Sometimes it helps to read the stories of people who have been through trauma before us. Novels have a way of presenting things we already theoretically know in a new way that makes it revolutionary. Knowing what the enemy is doing, understanding a loving heavenly Father's vantage point, bearing witness to someone's trial and triumph and fall, can all give pieces of what we need to make it through another day.
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If you don't have support in your life, or even if you do, these books can help you on your healing journey.
They can also provide perspective to the helper who struggles to understand trauma.
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Is there a book not on this list that should be? Send us an email and let us know!
Hinds’ Feet on High Places remains Hannah Hurnard’s best known and most beloved book: a timeless allegory dramatizing the yearning of God’s children to be led to new heights of love, joy, and victory. In this moving tale, follow Much-Afraid on her spiritual journey as she overcomes many dangers and mounts at last to the High Places. There she gains a new name and is transformed by her union with the loving Shepherd. This special edition (February 2009 release) includes:
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Hannah Hurnard’s own account of the circumstances that led her to write Hinds’ Feet
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a brief autobiography
This allegorical tale will point you to God’s love and is perfect for anyone who has enjoyed The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis or other Christian allegories.
C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the unique vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to “Our Father Below.”
At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C.S. Lewis gives us the correspondence of the wordly-wise devil to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging account of temptation—and triumph over it—ever written.
This exciting two book allegory, Master Potter and The Master Potter and the Mountain of Fire, addresses the current fascination with supernatural phenomena. The secular market is flooded with power encounters, New Age, occultism, angels, demons, witchcraft and sorcery. There is a renewed hunger to move in supernatural power, reflected in the wildly successful Harry Potter series.
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Master Potter tells the story of Beloved—wounded and left vulnerable by an abused childhood, she is rescued by Master Potter. Whisked away to his rustic home overlooking the quaint village of Comfort Cove, Beloved begins her painful journey of healing.
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The hardships she endures, the lessons she learns, and the invisible world she discovers will cause you to cheer for each triumphant step she takes and weep with each mistake she makes.
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Master Potter is a powerful Christian allegory for all ages with the potential to become a Christian classic along the lines of Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet on High Places and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
The first book, Master Potter, began in Comfort Cove, a quaint 19th century fishing village. A young woman named Forsaken, portrayed as a broken clay pitcher, met Master Potter. He changed her name to Beloved.
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Her journey from brokenness to divine destiny continues in Master Potter and the Mountain of Fire. Beloved and her friends are loaded on pottery wagons and taken to the dreaded Mountain of Fire. In this mountain kiln they struggle with heartrending issues of unforgiveness, suffering, sickness, needing miracles, and a friend's moral failure.
In the midst of the raging fires, Beloved travels through eternity in a crystal chariot. Ushered into astounding places-the Heavenly Library, the War Room, and a warehouse called Miracles Unlimited-Beloved's heart is transformed by the passionate love of Master Potter, the Bridegroom King.
California’s gold country, 1850. A time when men sold their souls for a bag of gold and women sold their bodies for a place to sleep.
Angel expects nothing from men but betrayal. Sold into prostitution as a child, she survives by keeping her hatred alive. And what she hates most are the men who use her, leaving her empty and dead inside.
Then she meets Michael Hosea, a man who seeks his Father’s heart in everything. Michael obeys God’s call to marry Angel and to love her unconditionally. Slowly, day by day, he defies Angel’s every bitter expectation, until despite her resistance, her frozen heart begins to thaw.
But with her unexpected softening comes overwhelming feelings of unworthiness and fear. And so Angel runs. Back to the darkness, away from her husband’s pursuing love, terrified of the truth she no longer can deny: her final healing must come from the One who loves her even more than Michael does . . . the One who will never let her go.
A powerful retelling of the story of Gomer and Hosea, Redeeming Love is a life-changing story of God’s unconditional, redemptive, all-consuming love.
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . .
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.
Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
When family is at stake, how important is the truth?
"I read this simply because it was recommended to me an I'm glad I did. I really liked how the author made the characters seem so real and just how the story progressed. I could feel the emotions of the people in the story and it drew me in." - Mike Maehl
"A Winter Storm is the first book that I have read in a while and it was a great jumping off point for me to get back into a regular reading routine. The characters were developed very well and at a quick pace allowing the reader to become emotionally invested in the characters' lives. At times it may seem that it is a little drawn out, but every word has it's place to keep the reader in love with Grace, the main character. The descent from the climax, however, is neat and anything but drawn out. The thing to remember about this book is that it is basically a true story. It is a subject that occurs every day all over the world and needs literature like this to bring it to light so people can view it from a perspective other than "just the past." - T. Ellis
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BOOK 1
All Moira Jameson has left of her mother is what’s in the journals willed to her, and there are far more secrets to her mother’s past than Moira could have imagined. As she learns about the woman behind the veil of motherhood she finds her judgments of her mother have been, at best, unfounded.
Her secret has wounded generations, and in getting to the bottom of it Moira finds her faith and all she’s ever believed in to be challenged, and she has to ask herself if, in giving her the journals, her mother is asking for something in return beyond the grave.
BOOK 2
Moira is hiding one of the rarest diamonds in history and the man who lost it is on the hunt to get it back at any cost. As she tries to find the connection between the diamond and the journals her mother left her when she died, Moira discovers a pattern of secrets and lies that have wounded generations. In the midst of deceit, she also finds faith that surpasses hopeless circumstances.
In her pursuit for truth, a ripple effect takes place that brings a private investigator closure, freedom to an old man enslaved to years of bondage, and a second chance to another who lost everything he held dear. Will Moira use the truth she found to stop the cycle of deceit? Will she have enough faith to help her overcome her own loss?
BOOK 3
Little is left for Moira in Rockpoint. After losing her mother she must decide what she’s going to do with her life and the multi-million dollar diamond she keeps a secret. Meanwhile, Moira navigates her grandparent’s past through treasures and truth kept safe in a shoe box. Bits and pieces of her mother’s history continues to surface, providing some much needed closure. From the shores of Ireland in WWII to the rolling New England hills throughout the 1950s, Moira sees how some mistakes can have consequences that last for decades.
Determined to stop the cycle of deceit and compromise, she discovers a new path and finds it may take more faith and strength than she has to walk in it. As her relationship with Cale gets more complicated, the threat of losing her home and her job becomes more prominent, Moira begins to explore another relationship she never thought was possible. It may just pull her away from everything she’s ever known to receive more than she ever hoped for.