This collection of thoughtful reflections looks at events and activities of everyday life and discovers routes to spiritual practice and deeper, daily spirituality.
At the behest of CREDO Institute, Inc., which hosts health and wellness conferences and is supported by the Episcopal Church Pension Fund, priest and CREDO conference leader Renée Miller wrote the 20 reflections and grouped them into the categories: Meditative Practice, Ministry Practice, Media Practice, Mind Practice, and Movement Practice. Each entry, accented with color photographs, is aimed at evoking mindfulness in the common activities of life, from music and movie going to reading, writing, and walking.
For the reader who wishes to use the book to introduce or more deeply explore spiritual practices with other people or in an instructional setting, each chapter concludes with a nod toward who might be inclined to certain practices, based on individual predilections or personality.
The Foreword by Herb Gunn lays out the theological underpinnings of spiritual discipline in what could stand alone as a primer on spiritual practice.
Three suspenseful horrors in one volume.
BLOOD LAKE MONSTER
Maribel Daniels is weeks away from escaping her hometown but vanishes while walking home from work. The same night, a truck overturns on a bridge, spilling chemicals into the lake and turning the water red.
Her sister, Anya, returns years later to find out what happened to Maribel, but every truth she uncovers reveals another lie. When she finally solves the mystery of her sister's disappearance, Anya realizes she's the only one who can put an end to the Blood Lake Monster.
Is she willing to sacrifice everything for the town that ruined her life?
HOWL
Three friends, an empty fuel tank, a desolate dirt road, and a hike through the woods in the middle of a snowstorm; what could go wrong?
Only everything.
A mysterious beast stalks Fred and his friends through the snow, forcing them to seek shelter with two strangers in a remote cabin. And so begins a waiting game. Food dwindles, tempers flare, and survival of the fittest becomes more than just a saying as the beast closes in.
STRANDED
Six contestants pair off into three teams of one man and one woman as part of a pilot season for a new reality show called Stranded. The challenge: Survive thirty days in a hostile and brutal environment for a chance to split a half-million-dollar prize.
Victor, the show's creator, chooses the northern Arctic as the first location, but after a single day, his mistake is clear: They are not alone.
Their presence awakens a relentless and unforgiving predator that feeds on greed, lust and fear.
In this game, the lucky ones get to die.
Three suspenseful, horrific, and bloody novellas...
SKIN DEEP
Victoria MacDonald wants to die but finding a way to go beautifully is difficult. She's tenacious, and vows to find a way to leave this world with the beauty she fought so hard to attain. Somehow, her search for the perfect suicide turns into murder...
Detective Amos Christianson answers a call about an intruder at Victoria's house. It's her second home invasion in less than a month, but this time she kills her attacker in self-defense. Something about Victoria's story stinks, though, and Amos can't let it go.
He can't let Victoria go either.
As they spiral into separate obsessions, their paths twist until neither can untangle themselves from the other, and Victoria's desperate search for a beautiful death forces Amos to make a drastic decision.
But is the price for freeing himself of her insanity too high?
SHE AIN'T PRETTY
Blake Swanson answered an ad for a job as a farmhand, but when he arrives for his interview, Lily, the widow who placed the ad, seduces him. He forgets everything but Lily as he falls down a rabbit hole of sex and terror.
Eva Bright is following a true crime scoop for a book, and infiltrates a cult run by a woman named Lily Maenad via a job posting. Working as Lily's assistant, Eva knows she's stumbled into something bigger than a doomsday cult. Lily isn't just some nut in the woods trying to convince people she's the next Messiah.
Eva teams up with a hopeless young man who has been drained by Lily, but are they enough to stop the terrors going on?
CHURCH
Ray is a Christian, but he loves a woman who follows a god called Zabir. Determined to save her from eternal damnation, he joins her church.
Ray doesn't realize that indoctrination into the Zabian way is a process that not only breaks a man physically, it strips his identity and shatters his mind. He holds onto his faith at first, but as his prayers for mercy go unanswered, and the pain inflicted on him becomes too much to bear, the void of nothingness promises relief, and tempts Ray to do the unthinkable, even if leaves his soul as damned as the one he tried to save.