Jimmy and Kelly Needham

Author and Bible teacher Kelly Needham reveals how we've been fooled into chasing meaning in all the wrong places, identifies the source of our hunger for the extraordinary, and shows us the steps we can take today to build a purpose-filled reality without turning our lives upside-down.

Many of us are exhausted from dreaming big and chasing the extraordinary lives we long for, but when we try embracing the everyday and find meaning in the mundane, we fear we're settling for a boring life. Are we missing something?

Kelly Needham has been the keynote speaker, the person folding T-shirts backstage, and the mom dealing with the ups and downs of daily life. By sharing her experiences with both the extraordinary and the humdrum--and wrestling with feelings of disappointment along the way--Needham helps readers discover for themselves the truth that changes everything: we weren't made to do something, but to know Someone. And it's that Someone who can infuse our lives with infinite purpose and meaning. In Purposefooled she explains

• why we feel like we were made for more and shows us the freeing answer to our longings,
• the ways modern technology affects our desires and dreams--and how to live free from its pressures and pitfalls,
• how familiar Bible stories reveal that being a world-changer is more accessible and simpler than we think,
• why we need to reclaim our imaginations from culture and steward them with eternity in mind, and
• what it looks like to live a deeply meaningful life today instead of wearing ourselves out trying to reach the next big thing.

For so many of us, our friends are like family members--we lean on them through our highest highs and our lowest lows--but sometimes those friendships don't turn out quite as we hoped. Bible teacher Kelly Needham debunks our world's constricted, narrow view of friendship and casts a richer, more life-giving, biblical vision for friendship.

In Friend-ish, Kelly Needham reminds us that we were called to more than halfhearted friendships and lukewarm connections. We need something more stable, secure, and sacred. We were designed for real friendship--but the difficult truth is that too many of us are settling for less.

Kelly deconstructs what Scripture says about the gift of friendship and takes a closer look at the distorted view that most of us have instead. As she shares the lessons she's learned from experience, Kelly paints her own glorious vision of what Christian friendship could look like.

With hard-fought wisdom, a clear view of Scripture, and a been-there perspective, Friend-ish teaches us how to:

• Recognize symptoms of idolatry and toxic dependency
• Boldly ask for what we need from our community of friends
• Understand and address the problems that arise in friendship--from neediness to discord
• Recognize when it's time to end an unhealthy friendship
• Reorient toward the purposeful, loving relationships we all crave that ultimately bring us closer to God
• Find the friends you need and start to become that friend for others

Join Kelly as she challenges you to view your chosen family in a new light, gain a vision of friendship according to Jesus, and finally enjoy friendships as God intended.

With the help of a rogues' gallery of cartoonish villains, young readers will learn that all people have some bad inside of them (where it counts) and that Jesus, the only Real Good Guy, can redeem them from their sin.
 
Even young children can spot a bad guy when they see one. In most fairy tales, comic books, and cartoons, the lines between good and evil are drawn in broad strokes. After all, if it looks like a bad guy and talks like a bad guy. . .
 
But according to God, only what’s inside of each person’s heart counts. By that measure, we’re all Real Bad Guys in need of Jesus, the only Real Good Guy to save us.
 
In Real Bad Guys, children will meet Millie, an everyday kid who learns from a who’s-who of stereotypical hoodlums that everybody sins and has fallen short of God’s standard for goodness. Also, because we can’t see the condition of people’s hearts, we can’t judge them by their appearance.
 
Filled with fun and humor, Real Bad Guys cleverly and effectively explains the problem of sin and its solution to children ages eight and up.