This book is dedicated to my good friend, Nancy Ndeke. Nancy I'm constantly astounded (and reminded), with tears, how you weave words with braids of emotion and subtle wisdom. Writing with you Nancy is a Poet's dream to join with the heart of a Greater One from Beyond whom one can learn about the self they forgot, and now because of the power of the other's words, have they been found again... You FOUND me. We found one another as "old Soul-friends." Thus, I'm reacquainted with who I was meant to be. And, always WAS.

21 surgeries by age 13. Years in the hospital. Verbal and physical bullying from schoolmates. Multiple miscarriages as a young wife. The death of a child. A debilitating progressive disease. Riveting pain. Abandonment. Unwanted divorce... Vaneetha begged God for grace that would deliver her. But God offered something better: his sustaining grace.

The moment when a mother holds her baby for the first time can either be the happiest or the most heart-wrenching of her life. Unfortunately for Stacey Verhoff’s mother, it was the latter. Her precious baby girl had been born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, just like her older brother six years earlier. In her poignant story behind the scars on her lip, Stacey shares her personal testimony of the goodness of God while guiding those who have ever questioned their self-worth or struggled to trust God in all situations. Within her testimony, Stacey travels deep within to reveal the wounds and healing of her heart as she endured seemingly endless corrective surgeries and hurtful comments about her physical appearance. While revealing her vulnerabilities associated with her challenges, Stacey offers an inspirational recounting of how God changed her perspective, healed her heart, and ultimately helped her realize that she was wonderfully created. Deeper Than the Scars shares a Christian woman’s personal testimony as she journeys deep within to share how God healed her heart and mind and taught her to see herself through His eyes.

On March 14, 2012, Kim Rideout heard the words that one in every nine women will hear in her lifetime: she had breast cancer. Taken To My Knees is a candid memoir written from the daily journals she kept as she underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments to deal with the IDC Stage IIB breast cancer she had been diagnosed with. Rideout recounts how scared she was in those early days with a brutal honesty. She takes her audience along with her as she makes daily attempts to reconcile her "new normal" with the gut-wrenching fear that a cancer diagnosis brings. In sharing her story, Rideout demonstrates how important it is to be surrounded with love, family, and friendship and how a positive attitude can be just as important in the healing process as any medication. This poignant book will provide a firsthand insight to family, friends, and caregivers of any breast cancer patient as well as give hope and strength to fellow warrior survivors.

A doctor’s personal and unsparing account of how modern medicine’s failure to understand pain has made care less effective In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience. Warraich, himself a sufferer of chronic pain, considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power, by whose suffering mattered and whose didn’t. He weaves a provocative history from the Renaissance, when pain transformed into a medical issue, through the racial legacy of pain tolerance, to the opiate epidemics of both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, to the cutting edge of present-day pain science. The conclusion is clear: only by reckoning with both pain’s complicated history and its biology can today’s doctors adequately treat their patients’ suffering. Trenchant and deeply felt, The Song of Our Scars is an indictment of a broken system and a plea for a more holistic understanding of the human body.

A beautiful young woman. An American soldier. A war-torn country. Nearly forty years of silence. Now, two daughters search for the truth they hope will set them free and the elusive peace their parents have never found. In the South Carolina Lowcountry, a young mother named Katherine Ann is struggling to help her tempestuous father by plunging into a world of secrets he never talks about. A fry cook named Lisa is trying desperately to reach her grieving Vietnamese mother who has never fully adjusted to life in the States. And somewhere far away, a lost soul named Ernest is drifting, treading water, searching for what he lost on a long-ago mountain. They're all yearning for connection. For the war that touched them to finally end. For their hundred years of happiness at long last to begin. From the beloved author of The Spirit of Sweetgrass and Trouble the Water comes this generous story of family, war, loss, and longing . . . of the ways we hide from those we love, and the ways that love finds us anyway.

Love's Command: Part Two &– a box set 4 - Trusting Love Robert McNeil survived in a world filled with death and very little more until... 5 - Come a Little Closer If You Dare Cody Johnson is a man not used to giving up—or losing a battle. But will the former Ranger find out that the battle is so much sweeter when you surrender? 6 - The Promise of Love“True love isn't something that comes easy, but it's a promise, once made, I will always keep”—David Jansen. Men, hardened by war, used to a life of death and dying, are each given an opportunity to find love. But will they listen to love's command, or will their years of war blind them to all love has to offer?