Our Fractured Wholeness

Born with cerebral palsy, Diana Ventura has known brokenness her entire life. Through telling her story, she shares what it means to live with and overcome brokenness of all kinds. As she reflects on her own experience and that of others, Diana offers understanding and insight. There is a mystical path through the landscape of suffering, she says, and those who travel it can find God and healing even in the midst of pain and sadness. Readers who join her on this journey of prayer and faith will be better equipped to meet the everyday challenges of living with brokenness with hope, dignity, and true love.

Born with cerebral palsy, Diana Ventura has known brokenness her entire life. Through telling her story, she shares what it means to live with and overcome brokenness of all kinds. As she reflects on her own experience and that of others, Diana offers understanding and insight. There is a mystical path through the landscape of suffering, she says, and those who travel it can find God and healing even in the midst of pain and sadness. Readers who join her on this journey of prayer and faith will be better equipped to meet the everyday challenges of living with brokenness with hope, dignity, and true love.

"I didn't see it coming. I sat in the darkness of the spare bedroom hours after the man I loved and planned to spend the rest of my life with announced he wanted something different. I was no longer enough.""But I was, and I am enough. I didn't get a choice in how my marriage ended, but I got to choose how I responded. I felt as if my life had exploded into a million pieces. In the consuming darkness, I felt a tiny speck of hope. I chose to trust in the dark what I had learned in the light." We all experience crises. The details differ, but some of the emotions of our experiences are the same. Fractured Into Wholeness is a story of struggle, forgiveness, and redemption. It's messy, and it's authentic. It will encourage and challenge you to take the next best step no matter what is going on in your life."Is God preparing me? Pruning me? Killing me? Healing me? Sometimes it all feels the same.""I can't tie my fractured into wholeness journey into a tidy bow. It's a knotted, frayed gathering of what remains of shredded threads. But it still binds."

ECPA BESTSELLER • An invitation to love like Jesus and step beyond distraction and division into the joy we long to experience—from the author of The Deeply Formed Life, winner of the Christianity Today Book Award “A stunning book with power to reshape our world . . . if we let it.”—Glenn Packiam, pastor and author of Blessed Broken Given We long for a good life, a beautiful life, a kind life. But clearly that’s not the world we live in. We carry the stress of our fractured world in our bodies and relationships. Families that once gathered around tables have converted those tables into walls. Hostility, rage, and offense is the language of our culture. How did we lose goodness, kindness, and beauty? And more important, how do we get them back into our lives? These are the two questions crying out in our streets, homes, churches, and from deep within our souls. Pastor and author Rich Villodas is convinced that only Jesus offers a way of being human that is both strong and tender enough to tear down the walls of hostility we experience daily. In Good and Beautiful and Kind, he reveals how… • These three essentials are stolen by sin, powers and principalities, and trauma. • We can get goodness, beauty, and kindness back through contemplative prayer, humility, and the cultivation of calm presence. • The traits of healthy conflict, forgiveness, and justice lead to wholeness, healing, and a new collective future—when rooted in the ancient way of Jesus. Filled with fresh energy, classic truth, and practical solutions, this is your road map for stepping beyond distraction and division to love like Jesus. Doing so will change the atmosphere within you…and around you!

This book is all about experiencing the awesome WHOLENESS power of God through a life of discipleship and prayer. The book is a call to get back to the simple basics of the Bible using the wholeness and oneness principles as a guide. In a few of the later chapters the book explores some simple, but remarkable number patterns such as the mathematical constants for light, time, gravity, creation fire, and many more, all of which were encoded in the Psalms 3000 years ago, about 2,900 years before they were known. These simple number patterns such as 19 for electricity, 27 for light, 29 for creation fire, and 38 for gravity, all have 'key words' in the first few verses of the Psalm number that is the same exact number of the math constant. The book also explores a few (ELS) or what is called Equidistant Lette! r Sequences to show hidden codes in the Bible. There also is a unique matrix code for the World Trade Center attack included. Many more interesting Bible numbers that equal modern day scientific theory and fact are found in the Tabernacle of Moses and other places in the Bible. The book brings out the wholeness principles contained in the Bible and how to apply them to your life. The book also validates the fact that the Bible contains the simple mathematical evidence for the existence of God with patterns of numbers that are way beyond chance.

The ministry of reconciliation is the new whole in holistic ministry. It must be if the Christian mission is to remain relevant in our increasingly fractured world. This book offers a fresh treatment of holistic ministry that takes the role of reconciliation seriously, rethinking the meaning of the gospel, the nature of the church, and the practice of mission in light of globalization, post-Christendom, and postcolonialism. It also includes theological and practical resources for effectively engaging in evangelism, compassion and justice, and reconciliation ministries. Includes a foreword by Ruth Padilla DeBorst and an afterword by Ronald J. Sider.

Effective, real-life strategies, tools, and encouragement for those desiring to help others find healing from severe trauma and discover the Father's truth and love.

It is a desire to be used by God as His instrument to bring wounded souls into wholeness through the shed blood of His Son Jesus, by sharing our brokenness with others. We feel sorrowful but blessed when we discover that God can use all things together for the good of those who love Him. Marilyn Hansen is one to encourage others, while struggling to believe that God could make something beautiful out of her own brokenness. Being obedient to God's call, she writes about how He made the broken pieces of her life whole for His glory. It was as though God were saying, "Marilyn, how do you think the world has seen Me? If it wasn't for your brokenness, I couldn't make you whole. I chose you just the way you are. I have allowed you to be broken to make you whole. Be filled with My Spirit. I only ask that you pour yourself out that others might be made whole." As I look back on my life, I feel very blessed that God could take the broken pieces and use them as a testament of His healing power. I wish He had not had to sacrifice His Son for me, but know I also am a sinner in need of His grace. I wish I had known Him earlier in my life, so I could be obedient to Him and fulfill His plan for my life. But by His grace, He has enabled me to be His servant by ministering to other wounded souls through which I can bring honor and glory to Him. He has taken the broken pieces of my life and made something beautiful for His use. His grace is sufficient in meeting my needs and yours. Let us allow Him to use us that He might be glorified by our willingness to be obedient to Him and fulfilling all He has called us to be. Will you allow God to make you Broken Unto Wholeness so He can take you on a journey that others will see and desire to let Him be seen in you? Your life does make a difference because of how He is glorified in your brokenness.

Broken marriages, shattered friendships, racial divisions, war between nations—we live in a fractured world. How can the pieces be put back together? In this eleven-session LifeGuide® Bible Study on Ephesians Paul lifts the veil from the future to allow us to see God's plan to unite everyone and everything in Christ. Studying this book will renew your hope.

There are qualities we all yearn to experience in our lives—peace, simplicity, grace, connection, clarity. Yet these qualities evade us because each of them arises from an experience of wholeness, and we live in a culture that enforces divisions within each of us. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows the countless ways in which we are persuaded to separate from the body and live in the head. Disconnected from the body’s intelligence, we also disconnect from the wholeness of the present. This schism within us is the primary source of stress not just in our personal lives, but for the systems of the planet. Drawing from neuroscience, anthropology, physics, the arts, myth, personal stories and his experiences helping people around the world to experience wholeness, Philip Shepherd illuminates what true wholeness means and offers practices designed to help readers soften into the intelligence of the body. Radical Wholeness is a call to action: to recover wholeness and experience a new way of being.