Love at Last Sight: 30 Days to Grow and Deepen Your Closest Relationships - Hardcover

Shook, Kerry; Shook, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400073804 ISBN 13: 9781400073801

Verlag: Waterbrook Press (A Division of Random House Inc), 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Everything you’ve been taught about relationships is wrong.

The movies and TV make it look easy. Matchmaking Web sites have it down to a science. Two people connect—love at first sight—and the relationship is magical from then on. But the truth is, strong, deep relationships that last a lifetime aren’t based on the mysterious chemistry of two personalities. Real love in relationships—friends, married couples, siblings, parents—isn’t a magic act. It’s a journey. A great relationship grows from an investment of time and effort.

Kerry and Chris Shook know that deep relationships aren’t built on initial attractions, but onlast things—the experience you shared the last time you were with someone . . . the words you spoke with her last week . . . the effort you made for him the last time you were together. AndLove at Last Sight offers a one-month relationship plan that will improve your most important bonds, including a weekly focus and daily readings that guide you through the process. By learning to be present in the moment, acting intentionally, risking awkwardness, and learning to let go, you’ll discover wisdom from the Bible that contradicts what popular culture would have you believe.

Meaningful relationships depend on seeing other people as they are, so that the last time your eyes meet on this earth, your relationship will be closer and deeper than ever before.Love at Last Sight is the last book you’ll need to get your dearest relationships right.

Another life-changing book from Kerry and Chris Shook
Authors of the best-selling One Month to Live

Your closest relationships will naturally drift apart over time. And chances are, right now, one or more of your most important relationships is less than what you wish it could be.

Now you can change everything and take steps to reconnect with the people who really matter—and we don’t mean by connecting on Facebook! This thirty-day program guides you step-by-step to deeper, more satisfying relationships by developing four forgotten but powerful relational arts for changing, improving, and repairing the relationships you care about most:

Week 1 – The Art of Being All There
Week 2 – The Art of Acting Intentionally
Week 3 – The Art of Risking Awkwardness
Week 4 – The Art of Letting Go

Learn the secrets that will lead you to healthy relationships with the most important people in your life—starting today!

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

KERRY SHOOK and his wife, CHRIS SHOOK, founded Woodlands Church in The Woodlands, Texas, in 1993. Since then, the church has grown to an attendance of over 18,000 and is counted among the fastest-growing churches in America. Authors of theNew York Times best-seller One Month to Live, the Shooks have been featured onFox News, NBC, ABC and PBS. Kerry and Chris have been married for over twenty-five years, and are the parents of four children.

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The Most Important Thing
 
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. — C. S. LEWIS
 
I don’t wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone. — JAVAN
 
Right now, there are three relationships in your life that trouble you. Perhaps a good friend said something to you yesterday. It felt critical, but you’re not sure what she meant. The two of you used to be so close, but lately you’ve been drifting apart. Something’s not right. Oh, and your mother called. There’s that. You know you should return her call, but you haven’t. Why? You know there are things you should have said before, you avoided them, and now you feel it’s too late. It’s always so hard with her. Always messy.
And then…your son has been missing. Not missing physically, but he’s been distant, quiet, silent. Missing emotionally. What’s that about? What’s going on in his life? You want to reach out, but he pushes you away. It worries you.
Maybe the relationships in your life aren’t exactly like these, but I’m guessing these remind you of someone close to you, a problem relationship in your life right now. Maybe it’s not your mother but your father, perhaps not your son but a daughter-in-law. It could be your best friend. Whoever it is, he or she is someone who matters to you—or else the relationship wouldn’t trouble you, gnaw at you on the inside, make you question and grumble, or even bring you to tears.
I suggest you have at least three such relationships in your life right now that feel messy or troubling and make your heart ache a little. The number three isn’t magic, of course. It could be just one or two, although it’s likely to be more, not less. We all have relationships that aren’t what we long for them to be. Now I’m not talking about business acquaintances, casual or distant friends, fourth or fifth cousins. We all have a lot of relationships in our lives—maybe too many (and we’ll talk about that)—but, quite frankly, not all are created equal. All people are important, but not every connection in your life has equal value. The relationships we want to help you with in this book probably include your husband or wife, possibly a boyfriend or girlfriend. Your mother or father could be on this list, or maybe a son or daughter. And there could be a friend, someone close to you with whom you’ve shared deep things. It’s these meaningful, essential people in your life—the key relationships you have right now—that we want to focus on.
So take a moment and think, who are these three key people in your life? Which meaningful relationships are troubling you? Relationships you wish were closer. Relationships you’d like to be deeper and richer. Relationships that trouble you, bother you, even make you a little crazy right now. Seriously, think about it. Who are they? And now take a moment to name these three key relationships out loud.
 
THE HIDDEN ADVENTURE
 
The journey you’re about to take over the next thirty days will help you improve, grow, and deepen those three relationships you just named. I’m not saying it will fix everything (relationships aren’t machines—you can’t replace a broken part and be good to go). But if you apply what you read over the next thirty days, your key relationships will grow and deepen. Something will change for the better.
Trust me, this is important for you. In fact, this may be the most significant thing you do in your life right now. Why? Because life is way too short. At the end of the day—at the end of The Day—in this all-too-short life we share, all that really matters is relationships.
Our relationships with the God who created us and with the people we love. Compared to these relationships, the job or career goals we set now aren’t really so important, the ladders we try to climb don’t matter so much, and the objects we long to own and possess seem utterly trivial. What really counts in the end is that special knowing look you share with your spouse, the arms of your child reaching up to you, or the quiet comfort of a friend who stands by your side in a difficult time. The award-winning animated movie Up contains some profound truths about relationships. In a breathtaking sequence early in the film, we see the entire arc of the life of Carl, a balloon salesman, as he meets Ellie, falls in love, and gets married. They share a dream to travel to South America and save every penny for their big trip. But there’s something familiar about the way their savings are constantly being used for the urgencies and emergencies of daily life. Before Carl and Ellie know it, they’re in their seventies, and although they have a beautiful marriage, they never realized their dream adventure. Ellie dies, and Carl is overwhelmed with regret about the trip they never took. In a desperate attempt to escape loneliness and recapture memories of Ellie, Carl attaches a bunch of balloons to his house and sets out for South
America!
You begin to realize as the movie progresses that this dream trip they were saving for, this object of their future plan together, wasn’t really that important after all. The real adventure was the life they shared along the way. The same is true for us: the adventure of a lifetime is right in front of us. It’s just cleverly disguised as a familiar face.
Think about the possible loss of the relationship with one of those three people you named. You can’t do anything about death and the physical departure of one of them from this earth. That’s in God’s hands. But you can do something about your relationship with them in life.
 
UPSIDE DOWN
 
Everything you’ve been told about relationships is upside down and wrong. Researchers tell us that a baby sees everything upside down for the first few days of life until the brain can adjust the visual picture to right side up. Most relationships today are stuck in this same infant stage; we tend to see relationships upside down, and our culture only reinforces this view. The concept of love at first sight permeates our music, movies, television, and books. What we learn as children and continue to believe as adults is that a fairy-tale relationship somehow just happens.
Now, I’m not bashing romance, but meaningful relationships depend on seeing other people as they are and looking at them right side up. Real love— whether romantic love, a close friendship, or a family relationship—happens long after first sight. It shows up as people get to know each other more deeply and often after they work through tough things together. Real love in relationships isn’t a magic act; it’s a journey. When people say, “It was love at first sight,” what they really mean is “I was attracted to that person the first time I saw them.” There is nothing wrong with being infatuated with someone at the start of a relationship. The real question, however, is, do you have a love that is growing stronger and deeper every day?
I don’t believe in love at first sight; I believe in love at last sight. Each of my relationships has the potential to be better the next time we’re together than it was the previous time so that the last time we see each other on this earth we’re closer than ever before.
 
FRIEND ME
 
It’s ironic that even though our society is more technologically connected than ever before, most...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Waterbrook Press (A Division of Random House Inc)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1400073804
• ISBN 13: 9781400073801
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar