At some time in life we all beg God to perform in a way we think is best. Even a woman of strong faith can experience a crisis of faith when life doesn’t turn out as she expects and she knows God could intervene on her behalf. Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah thought God should provide a child and pleaded with Him to honor their hearts’ desire. In different ways, each woman took matters into her own hands when God’s timing didn’t match her timetable. Face-to-Face with Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah explores various issues in women’s lives that lead to pleading with God and ways they react when He doesn’t immediately respond or they don’t like His answer, as well as guiding women to learn to rest in God’s sovereignty and wait on His timing.

Realize the value and blessings of participating in mentoring relationships during all stages, ages, and seasons of life. Women often don’t think they know enough to be a mentor, or fear rejection if they ask someone to mentor them. Others don’t think they need mentoring. However, throughout the Bible, God calls spiritually younger and older women to learn from and teach one another. Mentoring for All Seasons helps answer questions like these: •What is mentoring? •How do I find a mentor? •Why does God want us to mentor one another? •What are the blessings of mentoring? Through true stories from mentors and mentees in life seasons from tween through death—along with the author’s personal experiences, helpful tips, Scriptures to study together, and biblical mentoring relationship examples—Mentoring for All Seasons encourages women to be intentional about sharing their life experiences and God’s faithfulness with other women.

What do you do when your husband calls and says he's lost his job? How do you handle a husband who has been diagnosed with Parkinson's and is now homebound? Will your routine ever get back to normal now that your loving husband who has been deployed for 12 months is now suddenly back at home? Regardless of the reason he's home, one fact is clear . . . he's home. Dear God, He's Home! is a practical, honest look at how women can deal with a spouse—regardless of the reason—who is forced to become a stay-at-home man. Husbands across the country are experiencing life changes and are being forced home for multiple reasons including health changes, job loss, end of military deployment, and other factors. Their wives are being forced to deal with these changes, too, and the combination of stresses can take its toll on a marriage. Couples do not have to go through these changes alone. Author and former Saddleback Church leader Janet T. Thompson shares from her heart and her personal experience on how to deal with the paralyzing shock that comes with life changes; what to do next; how to deal with people's reactions; grieving the losses associated with any change; discovering a new focus and purpose as a couple; and restoring the joy to your marital relationship. Dear God, He's Home! includes personal thought questions, discussion questions for couples, and a small-group discussion guide.

A more complete picture of how procreation and childlessness are depicted in the Bible In the Book of Genesis, the first words God speaks to humanity are "Be fruitful and multiply." From ancient times to today, these words have been understood as a divine command to procreate. Fertility is viewed as a sign of blessedness and moral uprightness, while infertility is associated with sin and moral failing. Reconceiving Infertility explores traditional interpretations such as these, providing a more complete picture of how procreation and childlessness are depicted in the Bible. Closely examining texts and themes from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Candida Moss and Joel Baden offer vital new perspectives on infertility and the social experiences of the infertile in the biblical tradition. They begin with perhaps the most famous stories of infertility in the Bible—those of the matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel—and show how the divine injunction in Genesis is both a blessing and a curse. Moss and Baden go on to discuss the metaphorical treatments of Israel as a "barren mother," the conception of Jesus, Paul's writings on family and reproduction, and more. They reveal how biblical views on procreation and infertility, and the ancient contexts from which they emerged, were more diverse than we think. Reconceiving Infertility demonstrates that the Bible speaks in many voices about infertility, and lays a biblical foundation for a more supportive religious environment for those suffering from infertility today.

Starting a family is a soul-shaping, world-altering experience. Unfortunately, in a culture of competing values and protracted timelines, couples are increasingly backing their way into parenting or missing it altogether. By the time the average couple tries to have kids, they are often beyond their late twenties and surprised to learn they are sliding past the peak of their fertile years. In Start Your Family, Steve and Candice Watters encourage couples to be intentional about their timeline in the early years of marriage and to trust God to help them boldly launch their families. Responding to the most common doubts and hurdles, they offer biblical inspiration for the questions: Why have kids? When is the best time to start? How can we fit kids into our lives?

The first comprehensive study of the Song of Songs' use of military metaphors Although love transcends historical and cultural boundaries, its conceptualizations, linguistic expressions, and literary representations vary from culture to culture. In this study, Danilo Verde examines love through the military imagery found throughout the Song’s eight chapters. Verde approaches the military metaphors, similes, and scenes of the Song using cognitive metaphor theory to explore the overlooked representation of love as war. Additionally, this book investigates how the Song conceptualizes both the male and the female characters, showing that the concepts of masculinity and femininity are tightly interconnected in the poem. Conquered Conquerors provides fresh insights into the Song's figurative language and the conceptualization of gender in biblical literature.

In Wom(b)an: A Cultural-Narrative Reading of the Hebrew Bible Barrenness Narratives Janice Pearl Ewurama De-Whyte offers a reading of the Hebrew Bible barrenness narratives. The original word “wom(b)an” visually underscores the centrality of a productive womb to female identity in the ANE and Hebrew contexts. Conversely, barrenness was the ultimate tragedy and shame of a woman. Utilizing Akan cultural custom as a lens through which to read the Hebrew barrenness tradition, De-Whyte uncovers another kind of barrenness within these narratives. Her term “social barrenness” depicts the various situations of childlessness that are generally unrecognized in western cultures due to the western biomedical definitions of infertility. Whether biological or social, barrenness was perceived to be the greatest threat to a woman’s identity and security as well as the continuity of the lineage. Wom(b)an examines these narratives in light of the cultural meanings of barrenness within traditional cultures, ancient and present.