Books

Published Works by Mudroom Authors

 

Current

 

Marriage in the Middle: Embracing Midlife Surprises, Challenges, and Joys by Dorothy Greco

Midlife is a season of challenge and change―professionally, relationally, physically, and spiritually. On our better days, we experience a sense of growing clarity and satisfaction about who we are. We might even be coming to terms with our limitations and vulnerabilities, letting go of some dreams and creating new ones. But many days, we are overwhelmed and exhausted by the intense transitions of this season, leaving us feeling off-balance and insecure. And these challenges reverberate through our marriages, making us wonder how we’re going to survive.

Though many assume that “midlife” is synonymous with “crisis,” Dorothy Littell Greco reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way. The demands of midlife actually force us to adjust and adapt, providing new opportunities for discovery and growth within our marriages. With vulnerability and insight, Marriage in the Middle will inspire and encourage you to invest in your relationship with your spouse, enabling you both to thrive as you face the challenges and changes of this era together.” (Amazon)

 

Making Marriage Beautiful:  Lifelong Love, Joy, and Intimacy Start With You By Dorothy Greco

“What makes a marriage beautiful? Honesty? Compatibility? Physical and emotional intimacy? All of these are important, but there’s one component that determines the quality and longevity of a marriage more than anything else: a willingness to grow.

Because a wedding joins together two imperfect people, all couples experience disappointment, conflict, and pain. How husbands and wives respond to these challenges determines the kind of people they will become and the kind of marriage they will have.

Making Marriage Beautiful reveals how the pursuit of Christ results in profound transformation for both the individual and the marriage. Rather than offering clichés and formulas, Greco relies on candor, humor, and real life stories to bring encouragement and wisdom to all couples, regardless of whether they have been married four weeks or forty years.” (Amazon)

 

Pandemic Prayerbook: A Pray-at-Home Guide for the Coronavirus Crisis (Anthology edited by Darcy Wiley)

Featuring:

Download for free!

The COVID-19 crisis has created challenges that many of us were just not prepared for. Financially, emotionally, physically… There seems like there is so little that we can even do. But one thing we can all do is to pray.

Assembled by Darcy Wiley, this Pandemic Prayerbook is a tool for all of us during this time. Featuring ServLife’s Executive Director Adam J. Nevins and many others, this prayerbook is a free gift for you. In these prayers, we are asking God to change the trajectory of the virus, and in the meantime, to change us.

 

The Wonder Years: 40 Women over 40 on Aging, Faith, Beauty, and Strength (Anthology edited by Leslie Leyland Fields and Lauren Winner)

“We’re all getting older. How do we make the second half of our lives the best half? Forty incredible women of faith from 40 to 85 tackle aging anxieties head-on—and upend them with compelling first-person stories full of humor, sass, and spiritual wisdom. In three thematic sections—Firsts, Lasts, and Always—these women provide much-needed role models for aging honestly, beautifully, and faithfully, with surprises all along the way. These are indeed the Wonder Years.” (Amazon)

Featuring:

  • Vina Mogg
  • Brene Brown
  • Madeleine L’Engle
  • Lauren Winner
  • Luci Shaw

 

Soul Bare: Stories of Redemption (Anthology)

“Honesty, authenticity, and vulnerability. You want to be a person who reflects these qualities. But sometimes it’s just hard to reveal your deepest hardships and struggles. How are Christians supposed to have hope and experience wholeness amid personal challenges and failures? The women and men of Soul Bare not only intimately understand the risks of exposure, but they are also willing to share their most poignant and painful moments with you. Soul Bare features contributions from the best of today’s influential young writers, including

Soak in these powerful reflections, and you will find your own soul soothed. If you need to experience beauty in the brokenness of real life laid bare, this book is for you.” (Amazon)

 

Everbloom: Stories of Deeply Rooted and Transformed Lives (Anthology)

“Through the pain, loss, beauty, and redemption in these pages, you’ll find freedom in Christ and the courage to embrace your own story. The women of Redbud know the importance of spiritual shelter, and how easy it becomes to feel alone and misunderstood. In the Everbloom collection they offer essays, stories, and poetry: intensely personal accounts of transformation, and the journeys to find their own voices. Best of all, they invite you to join them, with writing prompts that encourage a response of honesty, faith, and imagination. Accept the invitation: set out on the journey to find your own voice.”

“We read to see elements of our own hearts, experiences, and stories reflected back to us in the words of others. This collection is just that: stories that help us feel seen, known, and understood. Honestly and beautifully told, this book will keep you in good company along your own journey.” —Shauna Niequist, bestselling author of Present Over Perfect 

Contributors include:

 

Past

 

The Way Up is Down: Recovering Yourself by Forgetting Yourself by Marlena Graves


“Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.” “These words from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard resonate deeply with Marlena Graves, a Puerto Rican writer, professor, and activist. In these pages she describes the process of emptying herself that allows her to move upward toward God and become the true self that God calls her to be. Drawing on the rich traditions of Eastern and Western Christian saints, she shares stories and insights that have enlivened her transformation. For Marlena, formation and justice always intertwine on the path to a balanced life of both action and contemplation. If you long for more of God, this book offers a time-honored path to a deeper life.” (Amazon)

 

The God Who Saves: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong by Karen Gonzalez

The God Who Sees by Karen Gonzalez

“Here is a riveting story of seeking safety in another land. Here is a gripping journey of loss, alienation, and belonging. In The God Who Sees, immigration advocate Karen Gonzalez recounts her family’s migration from the instability of Guatemala to making a new life in Los Angeles and the suburbs of South Florida. In the midst of language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and the tremendous pressure to assimilate, Gonzalez encounters Christ through a campus ministry program and begins to follow him.

Here, too, is the sweeping epic of immigrants and refugees in Scripture. Abraham, Hagar, Joseph, Ruth: these intrepid heroes of the faith cross borders and seek refuge. As witnesses to God’s liberating power, they name the God they see at work, and they become grafted onto God’s family tree.” (Amazon)

The Color of Life: A Journey Toward Love and Social Justice by Cara Meredith

Color of Life by Cara Meredith

“In this spiritual memoir, a white woman in an interracial marriage and mixed-race family paints a beautiful path from white privilege toward racial healing, from ignorance toward seeing the image of God in everyone she meets.

Author and speaker Cara Meredith grew up in a colorless world. From childhood, she didn’t think issues of race had anything to do with her, and she was ignorant of many of the racial realities (including individual and systemic racism) in America today. A colorblind rhetoric had been stamped across her education, world view, and Christian theology.” (Amazon)

 

BecomingCoztōtōtl: Poems by Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros

“’Becoming Coztōtōtl is composed of eighteen poems that celebrate the forces that have made claims on us since the beginning of time: our bodies, our land, our families. Throughout these pages, Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros honors our children, our mothers, and our antepasados with a subtle lyricism that demands our attention. Read these poems. They are timely in their defiance of injustice, timely in their unfeigned compassion.’”—Octavio Quintanilla, San Antonio Poet Laureate and author of If I Go Missing

 

Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack by Alia Joy

Glorious Weakness by Alia Joy

“The vulnerability and beauty found in these pages will leave you breathless, as Alia wisely leads the weary on journey into God’s goodness and grace, even in the midst of our deepest weakness, heartbreak, and loss. Her exquisite words are a tender touch that resurrect us in our brokenness to the knowledge that we are deeply seen—and even in our weakness, there can be life-giving glory and reviving grace. These are healing pages for hurting hearts, and ones I will return to again and again.” (Amazon)

~Ann Voskamp, NYTimes bestselling author of The Broken Way and One Thousand Gifts 
 
 
“We’re told that freedom and opportunity are our tickets to the good life. Get out there and follow your dreams! Be the hero of your own story! Find your happiness! Live your best life! It seems that limitless possibilities await anyone with vision and willingness to hustle their way through life. The thing is, instead of resulting in a sense of accomplishment, this limitlessness merely has us doing more and trying harder―leaving us depleted and dissatisfied. With life and faith. Ashley Hales invites us to a better way: a more spacious life.
 
Contrary to what we’ve believed, the spacious life is not found in unfettered options or accomplished by our hustle and hurry. The life we crave is found within the confines of God’s loving limits. Ashley helps us recognize that when we live within these boundaries, we discover a life filled with purpose, joy, and rest. This is the spacious life―finding true freedom within the good limits given to us by our good God.
 

Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much by Ashley Hales

“Suburban life—including tract homes, strip malls, commuter culture—shapes our desires.
More than half of Americans live in the suburbs. Ashley Hales writes that for many Christians, however: “The suburbs are ignored (‘Your place doesn’t matter, we’re all going to heaven anyway’), denigrated and demeaned (‘You’re selfish if you live in a suburb; you only care about your own safety and advancement’), or seen as a cop-out from a faithful Christian life (‘If you really loved God, you’d move to Africa or work in an impoverished area’). In everything from books to Hollywood jokes, the suburbs aren’t supposed to be good for our souls.”

What does it look like to live a full Christian life in the suburbs? Suburbs reflect our good, God-given desire for a place to call home. And suburbs also reflect our own brokenness. This book is an invitation to look deeply into your soul as a suburbanite and discover what it means to live holy there.” (Amazon)

 

 

 

Tammy Perlmutter
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