What’s in My Book Basket: Spring 2025
Here are the books I have been enjoying lately!
We experience longing in every season of life, whether we ache for a spouse or a child, for healing in brokenness, or for clearer direction in our calling. My friend Rebecca George reminds us in this highly relevant message, we can fall into resentment about what we lack—or we can see our unmet desires as an invitation to draw closer to a trustworthy God. Offering a gospel-centered approach to faithful living, You’re Not Too Late includes:
- wisdom for how to bring our disappointments to God
- real-life ideas for dealing with envy, isolation, and doubt
- insights into finding contentment, no matter our circumstances
- step-by-step ways to turn from sinful thought patterns to life-giving habit
- prayer prompts, discussion questions, Scripture for reflection, and accompanying online videos
With the compassion of someone who similarly struggles, Rebecca presents a comprehensive approach to waiting that doesn’t deny our desires but teaches us how to commit them to the care of our Savior. HIghly recommended! Click here to purchase.
I went through a really rough patch last year and this book helped me find hope and a way out of my sadness.
Terry Wardle grew up in the Appalachian coalfields of southwestern Pennsylvania, part of a hardscrabble family of coal miners whose cast of characters included a hot-tempered grandfather with a predilection for blowing up houses, a distant and disapproving father, and a mother who disciplined him with harsh words and threats of hellfire.
After enduring a crazy childhood, Terry graduated to a troubled adolescence, and then on to what seemed like a successful transition into adulthood, earning multiple degrees and founding one of the country’s fastest growing churches. But all was not well.
All his life, he felt he was never enough. Plagued by a truckload of fear no matter what he accomplished, he fell down the ladder of success into the deepest ditch of his life—ending up in a psychiatric hospital. Fortunately, that’s when he discovered that Jesus has no fear of ditches.
In fact, Jesus does some of his best work with people who find themselves there. In sharing his remarkable journey, Terry offers hope that healing and wholeness are possible no matter how broken a life may be. His larger-than-life story will help you move forward along your own healing path. Click here to purchase.
In this twelve-session video Bible study, I, along with some of today’s best-loved Christian authors and speakers, look at the spiritual lessons learned from twelve daring women in the Bible and what they mean for you today.
As you look at each of these women’s lives, you will discover how to:
- Apply biblical lessons to your own modern-day struggles.
- Live through your failures as well as your successes.
- Draw near to God in a world filled with trials.
- Find lasting contentment in every situation.
- Overcome rejection and insecurity . . . and much more.
You’ll study the lives of . . .
- Shulamite Woman: We Had God at Hello (Lisa Harper)
- Deborah: Fight Like a Girl (Bianca Juarez Olthoff)
- Proverbs 31 Woman: How Not to Do It All (Karen Ehman)
- Ruth: Staying Focused in a World of Distractions (Chrystal Evans Hurst)
- Puah and Shiphrah: How to Fight Your Fears (Margaret Feinberg)
- Esther: Letting God Be in Control (Courtney Joseph)
- Priscilla: Living a Life of Blessed Ordinary (Karen Ehman)
- Mary and Martha: Finding Life in Death (Bianca Juarez Olthoff)
- Bent Woman: We’ve Got God’s Complete Attention (Lisa Harper)
- Woman with the Issue of Blood: When Persistence Pays Off (Chrystal Evans Hurst)
- Elizabeth: How to Win the Waiting Game (Margaret Feinberg)
- Anna: How to Live a Life Devoted to God (Courtney Joseph Fallick)
This study guide includes: Individual access to twelve streaming video sessions, video notes and a comprehensive structure for small group discussion time, group leader helps, and personal study and reflection materials for in-between sessions. Click here to purchase.
THis was one of my favorite fiction reads of 2024.
Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now fifteen and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border, believing her neighbors that they pose no real threat, and dreams instead of the day Tomasz returns from college in Warsaw so they can be married. But little by little, injustice by brutal injustice, the Nazi occupation takes hold, and Alina’s tiny rural village, its families, are divided by fear and hate.
Then, as the fabric of their lives is slowly picked apart, Tomasz disappears. Where Alina used to measure time between visits from her beloved, now she measures the spaces between hope and despair, waiting for word from Tomasz and avoiding the attentions of the soldiers who patrol her parents’ farm. But for now, even deafening silence is preferable to grief.
Slipping between Nazi-occupied Poland and the frenetic pace of modern life, Kelly Rimmer creates an emotional and finely wrought narrative. The Things We Cannot Say is an unshakable reminder of the devastation when truth is silenced…and how it can take a lifetime to find our voice before we learn to trust it. Click here to purchase
Everyone loves restaurant-quality meals, but not everyone loves the cost. What if you could make restaurant-quality meals in your slow cooker at home, and at a fraction of the cost of the restaurants? The Stay at Home Chef Slow Cooker Cookbook features 120 incredible recipes that are simple, satisfying, and much less expensive to make than if you were eating them in a restaurant. Rachel Farnsworth (The Stay at Home Chef) creates simple, satisfying recipes that will appeal to anyone who is short on time but still wants to enjoy delicious meals at home. Click here to purchase.
Title photo credit: Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash
