Tadema invites readers to look over her shoulder and observe how she discovered that the heart of her own navigation of life was an essential union of the Holy Spirit with her spirit. (Motivation)

Dick Snavely reveals some of his childhood experiences and personal challenges that prepared him to organize and lead Family Life Ministries for nearly fifty years. These experiences include miracles, exciting answers to prayer along with the good, the bad, and the ugly. The reader will share in Dick's early struggles from spankings in third grade, reckless driving as a teenager, the search for a wife, and getting fired as a pastor. You will also rejoice with him in his glorious victories of a personal encounter with God, working with troubled boys, the conversion of a city gang member and the building of a Christian radio station that became a network of Christian FM stations. The excitement and thrill of victory is evident in the story of Family Life Ministries/Network. Dick has often prayed "Lord I don't know where you are leading me today but help me to hang on." Dick Snavely was raised in a Mennonite family in Lancaster County, PA. He organized Family Life Ministries, New Life Homes-Snell Farm, Twin Tiers Youth For Christ, and Family Life Network. He is a graduate of Bob Jones University Dick was a film evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Film Association, and pastored a church briefly in West Virginia. In 1957 he moved his family to New York where he organized Family Life Ministries, Inc. He led the organization as President and CEO for 47 years and was succeeded by his son Rick. He is married 55 years to Jacqueline DeVere. They have four children and eleven grandchildren. All four children are active in their church and serving the Lord. Dick is just an ordinary guy. What you see is what you get. He reveals some of the good, bad, and ugly times as he candidly tells of his life experiences in this book.

Bound for the New World, an English father of seven dies at sea in 1650. Only the children fulfill their fathers dream in the beginning of the New London colonial settlement. While one descendant goes west to a settlement in Pennsylvania, the Revolutionary War further divides the family. One frontiersman becomes a Loyalist serving with the Butlers Rangers while most cousins fight for the Patriot cause. This narrative follows the Beebe family who survive the vortex of the Wyoming Valley Massacre (Pennsylvania) and its aftermath at the cost of the breadwinners own life. Mary Secord Beebe, mother of seven, escapes the oncoming reprisals of the Continental forces by fleeing to Fort Niagara, NY, British Headquarters. Starting over in a remote village within the Province of Quebec, Canada, one descendant returns to Pennsylvania and eventually homesteads in the Sandhills of Nebraska. Follow this intriguing story of an ordinary family living in extra-ordinary times.

In her delightful and moving memoir, Sissy Spacek writes about her idyllic, barefoot childhood in a small East Texas town, with the clarity and wisdom that comes from never losing sight of her roots. Descended from industrious Czech immigrants and threadbare southern gentility, she grew up a tomboy, tagging along with two older brothers and absorbing grace and grit from her remarkable parents, who taught her that she could do anything. She also learned fearlessness in the wake of a family tragedy, the grief propelling her "like rocket fuel" to follow her dreams of becoming a performer. With a keen sense of humor and a big-hearted voice, she describes how she arrived in New York City one star-struck summer as a seventeen-year-old carrying a suitcase and two guitars; and how she built a career that has spanned four decades with films such as Carrie, Coal Miner's Daughter, 3 Women, and The Help. She details working with some of the great directors of our time, including Terrence Malick, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Brian De Palma-who thought of her as a no-talent set decorator until he cast her as the lead in Carrie. She also reveals why, at the height of her fame, she and her family moved away from Los Angeles to a farm in rural Virginia. Whether she's describing the terrors and joys of raising two talented, independent daughters, taking readers behind the scenes on Oscar night, or meditating on the thrill of watching a pair of otters frolicking in her pond, Sissy Spacek's memoir is poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, plainspoken and utterly honest. My Extraordinary Ordinary Life is about what matters most: the exquisite worth of ordinary things, the simple pleasures of home and family, and the honest job of being right with the world. "If I get hit by a truck tomorrow," she writes, "I want to know I've returned my neighbor's cake pan."

From a quiet street in a small town to the avenues of power in Washington, D.C, from the comfort of obscurity to the spotlight of radio and television, from a broken heart to a position of strength and responsibility, God wove the chords of my life in such twists and turns, it took a book to explain it all. If I knew why He called ME, I would tell you. My parents could have walked out of the pages of "Grapes of Wrath." My beginnings were unremarkable, yet God gave me a remarkable life. God's Velvet Hammer is my story.