4 Must Reads to Start Your Year on a Positive Note

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January 2025 Issue

Self-reflection and education are always a good idea, and what better way to do both than to dive into a good book? We have picked four of our favorites to start you on a positive, informed path for the new year. Remember, if you want to live differently, you have to be different, or at least do something different! Each one of these picks will light up your brain waves and move your life forward. Whether you’re healing, dealing, reeling or just trying to figure a few things out, these books are sure to enlighten as you set out to live your best life in 2025.

 

Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!
Daily Meditations for the
Ups, Downs & In-Betweens

By Kate Bowler

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Witty, honest, and wise spiritual reflections that invite readers to embrace the bad, not just the good—from the four-time New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved)

Kate Bowler believes that the cultural pressure to be cheerful and optimistic at all times has taken a toll on our faith. But what if we could find better language than forced positivity to express our hopes and our anxieties? 

Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! is packed with bite-size reflections and action-oriented steps to help you get through the day, be it good, bad, or totally mediocre. This is a devotional for the rest of us—which is to say, the people who don’t have magical lives that always work out for the best. As she composed these meditations during a season of chronic pain, Bowler understands how every day can be an obstacle course. She encourages us to develop our capacity to feel the breadth of our experiences. The better we are at identifying our highs and lows, the more resilient we become.

Like modern-day psalms, Bowler’s spiritual reflections look for the ways we can expand our capacity for courage, love, and honesty—while discovering divine moments with God. With bonus sections to use during the seasons of Advent and Lent, this is an easy book to read along with other people too. 

If you want to build your daily habit of spiritual attentiveness, this book is here to say: May all your days be lovely. But for those that aren’t, have a beautiful, terrible day!

 

Stainless Steel Butterfly:
Building a Strong Foundation so You Can Fly
by Susie Pinkard, with Foreword by Andy Andrews

Discover the power of resilience and grace! Susie Pinkard has navigated life’s challenges as a working mother, widow, and Fortune 50 corporate executive. She now inspires others to embrace their own path with grace, humor, and faith.

In this uplifting book, Susie illustrates the profound wisdom of Rudyard Kipling’s timeless poem “If,” providing you with the foundational tools to build your own unshakeable core and embrace all that life has in store. By reading this book, you will develop confidence and resilience to face life’s toughest moments with grace and virtue. In addition, readers will gain knowledge of how to unlock newfound emotional strength to weather any storm with steadfastness and poise. This book is a guide to transform your life and take flight with an unwavering sense of purpose. Filled with powerful anecdotes, personal experiences, and valuable lessons to help you become a stainless steel butterfly, the book is a must-read for anyone who wants to create a life of strength and courage.

 

The Anxious Generation:
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood
Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024 • A Washington Post Notable Book • A New York Times Notable Book • The Goodreads Choice Award Nonfiction Book of the Year

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world...While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

 

Battlefield of the Mind:
Winning the Battle in Your Mind

By Joyce Meyer

Worry, doubt, confusion, depression, anger and feelings of condemnation: all these are attacks on the mind. If readers suffer from negative thoughts, they can take heart! Joyce Meyer has helped millions win these all-important battles. In her most popular bestseller ever—over 7 million copies sold— the beloved author and minister shows readers how to change their lives by changing their minds.

She teaches how to deal with thousands of thoughts that people think every day and how to focus the mind the way God thinks. And she shares the trials, tragedies, and ultimate victories from her own marriage, family, and ministry that led her to wondrous, life-transforming truth—and reveals her thoughts and feelings every step of the way.

A new 30th Anniversary Edition of this book will be released February 4, 2025. This book offers accompanying study guides, devotionals, Bibles, and an app. In addition, a kids edition, as well as a teen edition is available. Getting a handle on negative thoughts and how they impact your daily life has no age limit—young or old.

Note: The first ever Battlefield of the Mind Conference will be held April 24-26, 2025 in Charleston, SC! It will feature Joyce Meyer, John Maxwell, Pastor Robert Madu and Bryan & Katie Torwalt. Register at www.joycemeyer.org.

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