title for this book is taken from the fourth chapter of the Book of Joshua. The Israelites had crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land and God commanded that they take twelve stones from the river as a memorial of what He had done for them. This is the author's memorial of what God has done for her. Twelve Stones was written for anyone who has an addiction to overcome. Kay's primary challenge and addiction has been alcoholism, but there were others to conquer also. Through years of trial and error, she discovered that Jesus Christ is the only way to victory over any addiction. In a collection of essays written during a two year period of her recovery walk, without sugarcoating, she freely relays the struggles, tears, fears, and the failures. But there are successes too, and there is no mistaking the joy and the peace of God that she experiences along the way. Come on that journey with her. Learn from her mistakes and benefit from her successes and this "...peace of God that passeth all understanding..." (Philippians 4:7) can be yours too. Kay lives in New Mexico with her husband of 45 years (though they will finally be moving back to Texas upon her husband's retirement). They have three children, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. She has a degree in Psychology from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and has enjoyed three very different careers: accounting, writer/publisher, and substance abuse counselor. She is now planning to concentrate her time and efforts on her spiritual life, her family, her church, and her writing. (If you want to hear God laugh, just tell Him your plans.)

There is a development between expectation for the rebuilding of the New Jerusalem/Temple in the Old Testament and the coming of the New Jerusalem/Temple in Revelation. In Revelation, there is a dynamic relation between the New Jerusalem and the Heavenly Jerusalem: the New Jerusalem is the descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Moreover, there is no Temple building which was expected as the eschatological promise in the Old Testament but rather God and the Lamb is the Temple. How can this shift be explained? Pilchan Lee examines the exegetical tradition which existed between the Old Testament and Revelation. He assumes that as the exegetical tradition, the early Jewish (apocalyptic) literature functions as a key element for forming the idea of the New Jerusalem in Revelation. John's main argument is that the church (which is symbolized by several images) is placed in heaven now (chapters 4-20) and the church (which is symbolized by the New Jerusalem) will descend to the earth from heaven in the future (21-22).