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Relationship decisions come down to five crucial components, according to Bishop Jakes: Research: gathering information and collecting data Roadwork: removing obstacles and clearing the path Rewards: listing choices and imaging their consequences Revelation: narrowing your options and making your selectionRearview: looking back and adjusting as necessary to stay on course

Before You Do gets you on the right track to making decisions that you'll be proud of and reap the benefits of for the rest of your life, as will the generations that follow you. He gives you insight on how to reflect, discern, and decide the next step to take to have a strong and enduring love, marriage, and family.

This historic work reveals the inner spiritual life of one of the most beloved and important religious figures in history.

During her lifelong service to the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa became an icon of compassion to people of all religions; her extraordinary contributions to the care of the sick, the dying, and thousands of others nobody else was prepared to look after has been recognized and acclaimed throughout the world. Little is known, however, about her own spiritual heights or her struggles. This collection of her writing and reflections, almost all of which have never been made public before, sheds light on Mother Teresa's interior life in a way that reveals the depth and intensity of her holiness for the first time.

Compiled and presented by Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., who knew Mother Teresa for twenty years and is the postulator for her cause for sainthood and director of the Mother Teresa Center, MOTHER TERESA brings together letters she wrote to her spiritual advisors over decades. A moving chronicle of her spiritual journey—including moments, indeed years, of utter desolation—these letters reveal the secrets she shared only with her closest confidants. She emerges as a classic mystic whose inner life burned with the fire of charity and whose heart was tested and purified by an intense trial of faith, a true dark night of the soul.

Published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of her death, MOTHER TERESA is an intimate portrait of a woman whose life and work continue to be admired by millions of people.

In The First Christmas, two of today's top Jesus scholars, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, join forces to show how history has biased our reading of the nativity story as it appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. As they did for Easter in their previous book, The Last Week, here they explore the beginning of the life of Christ, peeling away the sentimentalism that has built up over the last two thousand years around this most well known of all stories to reveal the truth of what the gospels actually say. Borg and Crossan help us to see this well-known narrative afresh by answering the question, "What do these stories mean?" in the context of both the first century and the twenty-first century. They successfully show that the Christmas story, read in its original context, is far richer and more challenging than people imagine.