DETROIT PISTONS Chaplain of 22 Years How to Understand and Deal with Life's Disappointments HANDLING LIFE'S HARDSHIPS offers you insights on what to do when you have obeyed God, but still find yourself asking, "Where is He?" You will learn what to do when your faithfulness seems to be rewarded with adversity, confusion and difficulty. Robert Joyce reveals God's thoughts about personal hardship and answers questions that will help you in your quest to understand and persevere when things don't turn out as you have expected. He explains how to process your experiences according to God's Word. Rather than panic, you'll understand the process God uses to develop character and integrity in our lives. This book will activate your faith and encourage you to fulfill God's purpose for your life.

FACING THE DARK SIDE OF GENESIS: A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF OURSELVES claims that religious thinkers have overlooked a crucial aspect of the truth: God's creating act is necessarily interpersonal and immediately causes perfect creatures only. These persons, both angelic and human, necessarily respond instantly with full freedom. The new interpretation for understanding better who we are--and who we are not--integrates and deepens traditional belief in God. Attention is given to the profoundly unconscious dimensions of the mind and heart, largely neglected, that emerge from the spiritual structure of being. This new theistic worldview suggests an expanded ground for understanding the conflict between creationists and evolutionists. The author discloses a general failure of theology to see the difference between creation absolutely out of nothing and the redemptive creation out of something that is fallen, as depicted in GENESIS.

A challenge to all believers in God to raise their awareness of the power and beauty of their own being at creation and their failure to be perfect as they were gifted to be. In creation, God's act of gifting us with being yields a perfect created person, but we humans on earth are those who responded immediately with less than a perfect yes to the gift of being. The book calls for a significant shift in the worldview of God-centered people. The story of Adam and Eve is told in a provocative way that may make more sense than creationists and evolutionists could ever do. Creation out of nothing is radically distinguished from creation out of something, such as dust, a rib, a fall.

A new understanding of creation and of ourselves. A PERFECT CREATION challenges both creationists and theistic evolutionists to look deeper into the infinite intimacy of God in gifting us to BE. We are called to acknowledge our hidden failure of personal gratitude for our own be-ing. We are seen to be not the only cause of darkness, pain, and evil in our lives, but the ultimate cause. We have spiritually repressed our absolute origin in God and have confused our coming to be in cosmic creation with our originative creation out of nothing. The Book of GENESIS and the rest of the Bible deal largely with the creation of rescue--done by God out of the void, darkness, dust, et al. caused by our pristine personal failure to say fully YES to the gift of being. The original history-making sin of Adam and Eve in Eden is seen as a major symptom of the originative sin of each one of us WITH Adam and Eve, ex nihilo. We are now awakening to the prospects and hope of living forever in repentant glory.

Gives the basic answer to WHY bad things happen to good people. Tells how religious thinkers have overlooked the key ingredient in pain, misery, and error. Shows the need to get beyond both evolutionism and creationism in understanding what happened with God's creation out of nothing. Affords a new understanding of ourselves and of the role of Adam and Eve. A Copernican Revolution in resolving theology's toughest question.