A Mosaic Of Life

One of America's most popular music artists bares her heart and soul in her first autobiographical work. With honesty and depth, Grant offers poignant and often startling insights on motherhood, marriage, forgiveness, and faith--revealing a life blessed with jagged edges as well as vivid colors.

Life is often not picture-perfect, and difficult times can make it hard to see a plan or purpose for our lives. In this inspiring story of one man's journey―from a rocky start as the son of a professional wrestler, to handling the fates of thousands as an air-traffic controller at one of the nation's busiest airports, to becoming a popular speaker―you will learn to see life from a different perspective. No matter what your circumstances, God can gather up the broken pieces and random elements of your life and form them into a beautiful mosaic―making you a useful vessel for His glory. Carl Kerby's story will not only give you reasons for hope in your own life, but will encourage you to share the only source of true hope with others. With humor and passion, Carl offers answers to questions about suffering, evolution, relativism, pluralism, and more, so you will be well-equipped to give reasons for hope to a broken world that desperately needs to hear it.Winner of the 2013 CSPA Book of the Year Award (Christian Living category), by the Christian Small Publisher Association.

Life -- personally and professionally -- is lived to the fullest as a mosaic, encompassing a rich and complex set of diverse experiences that provide purpose, meaning, happiness, and success. Yet, the pressures of modern society push us toward narrower focus and deeper specialization in our lives and careers. Our pursuit of specific expertise risks us becoming isolated from those different from us; our lack of shared experience fosters suspicion and conflict. Today we have businesspeople and government officials who persistently distrust and demonize each other; a fortunate swath of society with professional and financial security, increasingly isolated from those left behind; and community leaders who struggle to relate to and connect with the communities they serve. In every walk of life we have allowed ourselves to be pushed into self-defining cocoons from which it is difficult to break out. Nick Lovegrove's compelling vision provides the way out of this contemporary trap. He supplies vivid portraits of those who get it right (such as Paul Farmer, the physician whose broad and imaginative choices bring health and hope to the world's poorest people) and those who get it deeply wrong (such as Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron) and connects their experiences with a blueprint of six skills -- a moral compass, transferrable skills, contextual intelligence, prepared mind, intellectual thread, and extended network. The Mosaic Principle will help you to succeed in an ever-changing, more complex, and diverse world, and build a more remarkable and fulfilling life.

Before You Die, Live the Life You Were Born To Live. When you come to the end of your days, you will not measure your life based on success and failures. All of those will eventually blur together into a single memory called “life.” What will give you solace is a life with nothing left undone. One that’s been lived with relentless ambition, a heart on fire, and with no regrets. On the other hand, what will haunt you until your final breath is who you could have been but never became and what you could have done but never did. The Last Arrow is your roadmap to a life that defies odds and alters destinies. Discover the attributes of those who break the gravitational pull of mediocrity as cultural pioneer and thought leader Erwin McManus examines the characteristics of individuals who risked everything for a life they could only imagine. Imagine living the life you were convinced was only a dream. We all begin this life with a quiver full of arrows. Now the choice is yours. Will you cling to your arrows or risk them all, opting to live until you have nothing left to give? Time is short. Pick up The Last Arrow and begin the greatest quest of your life.

New in Paperback! Mosaic ideas for every room Mosaic Art and Style is a celebration of how mosaics can be integrated into our environments. Author JoAnn Locktov explores our fascination with mosaic art and illustrates how artists have crafted architectural installations as well as decorative and functional objects that have added immeasurably to living spaces. Readers will enjoy seeing how mosaic art can be applied to every surface imaginable. Mosaic Art and Style tells the story of how the projects were conceived and fabricated from the artists' points of view. Locktov has forged special relationships with a multitude of artists, who have allowed her to feature their work in Mosaic Art and Style. Through these relationships, she takes the reader into the world of the artist and gives readers a behind-the-scenes pass into the artists' workshops, where she shares their personal thoughts about the creation and inspiration that imbues their work.

Writing the story of one's life sounds like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. This warmhearted, encouraging guide helps readers record the events of their lives for family and friends. Excerpts from other writers' work are included to exemplify and inspire. Provided are tips on intriguing topics to write about, foolproof tricks to jog your memory, ways to capture stories on paper without getting bogged down, ways to gather the facts at a local library or historical society, inspired excerpts from other writers, and published biographies that will delight and motivate.

"Like Trotsky, I did not leave home with the proverbial one-and-six in my pocket. I come from a family of landed gentry . . . [and] could have chosen the path of comfort and safety, for even in apartheid South Africa, there is still that path for those who will collaborate. But I chose the path of struggle and uncertainty."--from the Preface Born into the small social elite of black South Africa, Phyllis Ntantala did not face the grinding poverty so familiar to other South African blacks. Instead, her struggle was that of a creative, articulate woman seeking fulfillment and justice in a land that tried to deny her both. The widow of Xhosa writer and historian A.C. Jordan and mother of African National Congress leader Z. Pallo Jordan, she and her family experienced a period of tremendous change in South Africa and also in the United States, where they moved during the 1960s. She discovers similarities in the two countries, including the arrogance of power. Anchored in history and culture, A Life's Mosaic sharply reveals the world and the people of South Africa. As the story of a political exile, it represents the dislocations that have caused universal suffering in the second half of the twentieth century. Phyllis Ntantala discusses the cruelty of racism, the cynicism of political solutions, and the hopes of those who live in both a world of exile and a world of dreams.

A ground-breaking book in the tradition of The Alchemist and The Celestine Prophecy, The Mosaic, by marketing expert and activist Daniel Bruce Levin invites you to see the world from a new point-of-view-- one that focuses on what connects us to each other and brings us happiness. The Mosaic follows the journey of Mo, a boy who loses his parents two years apart on the same day. When he asks the adults where his parents went, they tell him they are in heaven. Mo sets out to find the place called heaven and along the way, he meets an assortment of ordinary people, who are anything but ordinary. The Mosaic is a magical book that will inspire conversation around the possibilities that exist when we are able to see what we do not see. It will entertain and uplift you through the magic of connection, and it will linger with you well after you finish its story. "The most profound and lasting way to learn is through story, and a story that reflects so many aspects of our shared human journey keeps the lessons learned alive in the heart forever. This is one such beautiful and lasting story." -- Sonia Choquette New York Times best-selling author of The Answer is Simple...Love yourself, Live your Spirit! .

In times of war and in peace, from the earliest days of the Roman Empire to our own, Westerners have journeyed to the lands of the middle east, bringing back accounts of their adventures and impressions. Yet it was never a one way exchange. From the first Arab embassy to the Vikings in the 9th century to the internet musings of the Taliban, A Middle East Mosaic collects a rich, boisterous literature of cultural exchange. We see the American Revolution through the eyes of a Moroccan Ambassador and the French Revolution through a series of Imperial Ottoman proclamations. We find surprising portraits of Napoleon ("a brigand chief"), TE Lawrence and Ataturk. We learn what George Washington and Machiavelli through t of Turkish politics and hear Flaubert and Thackeray rail against eastern crime and punishment. We peer into Voltaire's business correspondence and follow the footsteps of Mark Twain, Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell and Ibn Battutta, the Marco Polo of the east. Great discoveries are recorded - an Egyptian Ambassador is introduced to electricity and dismisses the spectacle as "frankish trickery;" another pronounces the invention of a secure mail system most useful for assignations. We enter the harem with a 16th century organ maker and emerge with Ottoman reform. It was not until the sixteenth century that the first middle eastern rulers entered into diplomatic relations with European rulers, but trade often precede diplomatic relations. Business men from the days of the crusades against Saladin to the oil prospecting of Samuel Cox and his descendents have seen great possibilities in the markets of the middle east. And throughout the centuries we have been united by war. We witness the outbreak of the Crimean war with Karl Marx and enter Egypt with Napoleon. We observe Arab customs with George Patton and visit Baghdad and Cairo with George F. Kennan in the second world war. When Usama bin Ladin rails against "Jews and crusaders" occupying the holy land, he is rehearsing a grievance with a long history. This symphony of voices, full of wit and wisdom, spite and wonder, suspicion, befuddlement and occasional insight, is ordered and explained by our foremost living historian of the middle east. The fruit of a lifetime of scholarship and erudition, A Middle East Mosaic is a dazzling capstone to a brilliant career. In a spirited reappraisal of western views of the east and eastern views of the west over the last two thousand years, Bernard Lewis gives us a brilliant over-view of 2,000 years of commerce, diplomacy, war and exploration. This book is a delight, a treasury of stories drawn from letters, diaries and histories, but also from unpublished archives and previously untranslated accounts. Diplomats and interpreters, slaves, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries, princes and spies, businessmen, doctors and priests all pour forth their stories of the people and events that shaped history. A Middle East Mosaic cannot fail to appeal to anyone with an appetite for history and a curiosity about the vagaries of cultural exchange.

A best-selling author, pastor, futurist, and cultural thought leader argues that to experience and establish inner peace, we must first confront the battles that rage within. Your longings for inner peace and deep purpose are attainable, but they won't come easy. They require a warrior's mentality. Fighting for them requires passion, perseverance, and precision. This is an invitation to an unflinchingly honest look at your interior life guided by the ancient principles and methods revealed through Scripture. Erwin Raphael McManus delivers wisdom, instills passion, and provides the sacred movements needed to become the warrior you were meant to be. We live in a time of global and personal chaos. The world is at war because our souls are at war. The path to peace begins with you overcoming your most frequent and fierce enemy: yourself.