audiobook

When Divine Delight Meets Human Despair: A Sample.

Now that the audio version of When Despair Meets Delight is available,* I'm looking forward to how we can get it in the ears of prospective listeners. back along the arduous journey of the publication process. Some find self-publishing easy. Just write something. Plug it into a Kindle service. Punch a few user-friendly buttons and -- bim, bam, boom -- out pops a book. Looking back, I wish I had taken an easier path. But nothing is ever easy for me. I prefer to suffer. I'd like to think that choosing a more rugged, less traveled road would lead me to a greater destination. But it doesn't always. There is no guarantee that the amount of effort we put into something will directly corelate to the finished product. To say that the road to my book has been rugged would be an understatement. Not only were there detours, but head-on [...]

Hear the Good News: When Despair Meets Delight Audiobook Launches Ash Wednesday

Most pastors would be shocked to know how many people in their church family live with or are directly impacted by mental illness. Stigma continues to keep mental illness silent in the church. Parents who sit in church pews week after week feel completely alone in bearing the pain of their son’s or daughter’s mental illness because they are embarrassed or afraid to say anything. The person sitting next to them may be carrying the same burden but who would know. And they will continue to carry these burdens alone until the church is willing to talk about it. -- Mark Teike, Pastor; St. Peter's Lutheran LCMS (Columbus, IN), from the Foreword of When Despair Meets Delight. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. This year it lands on February 17 -- this week! Lent is a season to take spiritual inventory of our relationship with God, others, and self. [...]