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Rebekah’s Quilt by Sara Barnard @TheSaraBarnard

Posted on Tuesday, December 10, 2013

RebekahsQuilt

Who can Rebekah trust when the line between English and Amish becomes blurred?

An Amish Settlement. An English stranger. The Blizzard of 1888.

Rebekah’s mother, Elnora Stoll, is the finest quilter in all of Gasthof Village but it seems Rebekah has inherited none of her skill. It’s not until the arrival of a mysterious English stranger that a lifetime of questions are answered and Rebekah, her special friend Joseph Graber, and the entire settlement of Gasthof Village learn the true meaning of what it truly means to be Amish.

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Genre - Romantic Historical Fiction

Rating – PG

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Sunspots by Karen S. Bell @KarenSueBell

Posted on Monday, December 9, 2013

Sunspots

Sunspots follows the healing journey of a young woman thrown into the horror of losing a spouse. It is a love story of loss and redemption and the ghosts that haunt our lives and our houses. Skirting the genres of magical realism and romance, Sunspots, explores the existence of the afterlife and the paranormal. The story takes the reader on a path of high emotion as the narrator, Aurora, uncovers her husband Jake’s secret life and her own internal conflicts as she matures to self-awareness. The novel’s tone vacillates from irreverent humor to solemnity as Aurora relates her previous life with Jake and her present challenges. The title refers to the solar maximum which became the backdrop for Aurora’s conception when her hippy parents went to Canada to observe the Aurora Borealis. In name and in spirit, Aurora is connected to the observable and unobservable energy around us. With the help of friends, family, and the ghost of Viola Parker (her home’s original owner), Aurora accepts her fate and the secrets revealed about Jake’s true character. She realizes that in this life she will finally break the cycle of pain caused by her love for this man, Jake Stein, through the centuries.

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Genre – Contemporary romance, Magical Realism

Rating – PG-13

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#AmReading - Hearts Crossing by Marianne Evans @Marmo212

Posted on Sunday, December 8, 2013

Hearts Crossing by Marianne Evans

Amazon

“How do you feel about God, Collin?”
“I don’t.”
Collin Edwards, a former parishioner at Woodland Church of Christ, has renounced God without apology, his faith drained away in the face of a tragic loss.
Daveny Montgomery cares deeply about her relationship with God and the community of Woodland. But lately she's been in a rut, longing for something to reignite her spiritual enthusiasm.
A beautification project at Woodland seems the answer for them both. Daveny spearheads the effort and Collin assists—but only with the renovations, and only because he wants to know Daveny better.
Despite his deepening feelings for her, even stepping into the common areas of the church stirs tension and anger.
Can Daveny trust in Collin’s fledgling return to faith? And can Collin ever accept the fact that while he turned his back on God, God never turned his back on him?

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Living in Grace: The Shift to Spiritual Perception by Beca Lewis @becalewis

Posted on Saturday, December 7, 2013

The 4th Step To Shift—Learn Perception Rules.

There is one “law” in the physical universe that can never be overturned or negated. The law that “Perception produces reality and what is perceived to be reality magnifies.” And its corollary: “An error in the premise must appear in the conclusion.”—Mary Baker Eddy, Science And Health With Key To The Scriptures.

Our point of view produces the visible. We verify what we believe through our senses and then agree that what we have verified is reality. With this agreement our personal reality reproduces itself again and again. Every reproduction creates a stronger belief. Belief produces emotion. Emotion strengthens our belief and the cycle continues.

Nothing we experience is how it “really” is. Everything we experience is the out-picturing of our highest understanding of Truth. We are seeing our “point of view” and calling it reality.

The reality rut.

Something that keeps us from stepping over our personal cow gate are the ruts we live in. What is a rut? A rut is something that happens over and over and over again in much the same way. The more we do and live in the rut, the deeper it gets. We live in ruts because we are so busy taking care of our daily lives we think we don’t have the time or energy even to examine the ruts—let alone step out of them.

We get into ruts because we have forgotten that what we believe to be reality magnifies. We look at the reality we have created by our own thinking, and think again that it is real. Our belief strengthens. After all, we can see, feel, taste, and touch it, and get emotional about it. With each confirmation we receive from the outside world saying that lack and limitation are true, our rut gets deeper.

A newly sighted person, blind from birth, does not immediately see the people and things around him. He first sees light. From there he “learns” to see by listening and touching what is already familiar. In time, he sees the form. We know that after being given their sight, some people decide it is easier to stay blind, and revert to sightlessness.

Isn’t this decision just like most of us sometimes? We perceive a new truth and begin to move towards it. But it involves work, and what before seemed so difficult and limiting now becomes the easier path to take. We retreat to the familiar of what we already know.

However, we deserve more. Rut living is not what we were designed to do. It is not our purpose. Our purpose is to express our personal talents and gifts as an unlimited Spiritual being, not to be bound to the sense of lack inherent in rut living. We can Shift our thoughts into high gear, an expanded view, and accelerate into abundance.

To get out of any rut we have to Shift our beliefs about what is real. This is a Shift in thinking. Whatever we shift our thinking to becomes our reality.

When you Shift your point of view, the world Shifts with you. Why is this true? Because the world we call “real” exists only in our own perception.

Welcome to spaceship Earth.

Paradigm: Pattern: an outstandingly clear or typical example. A philosophical and theoretical framework of a discipline within which theories, laws, generalizations, and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated.

Point of view = paradigm = rut:

Ruts (paradigms) are dug inch by inch, even before we are born. Those eagerly—or not—awaiting our arrival are preparing both the mental and physical ground for our life. They begin by projecting whom we will look like. They attach hereditary beliefs to us. They envision our future. They already either like or don’t like the impact we are having and will have on their own lives.

Once we are born, it is almost as if we have crash-landed in alien territory. We are totally new to the life system in which we find ourselves. No matter what our family or culture, the lifestyle is already set up and we must learn to adjust and fit in. We began to understand what works and what doesn’t. We adapt in order to survive and hopefully to thrive.

We hear what people say about us and about how the world works, and we believe it. We decide to agree with what we are learning about being here at this time, in this state of consciousness we call Earth, because we want to fit in. In time we forget what we knew before we “landed”: that we are Spiritual—not material—beings. We start believing the current system of reality, whatever it may be. We have accepted the worldview. The master hypnotist—our culture—has us hypnotized.

We must change the way we see the world. We are in a crisis of perception. What we need is a new vision of the world.

—Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point

The eye refuses to see what the mind does not know.

—Deepak Chopra

How ruts work.

Ruts, a.k.a. paradigms, filter information. They provide evidence to us that tell us this is how life is, so don’t bother asking for more. Or they prove to us that we were always right, so therefore we have nothing more to learn. When we say, “This is who I am,” we are stating our paradigm.

A paradigm operates in much the same way as a computer file. The computer will feed back anything that has been put into it. It cannot receive, let alone understand, any information that does not fit exactly within parameters. When we go to the memory banks and pull up the file called “father,” for example, we will see on the screen everything we have told the computer about father, nothing more.

The most important function of a paradigm is to act as a filter. Every bit of information that comes to us is filtered through our paradigm. Only the information that fits into what is defined by the paradigm (such as home, country, spouse, parent) comes through. We never know about most information available to us because the paradigm says “no”.

Most of the time, our paradigm does not allow us the chance to make a decision about what we think we want to know. However, if the paradigm called “me” is broad enough to let the information reach a decision level, we will still “consciously” filter according to our idea of who and what we are and who we are capable of being.

We will say “no” to anything that does not fit our belief system. If there is any other reality available to us, we are effectively kept from knowing it. At this point, we are the paradigm.

Living In Grace

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Genre – Spirituality, Non-Fiction

Rating – G

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Website http://www.becalewis.com

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#AmReading - Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes by Denise Grover Swank @DeniseMSwank

Posted on Friday, December 6, 2013

Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes by Denise Grover Swank

Amazon

For Rose Gardner, working at the DMV on a Friday afternoon is bad even before she sees a vision of herself dead. She's had plenty of visions, usually boring ones like someone's toilet's overflowed, but she's never seen one of herself before. When her overbearing momma winds up murdered on her sofa instead, two things are certain: There isn't enough hydrogen peroxide in the state of Arkansas to get that stain out, and Rose is the prime suspect.

Rose realizes she's wasted twenty-four years of living and makes a list on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt: twenty-eight things she wants to accomplish before her vision comes true. She's well on her way with the help of her next door neighbor Joe, who has no trouble teaching Rose the rules of drinking, but won't help with number fifteen-- do more with a man. Joe's new to town, but it doesn't take a vision for Rose to realize he's got plenty secrets of his own.

Somebody thinks Rose has something they want and they'll do anything to get it. Her house is broken into, someone else she knows is murdered, and suddenly, dying a virgin in the Fenton County jail isn't her biggest worry after all.

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#AmReading - Angel in the Shadows by Lisa Grace @lisagracebooks

Angel in the Shadows by Lisa Grace

Amazon

Fifteen-year-old Megan Laughlin has a gift--or what seems like a curse at times. Megan sees angels and demons.
Megan knows her destiny is to protect her friends against dark angels who try to sway them into situations that can destroy their lives, their souls, and their eternity.
At school, she recognizes Judas, an über popular boy, as an evil angel hell-bent on destroying her and everyone she loves. As Judas spreads horrible rumors and overdoses two of her classmates at a rave, Megan realizes the enormity of his power. While classmates die, Megan, with the help of an angel, Johnny, and a team of friends will face the fight of their lives as they battle Judas.
Megan thinks God hasn't given her any "special" powers, but discovers she has what she needs as she confronts Judas and his seemingly unconquerable power.

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Order of the Seers by Cerece Rennie Murphy @CereceRMurphy

Posted on Thursday, December 5, 2013

Order of the Seers

What would you do if you held infinite power in the palm of your hand? Part One of the thrilling Order of the Seers trilogy poses this question within a story that fuses action, mystery, romance, and adventure in a science fiction novel that keeps you at the edge of your seat. Captured and enslaved for their extraordinary gift, a group of individuals, known as Seers, are forced to serve a ruthless world organization that uses the power of the Seers to exploit the ultimate advantage: knowing the future. While a brother and his Seer sister fight to evade the group that hunts them, an unlikely captured Seer, plots his escape from within the organization and sets off a chain of events that will change the world.

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Genre – Science Fiction

Rating – NC-17

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Website http://www.crmurphybooks.com

 

Quality Reads UK Book Club Disclosure: Author interview / guest post has been submitted by the author and previously used on other sites.